Chinese and Western Attitudes with Geshe Michael Roach

[Music] Welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. When you lead from a base of expertise, your confidence and credibility are derived from your knowledge. People follow you as a result. However, when you take a stretch assignment and span outside of your comfort zone, leading requires a different approach. One of influence, inspiration, compromise, and courage. We are here to talk about how to take that next step and keep going. Now, here is your host, Wanda Wallace. Welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. Now, today, if you think about it, all of us work in a variety of cultures around the world. And I will bet that many of you struggle to understand a lot about those various cultures. At least I know I do, and I speak with an awful lot of meters and managers who are having a hard time understanding exactly how another culture thinks, and therefore how to interact with somebody, solve business problems, build the best relationships. And I suspect that there are no more two difficult cultures to understand than the US and China. You need only look at the current tensions that exist between those two countries to understand that we have fundamentally different views about a whole host of things, little on philosophies on how to lead. Now, I don't think this is just about the US and China. I think this is more about the West and China in general. But we're going to put it in the context of the US and China. And I want to be clear, we're not espousing a right or wrong view. That's never my intention here. My intention is to make sure that people are understanding a different perspective, because I believe that is the first step in resolving any conflict that exists regardless of the nature of it. So I welcome you, are my Chinese listeners? And you want to add comments? Please find me on LinkedIn or directly to me at [email protected]. And for my US and Western leaders, I welcome the same, welcome the same thing for you. We have wonderful specialists today. Geshay Michael Roche is the first Westerner of the Sarah May Tibetan Monastery University. And the first to be awarded the degree of Geshay or Master of Philosophy. His Diamond Cutter Management Training Institute, DCI, provides management and personal success training in more than 20 countries. His previous book, The Diamond Cutter, is an international bestseller. And he and Dr. Eric Wu wrote a new book that we're going to talk about today called China Love You, the death of global competition. And I think you're going to see that it offers some revolutionary perspectives around this cross-cultural collaboration. So Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, wonderful for having me. It's a pleasure. I am looking forward to the conversation, and I have to say for everybody who loves the book, highly recommended. So, but I want listeners to understand how this book came to be. So why did you write it? That's a great question. So I've been going to China over 20 years to give business management programs and to also work with different government agencies. And I just, I found a businessman named Eric Wu, Dr. Eric Wu, and we sort of became friends. And we started to help each other. I would invite him to the United States with his family. And I would take my wife and myself would go to China. And we started working together more and more. And, you know, after you know someone from another country for a few years, you can start to tell the secrets to each other. Things that I do that irritate him. And things that he does that irritate me. You can start to talk honestly with each other. And then you can start exploring what it is in your national background or your cultural background that might be causing you to have friction sometimes. And I think we became such good friends. And we have such similar interests in business that we started to share with each other. And I remember we were sitting in a coffee shop, I think in Singapore. And we were talking about the big differences between America and the West and China. And if we could just write down maybe ten differences that people can expect to meet up. And how they came to be historically that we might be able to, as two countries, we might be able to understand each other better. I think we've seen in the world right now that when misunderstanding becomes conflict, when it reaches the point of actual conflict, it's almost too late to do anything to try to understand each other better. So I think before there's any conflict, we all know it's much, much easier if we can try to understand each other and work out our problems by talking to each other rather than finding each other. So that's the hope of this book. Yeah, I can certainly see that. From my point of view, I see an awful lot of teams working cross-controlly, culturally, and they will inevitably be Chinese participants on that or American participants or Western or mix of cultures on there. And frequently the culture of the headquarters of the company will dominate. So if it's an American headquarters company, that's what we're going to see at the very beginning. But you miss participation of various other members, I believe, particularly Chinese counterparts, because you don't quite understand how to engage with them or where they're coming from, or how to understand their comments, or their lack of comments, as the case may be. So I just think there's an awful lot to be gained even for the average leader in the average company, understanding more about these cultural differences. Okay, now go ahead. It's true that if the main company is American, for example, or if Apple has a factory in China, then the management would be expected silently. They'd be quietly expected to adhere to American managerial norms. So there would be the management of the factory, the top management, would sort of unspoken be expected to act American. And if the Chinese have a company in the United States, and American executives are