Yesterday China and other Asian countries and communities all over the world celebrated the first day of the Chinese Lunar Year, or Spring Festival (chunjie).

The Year of the Dragon is associated with new good beginnings and good fortune. Those with an entrepreneurial spirit and into business will see success, it is also a good time to get married, have children or start a new business.

Traditional Chinese New Year celebrations last 15 days and finish with the Lantern Festival.  There will be celebrations all over the world, so look out for events in your area.

If you’re located in New Zealand check out events in Auckland and Christchurch,  as well as Wellington.

So, no need to get in touch with your Chinese business partners or colleagues between 22 January until 28th!

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Last year I wrote about the pressure of migrant workers to make it home over the Golden Holidays (this year between 22 – 28 January).

This year I thought I’d share a relatively new phenomenon: Renting a Girl or Boyfriend to Return Home for New Year.

The pressure is on for the 20 something olds from parents and family to return home with a prospective partner. To avoid the grilling around the traditional round table on New Year’s Eve, or to gain face with relatives some seem to resort to hiring a fake partner.
According to them “renting a girl or boy friend” during this traditional festival when they have to return home for a family reunion means to show filial piety to their parents.

The public opinions on this new trend are naturally split.  Xinhua news agency interviewed a psychology professor and a lawyer on the topic prior to this year’s Spring Festival: while it’s not illegal to impersonate someone’s partner, it’s clearly not a long-term solution, and may even cause sadness and embarrassment further down the road.

The English online version of the Chinese People’s Daily even listed the prices people were expecting to pay for ‘Renting girlfriend for New Year” in ten cities last year.   You can check for yourself: put in “租友过年” (renting a friend for the New Year) on google or on baidu , its Chinese equivalent, to see how popular this topic has become.

Coaching is all about clarifying your goals and intentions, and realizing them.

The goals of my clients and their paths to achieve them are as varied as they are.

This year my lovely designer Di helped me to create a coaching journal as gifts for my clients with actual takeaway quotes from clients this year – carefully selected to inspire them, while preserving confidentiality.

Some of my favourite takeaways are:

“Turn this current situation into opportunity”

“What does success look like – in the coming 10 months?””

“The value of coaching: having a dispassionate objective 3^rd party. It’s a process of being guided to your own solutions”.

In my electronic seasons greetings I traditionally include a TED Talk:

This year’s is brief and inspiring: Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days

Is there something you’ve always meant to do, wanted to do, but just … haven’t?

Watch this talk.

Here’s to your takeaways and successes in the New Year!

This project is an initiative by partners of EUNIC (European National Institutes for Culture) in China, the Goethe-Institut, the British Council, and The Danish Cultural Institute.

The EUROPE-CHINA CULTURAL COMPASS project is part of an ongoing dialogue between Europe and China, and I am proud that I was able to contribute to it.

The COMPASS  is designed to help prepare cultural practitioners for collaboration, and addresses both Chinese and European readers in two separate publications, one in Chinese and one in English.

In my humble opinion, it is a unique piece, a product of cooperation across continents, cultures, languages, and sectors.  The result is the most holistic approach to the topic of collaboration between China and other countries that I have come across yet.

And, the best of it: with courtesy of EUNIC you can download your own copy in English or Chinese – for no charge!

Look forward to your feedback!   http://www.eunic-online.eu/node/445

Major shifts are taking place in New Zealand society and business. Domestically, almost half of the new entrants to the workforce will soon be from diverse cultural backgrounds. Externally, three of New Zealand’s top five trading partners are now Asian countries – People’s Republic of China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and this trend will only strengthen in the coming years.

By turning cultural diversity to its advantage and making the most of a generally underutilised talent pool, business has a unique opportunity to enhance competitiveness, productivity and innovation.   But leadership is needed if we are going to make this a reality in New Zealand.

Let me know if you’d like to talk more about this opportunity.

In the current issue of the Human Resources Magazine (June/July 2011), I’ve published an article entitled ‘Turning cultural diversity into business advantage’.

There I look at the major cultural shifts taking place in New Zealand society and business, and how this is likely to affect the way in which business operates, both in NZ and overseas.   By turning cultural differences to its advantage, New Zealand business has an opportunity to enhance competitiveness, productivity and innovation.

My vision is that NZ can be a model in the world, where we have turned cultural diversity to business advantage; where we have shown that relating to people from different cultural backgrounds results in vibrant, more productive work places; where we have learned to tap into our domestic diverse talents and play to those strengths, which enables us in turn to better forge sustainable business relationships in key offshore markets.

On 9 August, my colleague Sue and I will speak on the same topic at the National Conference of the HR Institute of New Zealand: ‘Workplace Culture in a Tiny Country’.

Come along to hear our presentation!

The Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, is the most important traditional festival for family reunions. Millions of Chinese take the week-long holiday from Feb 2 to Feb 8 to go home despite huge difficulties, like queuing for hours in chilly weather to buy railway tickets.

According to the China Daily the “Spring Festival travel rush, or Chunyun, starts from Jan 19 to Feb 27, and some 700 million Chinese, or nearly half the country’s population, expected to travel within the 40-day-long peak travel season. It is the “largest human migration on the planet”.

