Posted by Rachel Johnson on
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Today is our “Seattle” day – both company visits today
are to businesses headquartered in Seattle. Expeditors is a logistics solutions
company, and PMI is a beverage solutions company. I find that this “solutions”
term has become ubiquitous in business parlance of the past decade or two. In
any case, I think these visits were the most interesting for us this trip.
The answers at Expeditors were frustratingly vague on the
big questions we asked, although they were perfectly happy to answer detail
questions about their operations. We were wondering if perhaps they were trying
to put a perfect face on their operations. Regardless, it was very frustrating
to keep asking the same questions over and over again and getting the same
non-answers from the regional manager.
PMI makes the cups you see at Starbucks, in addition to
other private label items. The visit to PMI was brilliant, and really my
favorite company visit. We were lucky to have Qin Chen at our lunch table prior
to the visit, and had a detailed discussion about the employment of expatriates
in Chinese firms. He said that the kind of problem solving and managerial
skills they needed when they first went to Shanghai simply didn’t exist in
China in the numbers that they needed to be able to find local hires, since
every other foreign company was looking for a person with the same sort of
experience. He said that they’ve been able to build up a number of their employees
internally, and so they have those skills now, but that it is still worthwhile
to hire expatriates. This could be very concerning for a company, because that’s
a huge amount of time and invested effort into these Chinese employees just to
make them the kind of employee that can do the necessary work. Replacing
someone would be quite difficult in those circumstances.