working for that company, then they're sort of an unexpected unspoken expectation that we would get to know their culture and try to follow their culture. And that I think what's ideal is that if we can, if the executives of each company could just sit down, go out to a cafe, talk to each other about what's irritating them about each other, and be very open about it. And oftentimes, in foreign, I was in Japan last week, and it's not customary to speak about these things openly in a business conversation. But I do think the more that we do, the better it will be. And the more with China, there's so much history that we don't know about. It's 5,000 years of history. That's 20 times older than the United States. I think if we can get to know the big events of their past history, it can help a lot to manage a company together. And if you can learn a little bit about each other, if you can learn about each other's history and culture, a combined company, where you have very talented, innovative Chinese management linked up with American, and they really understand each other. It's extraordinary success. You make a lot of money that way. So I think it's worth the time. Alright, I want to clarify something. I've said at the beginning, America, and I've said America and the West. In your view, especially from your experience, is it really the West versus China, or is it really US? Which what are we really talking about here? American versus China, or the West versus China? I think it's a good question. And if you think about population-wise, or language group-wise, what are the main non-Chinese entities in the Western world? You have Europe, which is really kind of like one country where each county or each state speaks a different language. And then you have Latin America, which is a huge language block, almost a billion people. So you have three language blocks in the world. You have 500 million native English speakers, 500 million second language English speakers. So that's a billion. You have Latin Americans speaking Spanish, maybe six, seven hundred million. And then you have the Chinese block, which is 1.5 billion Chinese speakers. If you look at it that way, it's sort of European languages as opposed to Chinese language. So I would say the big blocks. I don't think Latin America yet is strong enough economically to count as a major block, although as a language block, the count. Europe is having many, many problems on its own, I think, for the next five, 10 years. So by default, I guess. you could say it's really American culture, conflicting or banging up like an iceberg and a ship with Chinese culture. And from a Chinese point of view, the American culture is so young and Americans, we're so brash, we're so outspoken, we're so freedom loving that it really clashes with Chinese culture. If you can, I think if we can understand their culture better, if we can try make a small effort to understand their culture better. And then as I said, it's so cool when you have a strong American company and a strong Chinese company who take time, the management takes time to learn each other's culture, then that company is unbeatable. And as a country, as a nation, I think if China and America could just work together, we could have a new kind of prosperity and peace globally that would benefit everyone. So why don't we? Well, certainly we don't need any more conflict globally in the world. And various countries might disagree with whether the US is actually having its own set of problems or not. But we'll put that one aside for the moment. So let's talk about US versus China. One of the guiding principles that you introduced very early on in the book is this notion of individualism versus collectivism, something that we described in academics as for quite a while as distinguishing a US philosophy versus a Chinese philosophy and others with various shades of degree, degree in between, explain these two differences for us. And then I'm going to say, so why does that matter? Would give us the difference at the top? Yeah, I think one of the main things you can learn that will help you as a business person dealing in all of Asia, but especially China is that, and the way Dr. Wu in our conversations through the last 10 years, he would say, look, Michael, you don't understand China's not the size of the United States physically smaller. And we have a huge desert area in the northwest, goby desert area. If you talk about the parts of China where people can actually live, it's a tiny, tiny part of a, it's a tiny percentage of the United States, you know. So the United States is this huge country covered with forest, covered with natural resources. And then in China, you have 1.4 billion people, four times the population of the US, smushed into a much smaller space. And he said, look, if you don't have a culture of cooperating in a group, if groups can't cooperate with each other, then you have civil war. And what has happened in China for 5,000 years is constant in civil war. The word Beijing means northern capital. And there's a Nanjing, which means a southern capital. And that pretty much defines China. Just imagine the American civil war didn't go on for 5, 10 years. Imagine it went on for 5,000 years. And then what would be the norms or what would be the way that the government could get people to cooperate with each other and not have this constant armed conflict inside the country. So they would say, look, it's like putting 10 people in a small apartment instead of 2 people. And the rules about expressing individualism are going to have to be different because if 10 people in a two-room apartment start expressing their individuality strongly, you're going to have constant conflict, which will actually hurt them. It will hurt everybody. And that was very hard for me because I grew up in the principles of individual liberties. I grew up believing in it. And I believe in it. And it was very hard for me to go to China and be told, look, just be a good citizen. Just follow the rules. Don't