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Asia Buzz: Management Speak
Reading This Column Will Do Me Wonders
By ANTHONY SPAETH
September
18, 2000
Web posted at 10:30 a.m. Hong Kong time, 10:30 p.m. EDT
The study of management is more than 50 years old, dating back to Peter Drucker's trail-blazing book, My Desk's Bigger Than Yours. In the five decades since, so much theorizing and experimentation has been done that corporate management is now as exact a science as laser eye surgery -- and considerably more precise than laser missile shields. That's why America's economy is as unstoppable as a .45-caliber bullet, while the British, who snubbed management theories, are trying to reproduce The Great Strike of 1926. (Don't even ask about France.)
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In Asia, modern management techniques have not caught on. Asian companies are run by Dad and his sons, and shareholders make money by speculating on a stock, not owning it. There are variations from nation to nation, of course.
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In Japan, all corporations are owned by a shadowy outfit known as S.P.E.C.T.R.E., and employees are shackled to desks. (S.P.E.C.T.R.E. apologized this week, with a diabolical chuckle, for flooding the world with unsafe tires, milk products, cars and television sets.) In Singapore, there are no corporate managers because civil servants are paid $500,000 a year to do something-or-other. Had the Pope been born in Singapore, he would have gone into the civil service. And in China, of course, it wasn't so long ago that they drowned middle-aged businessmen at birth.
All this must change and Asia must embrace American management theory. That sounds imperialist, but it's an unavoidable fact due to three simple letters: WTO. As Asian economies conform to the principles and rules of the World Trade Organization, everything's going to change. You've undoubtedly read that markets will be opened up and competition introduced, but that's a code used by journalists too lazy to have read the fine print.
You won't believe what joining the WTO actually requires. Did you know that every country would be required to have local language editions of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition? That when you buy French fries anywhere in the world you'll have to pay in francs -- and mozzarella will require lira? That streaking and other forms of nude protest will be punishable by death, and gay parades will be under the iron control of Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee? The list goes on.
To deal with changes of that magnitude, Asia is going to have to take a crash course in 50 years of management studies. The foundation was surely laid by Drucker, with his classic trilogy: "I Don't Have Time For This," "You Know We Don't Give Raises," and "Water Cooler Warriors -- Put Them in a Sack and Drown Them." Later theories were sometimes abstruse but influential. The "No Exit" theory of office planning for example, inspired by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. And a whole school of recruitment techniques was inspired -- that's how creative the field is -- by the country-western song, "If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me."
The theories can be daunting but modern management in practice can be understood by even the most ordinary employee, and often is. Profit and revenues are passe thanks to the Internet -- though research is ongoing -- but no one has disputed that all employees should have chairs and be herded together with only the flimsiest separations between each. (See "Sheep and Cattle and What They Tell Us" by Watson and Bell, 1963, a seminal work.) Promotion theory has come a long way since the cynical Peter Principle of the 1970s. Experts now unanimously agree that promotions occur on an entirely random basis. (See "Twelve Monkeys and an H.R. Manager" by Deeds.)
Asia has embraced some modern management notions with relative ease. Housing allowances in high-rent cities, for example, are customarily reserved for employees making the maximum amount of money, as per the "Looking Through the Other Side of the Telescope" theory of Warren and Scrooge. That's a step in the right direction. Dressing-down has taken root in Bangladeshi offices. North Korea's nuclear weapon technicians are being given more "down time" with their families. For Asia, is that enough?
Modern management is a must. Did you know the WTO requires countries to shrink their borders to the size of Belgium and Luxembourg combined? Analysts say this will be a challenge for such countries as India and Indonesia, though S.P.E.C.T.R.E. said this week, with a diabolical chuckle, that its plans are complete for Japan, the Korean peninsula and China. Is the rest of the continent ready? If not, Asian economies might wake up one morning with a feeling memorialized by that other famous, tune-gets-in-your-head, country-western song: "I Haven't Gone To Bed With an Ugly Woman. (But I've Sure Woken Up With a Few)."
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