Em Xangai

Artigo de uma colunista habitual da revista da Câmara de Comércio da UE. Visivelmente irritada com uma pintura que lhe tinham feito na varanda, por ordem de alguém, sem saberem porquê.

Mesmo com o desconto, é bem verdade.

"I can only imagine that if I grew up seing strong-armed and told to accept decisions from invisible seats of power, my concern, at every critical juncture, would be: Who makes the decision? Not: What should be the right decision? This, essentially, is how this culture came to train its people.

If your style is equally autocratic, you will have no problem managing your staff in China. You can make all the decisions without any need to explain or train them in assessing information. You can make decisions based on a whim and they will still happily follow your orders. Although you'll have to keep them simple and dispense them one at a time since more than one would only be confusing - which are they to follow first?

But if your management style is based on team-building and consensus, you're in trouble. You have inherited an entire generation that has never seen decisions based on having information and critical thinking. Instead, managers with years of experience continue to wait for a "final decision" from the boss, assuming that what the boss wants can never be deduced or understood. Most tragically, this legacy leaves behind a team of experienced staff who has not learned the process of decision making."