think so much as a separate person. You're part of a group. And the positive side of that is I was doing a business program with Chinese two weeks ago, a large group of Chinese. We were actually founding a new university. And we had teams working together to carry out individual tasks for the university. And it was so wonderful to see people working together so smoothly and kind of sacrificing their individual wishes to the team. And I think there's a place for it. And I think if we're going to work together with Chinese, we at least have to appreciate that it probably works better for them than to have 10 competing individual bosses in the room like that. I think I agree with you that it is hard for somebody who steeped in the notion of individual freedoms to understand various Chinese policies. And we could take the policy of not permitting Facebook or any of the social media or blocking the access to the internet. Or we could look at the belief that everybody has to go along with the government and the government policies and the coiling of rebellion, something that in the U.S. we pride ourselves on because that is the founding of this country. So it's very hard to appreciate this and how this collectivism really helps them work as a country. So you have a lovely example on the book about creativity and about the pros and cons of creativity. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, it's an interesting deal about creativity because I think it is true that the American model of intense individualism. And I kind of, you know, you see it in our modern movies. Like if you watch a war movie, which is a popular kind of movie in America, oftentimes the hero is the sergeant who doesn't listen to the lieutenant and doesn't listen to the captain and goes and under fire, under pressure, he runs out and he creates an innovative or creative approach to the battle. And later, you know, the lieutenant apologizes for not being creative and the general gives the sergeant a medal. And that's a typical American movie where we express ourselves individually. And because we're Americans are able, because of the premium we put on individuality, it's easier for us to be creative. We can, even in a large corporation, so I owned a large corporation of 10,000 people, which was purchased by a Warren Buffett in 2009. And we really value individual department heads pretty much running their own show. We even had a role that the investors were not allowed on the floor of the buildings, where somebody was trying a creative effort. They had freedom to run their own show. As long as they made a certain amount of profit, we actually had a role that the investors weren't allowed on the floor unless they requested special permission. But in China, it would be one supreme leader who makes all the decisions. One supreme leader would, as you saw in the recent, it's ongoing right now, I think the Communist Party's five year meeting is taking place right now in Beijing. And there's one supreme leader. There's eight members of the Politburo who are advising. There's 25 members of the expanded Politburo. And that's pretty much they run the show without a great deal of creativity. And in that case, what's really exciting in our Chinese American collaboration is when you let those Chinese side of the company, if you let the Chinese nationality people, if you give them a little room to be creative for the first time in their life, they come up with extraordinary stuff. They come up with really wonderful ideas. So I think there's a, I gotta say, as far as creativity, I think the Americans have an edge. And probably they will always have an edge for the foreseeable future. Just the way that the government is running the show, I think it's going to be part of Chinese culture for at least one or two more generations of kind of discourse. encouraging almost creativity. Balance again that against that, there's 400,000 Chinese in colleges in the United States. There's almost half a million young talented Chinese people in American universities right now. And I think they're gonna take back this idea of creativity. And what we try to argue in the book is that we should share our knowledge. We should try to further the success of the people that we're working with. Right now the US just instituted a pretty strict blockade on certain kinds of tech going into China. China was refused permission to be on the space, the space, what do you call it? The space station. And so they just made their own space station, you know? And they were refused free entry into the World Bank. And so they created the new bank of China, the infrastructure bank and the Silk Road Initiative. So I think if we continue to try to block each other, I think this, I don't know, this sense of trying to block each other from progress. You know, the US will be successful. If we can block China from developing new technology. And I think that's such a non creative thinking itself. If you could have an atmosphere where you team up and you share new ideas and you share new technology because it helps everybody's life. It helps the people of each country. I think it would be a lot more positive. - Okay, all right. So we have the argument that creativity is going to be better under an individualistic culture, like the US. But there's also the counter argument that the Chinese live by, which is not just we don't want to be creative, but we think that there are some negative consequences of creativity. So not just we're crowded and we have to all get along together, but a deeper story than that. You wanna give that perspective? - Yeah, I think let's pretend I'm sitting in Dr. Wu's seat and it'd be fun to do an interview together with Dr. Wu because he's very eloquent and we could get some more detail on this. But I think from their point of view, I remember my first trip to Beijing. And I don't remember how many years ago, I'm guessing it was 35 years ago. And there were very few cars in the city. Everyone was fighting a bicycle. And the airport was