Today most Chinese are returning to their workplaces after having spent time with their family. Among them are about 130 million migrant workers returning from their home villages to their work in factories and construction sites in the cities.  They usually only get to go home once a year, during Chinese New Year.

Last week I watched a documentary on this topic: Last Train Home by Canadian Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan.

I found it an incredibly poignant film, and important as it allows us a glimpse into the lives of the people who may have made our jeans in China.

No one remains untouched by China – whether you work for a multinational; buy toys for your kids or shoes for yourself.  Even if you run a small business in the New Zealand countryside, chances are that some of your clients are Chinese.

We are all connected now to China.

I’ve been a “Student of China” for the last 23 years – and I’m certainly not running out of new things to learn.

This is according to the 2010 IBM Global Chief HR Officer study ‘Working beyond borders’.

On an individual level, I’d add:

• An openness to different ways of doing things than your own;
• the ability to influence across cultures (national as well organisational), and
• lots of resilience and patience, when things are not working out the way one planned.

Yes, 21^st century technology has enabled some of us to work from where ever we are, and to connect and collaborate with people on all five continents at the same time, if need be.

Yet I see in my daily work how individuals are still stumbling over seemingly small things: the fact that it takes “10 e-mails to get the response they need from their foreign colleague”, the offence taken from the tone of some e-mails sent by non-English native speakers.

Petty, you think?  Maybe, but there’s a whole tail of reactions that follow such e-mails that can poison the work atmosphere and severely impact productivity.

So it seems we have a long way to go still to achieve the optimal way of working beyond borders.

On the bright side, however, it’s an exciting process of discovery; an opportunity to explore and create synergies from a range of perspectives.

If you’d like a closer look at the study:

ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03353usen/GBE03353USEN.PDF

I’d like to share a video on the Harvard Business Review (HBR) Idea Cast.   Harvard Business School professor Tarun Khanna – coauthor of Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution – explains how multinationals can thrive in emerging markets.

Asked what he thought was the biggest mistake companies make, when they’re trying to get into emerging markets – what do you think his answer was?

“ … by far the most common would be an overestimation of the extent to which their experience is going to be useful in a new context”.

It’s a very human reaction: if we’ve been successful and rewarded for what and how we’ve been doing things in the past, chances are we will unconsciously want to replicate this approach also in a new environment – almost regardless of the concrete cultural differences.

This can be a painful – and potentially expensive – mistake.

How can we avoid this very human reaction?

1. Know thyself – what is your preferred way of doing business?
2. Get to know your new cultural environment – what does ‘doing business’ look like there?  How do you build relationships? How quick or how slow do people make decisions?  Who takes the final decision?
3. Adapt your strategy and your day-to-day interactions to fit the market’s preferences rather than your own.

For the whole video take a look at: http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2010/06/how-companies-break-into-emerg.html

This delegation will be the biggest New Zealand delegation going to the Expo, as well as to the cities of Beijing, Tianjin, and Xiamen.

Three of the points I made which resonated with the audience were:

• Generations: The generational differences in behaviour we may encounter in China.  For example, don’t be surprised when you come across entrepreneurs from the younger generation who coolly hand over their cards with one hand and no particular care, instead of the traditional way of using both hands as a gesture of respect.
• Gender:  Women in the delegation were struck that gender is less of an issue in China than in other countries/cultures – China takes pride in the nation’s relative gender equality.
• Hierarchy:  If everyone in a group that you meet has the same title on their name cards, how do you recognise hierarchy? One way is to observe the people’s body language: who talks more than others, who talks first; watch out for eye contact to see who’s really in charge; i.e. where do people look before they speak.

Why, you may ask, why learn about this and try to modify our behaviour in the first place?

What happens when we adapt our behaviour is that we put others at ease, make them feel more comfortable and hence more open for our messages.

1. I went to a workshop on the upcoming Shanghai Expo organized by the Wellington, NZ, City Council – and got really excited!

All New Zealanders and all non-New Zealanders – have a look at the NZ Pavilion.  It’s truly beautiful, a great representation of New Zealand as a country, and in addition, if you are a NZ business person you can use it to host your Chinese business partners there and show them a slice of New Zealand.            I’ll be inviting my Chinese associate to the Expo.

2.     I’m working on a course for New Zealand exporters, and naturally I pick up on everything “exporter” related. This week it was a statement by Al Monro, CE of Next Window at the New Zealand-Australia Investment Forum, saying that “New Zealand exporter branding sends the wrong message”.  According to him it was “important that NZ start-ups see themselves as global companies.”

I must say I agree with him. It’s worth re-considering your positioning and how this may be perceived by people outside of NZ: to the rest of the world, Monro said, “it sounds pretty naff” describing yourself as an exporter, rather than as a company doing business internationally.

3.    My favourite event by was a reading with the Chinese author Xinran I went to in Christchurch, NZ,  two weeks ago.

If you’re not familiar with her work, google her!  Xinran is a Chinese journalist who now lives in London and has published a number of books.  I consider her a true “interculturalist” – a bridge builder between China and other countries, and especially between us and the many Chinese whose voices are not heard in a world obsessed by the numbers of the Chinese market only.

What’s been happening in your world lately?