Reasonably Productive

2145 4-29-10

Well I guess I finally got over my lazy hump and actually started being productive today.  Wrapped a good portion of my research with Blue Bamboo, made decent progress on my ethics essay, more laundry got done, went out with Clement and Charlie (Chinese guy that we're going with on our trip) to buy some food for the long train ride, and attended our last HR class.

Man the day was gorgeous, great sun but cool and a light breeze.  Seems like every time I have to work from home it's perfect but then when I have the day off it's either really cold or raining (usually both).  I wonder if I could convince my company to have flexible work days based off of weather patterns hmm…

As I mentioned previously I wrapped up my research for one of the Indian markets and I got to see it doesn't look too good.  I think when I get back, if they haven't done it already, we will need to relook at the visibility of our business model.  It's not so serious that the project should be abandoned, but some of our requirements may need to be relooked at and maybe our approach should be changed as well.

So my final thoughts on HR class are this: did not live up to its potential.  We had a good subject (international HR has many problems, and is extremely complex), and a teacher with an excellent background.  But a combination of lack of depth and a lecturing teaching style really hampered my learning.  All we really did was point out some of the problems with HR, and talk about a few theorists that came up with why they are problems.  Well that's all super but honestly coming up with the problems is easy, I want to figure out ways of solving them, and we just didn't get there.  So far my favorite class is still marketing, at least he pushed us.

I've been pondering one of the problems of HR for awhile now though, and this especially comes up for westerners trying to lead a predominately typical Asian department or company.  In order to frame this problem I have to make broad generalizations, and it should be noted that every situation is a different.  But historically speaking the Western way of managing people is this, set the end objective, have a couple of mid-goals to reach, and let you get to it.  In the East it's much more of a hands-on management with the manager telling exactly how it should be done.

We can debate back and forth as to which one is better but honestly it doesn't matter and it doesn't really change anything.  What a company has to decide is what to do about it.  There are several options that first come into mind, either a. we have to train local employees on how to think creatively from a western perspective, or b. we have to train our expatriate managers how to manage a much more high maintenance employees.  Honestly a. is way too costly and unlikely to actually succeed, while b. is extremely frustrating to Western managers and may lead to increased expatriate assignment failures, also very costly.

I hypothesis that the easiest way to fix this problem is to create a more divided power hierarchy, because in Asia there is a much higher power disparity between workers and managers.  In order to compensate for this we simply make many more managers, essentially taking the same pie and slicing it up into smaller pieces.  This way a Western manager that would have maybe 20 employees directly beneath him under normal circumstances would now only have 4, and each of these four would have four people directly under them.  From there the manager will have an easier time directly delegating work to his four team leaders, using smaller goal horizons with an obvious focus on the large end objective.  The other managers can then turn around and directly manage the four other workers, providing the support they desire.  This has an added benefit in giving leadership experience to local staff for the eventual replacement of our expatriate.

Anyways just a thought.

Alright I'm done, I've got to get packed because our train leaves at 11:30am tomorrow and I want to be able to sleep in if I can.  O I should mention that you won't hear from me for awhile, I won't be back till May 8^th.  Essentially what I'm trying to say is that I won't have my computer with me so I can't post on my blog.  I'll try to keep a written journal while I'm gone and then spend the following Sunday and Monday writing them up.

So… until then have a good life.