a single, sender block building with total chaos. And there was a couple of planes outside and when a plane come, you run and try to get a seat. I remember being the last one on the plane. I got a seat where the back was broken down flat and I sat kind of cross-legged on the seat on the whole way. And it was like that. And then in that time, in 35 years, when I go to Beijing now, I see all the cars I'd like to buy. And I don't see anybody on a bicycle anymore. And you can see, I believe it's 50,000 new cars every year in the capital. It's a problem now. But there are, you see extreme success and I don't know why as a business person who travels to China regularly. I was on a flight recently and a woman sat next to me from New York, New York. And we were halfway to China and she turned to me and she said, is it safe in Beijing? Will I be okay? You know, and I just looked at her and my dentist also. He was working in my mouth and he's like, where are you going next? And I'm like, I don't know. And he's like, is that safe? You know, are you gonna be all right there? And I turned to that lady and I said, it's the safest city I've ever lived in. It's the safest place I've ever been. Women can walk around anytime and there night and you're safe and everything's fine. And what are Chinese person would say right now to an American person? And by the way, there's the perception. I don't know if it's true statistically, but there's a definite perception when I'm in China that they have already passed the United States economically and that they can probably continue much further. I don't know how the UN treats the numbers or I don't know how the US government treats the numbers, but just a personal experience of the level of life there in China, it seems to have passed the United States quite clearly already. And so I think a Chinese person sitting on this show with us today would say, look, I mean, I hate to brag, but the facts talk for themselves. We are, we have climbed up from a whole city of bicycles to a much higher degree of comfort and modernization. Then New York, for example, I had a friend, I had a Chinese person in the cab going from Kennedy to Manhattan in New York and they were kind of shocked at how Shabby, New York looked and I'm like, I'm sorry, we're all, you know, it's kind of like that. And so I think a Chinese person on the show today would say, come to China, see what we have achieved and we're proud of it, we're very proud of it and we're proud of what we've accomplished as a group. And I think they would stick it in our notes this way. - Right, and I know that there is some economic data that says that China may be the largest economy. I know there's some debate about that, we'll leave it there. One of the interesting stories in the book was from Dr. Wu, where he says, yes, great, your individualism creates this lovely iPad, for example, great iPhone, that's fantastic, that's awesome. But as a Chinese person, we think about the consequences of creating that iPad, not just for the immediate generation, but for generations to come. And that's an example of the collectivism that you see as the mantra inside of China. And that sense of we live together and lift each other up together at least is the philosophy. I want to draw some implications from this though, because one of the things sitting here in the US or any of my Western headquartered companies, we have Chinese people working, and one of the constant complaints is you need to speak up, speak out and speak up, interrupt, jump in, throw in with your ideas. But that is so counter to their culture that it feels very alien to them to be speaking up in the middle of meeting, and particularly to be speaking over somebody who might be more senior or older. So how do we bring these two together? The US speak up, come on, gun hoe, and the Chinese know we're part of the collective blend in. Enemy. Yeah, it's a wonderful question. And I'm really-- it's really enjoyable to hear you thinking about it and talking about it, because we have this kind of collaborations in our-- we have 12 companies. And we are thrown into situations in some of the companies, 90% of our market is China. So we are often thrown into situations where we have a large Chinese staff and the American staff. And we'll be doing a debrief very typically after a business conference. And the Chinese people would stand up and say, I really enjoyed everything, and everyone was perfect. And they'll sit down. And I also love my mother. And then the American people would get up and say, we didn't get the city on time. The tickets were sold lay. We didn't get-- they'll be frank about. And then I think working together, I think just discussing it together, if I have an American company, and I would like to be successful in China, especially with Chinese management, I think talking honestly about it. And personally, I find that most of those conversations are best done at dinner. To go out, get out of the building, get out of the office, get out off the internet, and go out, take each other to a restaurant. And I feel like a lot of those-- that friction or misunderstanding-- can be proactively prevented by taking each other out to a meal. or go, you know, when we were in Japan two weeks ago, we took everyone to the beach. And we actually, there were people surfing there. And we all just sat down and started talking about things. And I think it has to be brought up consciously. We have to talk about it consciously, the differences. The Americans were all eating from the Chinese dishes improperly. They were using their own chopsticks to grab the food out of the communal dish. And the Chinese people freaked out. But they're too polite to say anything. You're supposed to use the chopsticks on the dish to serve your plate, but you're never allowed to use your chopsticks, which have your saliva on them, to grab the food out of the middle. And it's just something that we didn't know about. And I think this real attitude of some kind of affection for each other, I