ground with the managers and technical specialists that I work with. This makes it easy to avoid most of the misunderstandings that can arise when you are working with people from a different background.
However, there are some kinds of confusion that can arise. Many of the firms I deal with are family owned, and the head of the firm has full authority to make final decisions, after consulting of course with the other members of the firm. This is true even in dealing with quite large firms. The organizational structure is more complex, but sales managers know their relationship with the head of the company, and what will be expected of them.
Because Golden Horizon is owned by the Chinese government, however, my superiors have to obtain authorization from higher authorities before making decisions that are a major commitment of the firm. In some ways I envy the ability of overseas Chinese firms to take actions on their own. At the same time, however, at Golden Horizon I feel that I am taking part in the whole modernization of China.
However, this is a rather subtle difference. On a level of everyday business dealings, working with overseas Chinese firms in Southeast Asia is a very familiar experience, in which the managers that I am dealing with have many of the same expectations of how to do business that I do. They are overseas, but they are not foreign, so to speak.
Dealing with Japanese firms is quite a different business experience. The Japanese companies I have dealt with are large ones, such as Sanyo and Mitsubishi. My impression of dealing with a Japanese firm is that it is not unlike dealing with a very efficient government bureau, or an army. This is somewhat difficult to explain; allow me to take a minute or two to clarify what I'm saying.
What I mean by this is that a Chinese firm -- whether Golden Horizon or a family-owned firm in Southeast Asia -- is made up of a web of relationships. In t...