The Accidental Business Nomad by Kyle Hegarty

Author:Kyle Hegarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Survival Kit:

When Confucius Skypes Socrates

“The oldest, shortest words—yes and no—are those which require the most thought.”

—Pythagoras

Five thousand years of cultural differences discussed over a few pints helps provide added context to the diverse working styles across the world. We have seen examples of when these differences are misunderstood, they become liabilities. A global survival kit can turn differences into assets.

DESPITE THE challenges of hiring the right people, business improved and many of my clients were happy. It seemed as if there was an endless supply of Western companies eager to break into Asia, and my team and I were on the ground to get their sales and marketing up and running. With the cross-cultural datasets and behavioral profiling models, I was getting the hang of things, but I was still a long way from really knowing how to apply these tools in a consistent way. While I had started to figure out how to run effective teams in Singapore and manage remote workers around the region, it was still a challenge getting the clients in the US, UK or Australia to understand how they should be adapting to local conditions. To achieve this level of understanding, I needed a better way to explain these differences in how business gets done effectively around the world.

India, China, the Middle East—my passport bulged with added pages and scraped-off visa stickers to make way for new ones.1 During one such trip, I found myself in Taipei, Taiwan, with Chen, an IT reseller and curious character. This meant he resold other companies’ stuff. If a company makes a security software or internet router, he would add it to his product list and seek out buyers within his territory. I had been asked to get Chen to resell one of my client’s security servers. I was a middleman hired to find a middleman.

Medium height and skinny, Chen looked tense and intense. I guessed his age to be around 30, but he was closer to 50. Always moving, he had nervous eyes that made him look happy and angry at the same time; a near constant Cheshire cat smile curled his lips. He was a self-described “optimistic skeptic.”

“China made me that way,” he said, pointing to a wall that I assumed was the direction of China, which was just over 100 miles to the west. “That place has the most amazing potential, but man is their system messed up.” Growing up in the geopolitical hotspot that is Taiwan seemed to give Chen some of his edginess, even though he was enjoying the recent economic growth. It was as if he was experiencing two opposite emotions at the same time. He was slightly unsettling until you got to you know him.

Growing up in a wealthy family outside of Taipei, he moved to California to get a degree at UCLA. He didn’t say what kind of degree or where the family money came from. But his years in the States showed immediately in some of his mannerisms and how he spoke.

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