don't think there's any substitute for it. If you appreciate each other as human beings, then you're willing to talk about, hey, we don't do that with the chopsticks. And you're willing to, or hey, you had this idea for six weeks, and you didn't tell me and not to make it. Why didn't you say something? And I think if we just have a normal family affection for each other, in the companies that I've had the pleasure to work in, this is what broke through the ice. I think it's some kind of family feeling that we're all human beings. We all have a very short life. And why not enjoy each other instead of trying to block each other? I think this whole attitude of trying to block each other is very, very strange and very, very imagined if your brother or sister decided that the path to their success would be to block you from your success. And that this is the path to their success. It's kind of a really strange attitude. Strange attitude. Yes, but as you draw enemy lines, and my camp versus their camp, it gets harder and harder to kind of do that respect. All right, so Michael, this is a perfect place to take a break. But I want to summarize my highlights at the out of this conversation. Three points. One is the more curiosity respect we can have for the other culture. The more family feeling, we don't always love all of our family members, so that family feeling, the easier it becomes to talk about each other's perspective. So that's one key point that you clearly have to say, stop trying to block and start trying to understand. I would say that that's true in every conflict, but particularly this one. Second one is understanding the individualistic mindset that we hold so dear, particularly in the US, is not the same philosophy that exists in China. For there, it's much more around the collective, the group, the greater good of the group, not the good of the individual. And if you understand their history, you will understand why they believe that the collective is the right answer. You understand our history, we understand why we believe that the individual is the right collective, but honestly, neither are wrong and neither are right. So it's an appreciation of how those two different philosophies came to be and what those mean for how we work and interact and talk and live and build and grow and all those sorts of things. And then I think the last piece is this understanding about the ease, the comfort, the ability of speaking up. Do we need a little space in order to speak up? Can I just jump in? What's the rules around engagement? When is it OK and not OK? And you find a lot of individual differences, both in Chinese and in Americans, but just appreciating that that is a big difference that needs discussion. I think we're right three takeaways out of this conversation. Cool. I like how you summarize. Great. Yeah. Great. Thank you. All right. So we're going to take a break. My guest is Gashay Michael Roche, the book that we've been talking about, China Love, the death of global competition. And I should say that's co-authored with Dr. Eric Wu. And we'll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. I'm Wanda Wallace, host of Out of the Comfort Zone. We have some amazing guests with some incredibly good ideas about how to take your leadership to the next level. But I find people are looking for more practical ways of implementing those ideas. So we've created an individual subscription service, specifically to focus on how to apply. You'll find more about that at www.outofthecomfortzone.com. We have two additional subscription services, one for the social group that want to exchange ideas and perspectives with a group and talk about career advancement. And we have a master's level for people who want to take a deeper dive all on out of thecomfortzone.com. We hope you'll join us. If you want more information on the articles, books, coaching, and seminars we offer, go to our website at www.leadership-forum.com. You're sure to find some helpful links, videos, and more to help you create a winning strategy for your organization, leadership forum, helping organizations get it, and keep it. This is Wanda Wallace, host of Out of the Comfort Zone. Do you find yourself in a role where your team knows more than you know? Are you struggling to see how you now add value? For years, I've coached leaders who have moved beyond the comfort zone of their expertise and have developed a methodology to help them make the leap and go on to do more. All of those tips are now packed into my new book. You can't know it all. Visit our website at leadership-forum.com or tune in to Out of the Comfort Zone for more insight. [MUSIC PLAYING] You are listening to Out of the Comfort Zone. To reach Dr. Wanda Wallace or her guest, call into the program at 1-866-472-5790. Again, that's 1-866-472-5790. You may also send an email to [email protected]. Now, back to Out of the Comfort Zone. Welcome back to the show. With me today is Gashay Michael Roche. The book we're talking about is China Love, the Death of Global Competition, written with Dr. Eric Wu. And I find this book fascinating, because as much as I think I have learned about China and all of my trips, including my trips some 30 years ago and seeing all the bicycles exactly as you described earlier, Michael, I learned something in this book I hadn't realized. So that was really insightful and helpful to me. We were just talking about one big guiding principle, which is the notion of individualism versus collectivism. But I have to ask you, what other philosophical differences do you think we have that we need to understand in order to be able to collaborate in a better way? Yeah, and I'm glad you asked about it because it's my favorite subject. And so my personal training was in philosophy. I attended Princeton and I had a chance to study in Himalayas for over 20 years. And so that course of study focused on the literary tradition of China for the last 2,000 years. And the course of study was very intensive. And we studied many, many of the classics of China. And in my modern companies, in the companies that I founded since then, we have a sort of a tradition inside the company that we encourage the top management to get to know the ancient culture of China and get some familiarity with it. In China, this concept is called Jinta, which means, I think the best translation in English is a Renaissance woman or man, a person who is a successful business person. But at the same time, they have a deep appreciation of the ancient culture, the historical culture of the other countries that they're dealing with. And this has helped me throughout a very long business career, very, very great deal of success, is to try to, preemptively, get to know more about another culture by diving into their favorite books. Because that's a great insight, I think, into a culture. And in the case of China, I remember I took world literature courses in my life at Princeton. And we never talked about China. Maybe we read one book about Laozi or something, or something like that. But when the name-- of the course world world literature included one Chinese book out of a couple hundred you know western books and this is world literature you study Don Quixote and we study war and peace, Tolstoy and then we don't really read much about China so what we encourage our executives we have free courses inside the company fun courses people get credit people get paid to take the courses and you might sit down with a master of I don't know Dao Dijing like how to behave around other people or Jin Kuan Qing which is the diamond cutter sutra for the Buddhist or or some book like that and and they'll go through a course we have I think 12 courses inside our company that we encourage our executives to learn more about the ancient books of the other culture and you know any country that you go to if you learn a few words of their language you know like I was in Indonesia during business recently and I their languages beyond me it's called Baza and I have no no I don't know a single word but I tried I tried to learn thank you Te Ramakasi and people were so grateful and it changed it broke the eyes so much when you use just one word of their language but if you can sit down with a Chinese person at dinner and honestly say I was reading Lao Tzu last night and I want to ask you about that first chapter thing Dao Kedau Faitan Dao Ming Kamin Faitan what does that mean you know what do you think about that and probably they haven't looked at it since elementary school but they'll be so grateful that you took the time and and so I feel to get to know the other countries philosophy one extraordinary concept that we stole from Chinese culture and using our companies is that helping the other side in a negotiation plants subconscious seeds in the mind of both negotiators for a better outcome and that's just really strange okay so I was brought up in corporate life to for example if you're negotiating with a supplier it was a mantra it was cheapest cost highest quality we even accused my first mentor of he wanted to make a film called Best Quality Cheapest Price and our relationship to suppliers was to try to trick them into supplying the best materials at the cheapest price and then you know along comes this Chinese business person and we're talking to him and he said why do you guys think like that you know this supplier if he's a good supplier he will supply you goods for for decades 10 20 years he will be supplying you with raw materials for 10 or 20 years shouldn't you rather try to make him successful shouldn't you rather try to see that he makes a profit he or she makes the profit and then he becomes stronger he's in a better position to buy the materials from his suppliers and he supplies them to you steadily over a long period of time and and I remember when a Chinese business person first proposed this to me and I was a little taken aback I thought I mean it sounds good but it doesn't sound very practical I don't think it would be a good business strategy to pay my supplier extra so he will get stronger so he could supply me better and cheaper materials later I mean and I actually did an experiment in my own company so I was in a diamond jewelry company we reached the quarter billion dollars a year in sales and at some point early on I told my staff let's do this experiment you know this guy is claiming this this ancient Chinese principle that when you enter a negotiation you should try to find ways to make it successful for the other party you know that should be one of your main focuses that you try to make the negotiation successful for the other party and I said this is how we used to run our company we just say let's try let's try it in this department okay now the gold acquisition gemstone acquisition labor acquisition marketing design you guys keep doing your old competition thing with the suppliers and in this one field say a smaller diamonds we're gonna try to take care of our suppliers we're gonna try to find out what's their kids scholarship requirements that you know cost $80,000 to send your kid to the US for a year of school and let's try to think about what the supplier needs and how we can make the supplier more strong and how we can even kind of shave off our profit a little bit and allow them to have more profit so that they become stronger so that we have a solid suppliers for 10-20 years and in one department we did it that department double their sales that the that department double their income and then it then we were all sold then we thought wow maybe we should try to have a culture where employees investors partners customers we try to make them successful and we proactively try to make them successful and it's been very that's a philosophical philosophical idea that I got from China that when you're in a negotiation the kindnesses you pay to the other party create sort of mental seats that later on in the relationship ripen and both parties become more successful and and just that one little piece of information from China's history was so valuable to my companies and I think we can always find things like that it is so antithetical to the classic Western approach or you remember reading this in the book and I'm listening to you say it again and I'm going yeah okay it's gonna take now we take me an experiment to see if I'm actually right if it actually works at the same time you know if we try to knock each other down and knock each other down and knock each other down and knock each other down we both end with very little left in the pool okay so you know kind of if you think of it how do we grow the pool for both parties and then how do we share equitably in the growth of the pool that we have grown that you know one could argue might actually lead to a better negotiation and there are other businesses that have a lot tried that philosophy and succeeded at it so yeah and an idea steeped in Chinese philosophy and Chinese stories fascinating okay I want to ask you one last thing which is about names you open up with a big thing about names at the beginning of the book and that we should learn to pronounce each other's aims and I know when I am working with my Asian colleagues Chinese and others they always say oh my name is too hard to pronounce and I still think it's always my obligation to at least try even if I don't get it very close to the intonation I should at least try and you have a philosophy about what we should do tell us about that philosophy yeah I was I like all of us like you wonder like everyone I first time I went to China I was confused completely about people's names and it took me a long time to figure out so one rule is that the last name comes first so it's the first name or not so she Jim Kim the president of China his his last name is she so you refer to him as Mr. Sheer Chairman Sheer something like that and then his personal name is Jim Bing or something like that so I think that's the first thing secondly when they had their cultural revolution or they had their communist revolution 1949 they took all the Chinese characters and they they tried to spell them with western letters and I guess the guy in charge was kind of an alcoholic just kidding but he goes X for SH sound "shuh" in China is X can If you got a China and you say Chairman Gazette, you try to pronounce X, it kind of means you don't care about them, or you didn't take five minutes to learn how to pronounce their name correctly. And most, almost all Chinese in high school, by the way, there's more English speakers inside of China than in the United States total. Okay, there's more people in China who speak English than in America. Okay, it's amazing. They learn English in high school, and they're encouraged to take a Western name. And I think it's sort of degrading, I think, as a Western business person, to respect your colleagues. The very first thing you should do is learn their name, and learn to say their name correctly. And I keep a little, I have a file on my phone called correct names, and I don't remember the second or third time I meet them, and I check my phone, and then I say their name. I have a friend, her name is, she says, I'm Allison. I say, no, your name is Joe Xiaoping. And she's like, wow, that's so nice that you learn my name. So I think for all of us doing business in China, and by the way, you can't ignore a market of a billion and a half people. If you do well in China, you're going to do well with everything. If you just harness a tiny percent of that market, I mean, a modern American business person, I think you'd be foolish to ignore China. I think you should learn a little bit about Chinese people, start with saying their names correctly, learn about their sensibilities, how they feel about things. And then it's going to be so great because a collaboration between an American and Chinese is just unbeatable in the whole world. It's fantastic. And I'm enjoying that for the last 30 years, and I just wish other people could do that. All right, Michael, we've come to a come out of time. So I think we keep talking for another hour easily. They're pulling the more stories to tell. So my guest today, Gashay Michael Roche, the book that we're talking about, co-authored with Dr. Eric Wu, is China Love You, the death of global competition. I should also say that Michael's first book, The Diamond Cutter, was also an international business success. So there's two references for you. If somebody wanted to reach out to you, how should they grab you? What's the best way to get in touch with you? I'd say Diamond Cutter Institute is our management training program. And we have about 150,000 clients in 35 countries. And so you could just find it online. Diamond Cutter Institute program. Fabulous. I think the highlight for me and the whole conversation is once again the reminder that if we choose to create tension between two sides, then we make it difficult for us to come to the best possible solution. Whereas if you try to create prosperity, good for both sides, we have the chance of elevating what each of us can achieve. And it's back to your notion of helping the other side plant these subconscious seeds in the mind of the other gets a better outcome back to the old Chinese stories. And an openness to understand that while it may not be familiar, necessarily comfortable or likable by me, as a Westerner, there is another approach, another view in the world that might be worth knowing. And with that, I want to thank you very much for your time today. Thank you, Wanda. You really are great at this. And I'm going to start watching you show me. Good. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And for everyone else if you'd like the podcast today, please like us on your favorite podcast provider. And we will see you next week, same time, say place for more wisdom and getting out of your comfort zone. Thank you for joining us today. Tune in for another edition next week with Dr. Wanda Wallace on the Voice America Business Channel. Reach outside your comfort zone this week. [Music]