Made In China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs [Hardcover]

Donald N. Sull (Author), Yong Wang (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1591397154 | ISBN-13: 978-1591397151 | Publication Date: June 9, 2005

Executives worldwide have studied and emulated U.S. entrepreneurs from Bill Gates to Michael Dell. Yet, we know next to nothing about the pioneers who are reshaping the world's second largest economy: China. In the face of murky ownership structures, inconsistent access to capital, shifting industrial policy, and other obstacles, an elite few Chinese firms have thrived during the turbulence of the last decade. In Made in China, Donald N. Sull profiles eight of these formidable ventures to reveal the secrets behind their surprising success. Based on extensive research, including in-depth interviews and access to corporate archives, Made in China explores these entrepreneurs' winning strategies, from how they anticipate and maneuver through emerging threats and opportunities ("active waiting") to how they manage risks and how they consistently out-execute rivals. Taken together, these principles represent a comprehensive model for managing in unpredictable environments worldwide. An insider's look at the playbook of some of the world's savviest and most resilient entrepreneurs, Made in China is essential reading for companies operating in China or in any volatile industry or market. Sull is an associate professor of management practice at London Business School. Previously an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, Sull was also a consultant at McKinsey & Co., Inc. He advises both multinational firms and new ventures in several countries.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"a book from which even veterans of the Chinese market can draw useful lessons" -- Barrons, September 5, 2005

"well worth reading as a lively guide to what makes Chinese entrepreneurs tick" -- Financial Times, May 16 2005

From the Back Cover

"Sull’s book accomplishes two challenging objectives: it develops a useful framework for operating in volatile economies and provides rich profiles of China’s national champions. Sull is an emerging star in international management, and China is one of the world’s most important and dynamic economies. Made in China is a wonderful confluence of talent and topic. It should be on every forward-looking manager’s bookshelf."

--Robert E. Kennedy, Executive Director, The William Davidson Institute, and professor, Michigan Business School

"Sull has brilliantly used the case studies of China’s leading entrepreneurs to frame a road map for navigating the dynamic and unpredictable markets of the twenty-first century. A must-read for those who want to create their own success stories."

--Bill Coleman, Founder, former Chairman, and CEO, BEA Systems, Inc.

"There is no economy in the world as important and yet as poorly understood as China’s. In his penetrating book, Sull helps us understand what really happens in some of China’s most important companies. Packed with both startling and reassuring stories, this book can help any entrepreneur seize the opportunities and manage the risk of trying something new."

--Bob Higgins, Managing General Partner, Highland Capital Partners

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 231 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (June 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591397154
• ISBN-13: 978-1591397151
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,191,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Don Sull is a professor of strategy and the faculty director of executive education at the London Business School. He received his bachelors, masters, and doctorate from Harvard University, where he taught entrepreneurship. Prior to his academic career, professor Sull worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Company and as a management investor with a leveraged buyout firm. He blogs for the Financial Times (www.blogs.ft.com/donsullblog).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Another 'FAILED' study about Chinese entrepreneurs, December 12, 2005

By 

Hubert Shea (Shanghai, China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Made In China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs (Hardcover)

This book is only suitable for executives who believe that the business environment in China is still unpredictable. Sull intends to study a sample of entrepreneurs and companies in China in order to illustrate effective strategies that entrepreneurs might use while managing in unpredictable markets.

After reading this book, I find that there is nothing 'new'and 'unique' that Sull can generate from the study. For example, in the case of Ting Hsin Group (the leading food conglomerate in greater China region), Sull concludes that Chinese entreprenreurs are used to make sound and effective business decisions based on their gut instinct. As a seasoned executive in the Chinese market for more than 15 years, I have encountered many Chinese entrepreneurs who possess such trait but few of them can be successful.

Another problem about this book is that the study of Chinese entrepreneurs or companies is a hard nut to crack. According to my research experience, Chinese entrepreneurs are used to be unwilling to disclose their authentic information to business researchers who lack personal and trustful connections with them. The data collection method used by Sull (i.e. hiring local consulting firms)cannot warrant a point of entry to capture authentic and rich data for this study. BTW, I do not recommend you to buy this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In China, do as Chinese do, February 22, 2006

By 

Michael.kim "Kim" (Korea/China) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Made In China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs (Hardcover)

I am a vice president of leading Korean telecom company with 5 years investing experience in China. What Donald mentions in his book is quite true based on my own experience. China is a booming market with huge opportunities in all industries, but it also gets its particular rules to play in these fields. Some rule can be adopted in all industries; the others are special on different sectors. Donald's research uncovers the miracles in four leading industries, and offers us rich information. Especially, his opinion on telecommunication industry is quite correct and useful. The findings of Donald's book also offer good guidance to my work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Business Theory Meets the Chinese Challenge, July 29, 2010

By 

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Made In China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs (Hardcover)

This book is advertised as a landmark study on competing in unpredictable markets, with lessons drawn from the experience of successful Chinese entrepreneurs whose achievements have recently become the focus of worldwide attention. Donald Sull seeks nothing less than to rewrite the rules of business strategy and to challenge existing theories of the strategy process that build upon the premise of a predictable business environment. He dedicates his book to the memory of the late professor Sumantra Ghoshal, who passed away in 2004 but is still remembered as an exceptionally gifted scholar and who remains a source of inspiration to a generation of management researchers and practitioners. Don Sull shares with his role model the ambition to challenge established management wisdom and to produce strategy research that offers normative guidance to managers in addition to description or prediction.

In my opinion, he falls short of his ambition on several counts. First, like all books published by the HBS Press, Made in China carries a very simple message that is hammered down from every angle and brought home in a very repetitive manner. This message boils down to a few sentences: in markets such as China were everything is unpredictable, managers can't afford the luxury of drafting strategies and building plans for the future. Instead, they must seize opportunities faster than their competitors, set shifting priorities, focus on execution, and stand ready to scale up massively when they strike gold or to withhold the shock when the big one comes. That's about it. This is definitely no heady stuff. The message is illustrated by cases of Chinese companies and vignettes into the personalities of their leaders, but this contextual information is reduced to a minimum. There is no attempt at presenting thick descriptions, in-depth portraits, or extended cases.

What distinguishes this management book from journalistic reporting is the use of original concepts that aim at putting a picture on the challenges managers face in an unpredictable context. These concepts ("active waiting", "the fog of the future", "conducting reconnaissance into the future", "sense-anticipate-prioritize-execute", etc.) are very easy to grasp and do not constitute any intellectual breakthrough. Instead, they provide sticky labels to organize the discussion around the author's own terms. In case the reader hasn't registered them, they are summarized at the end of each chapter, and repeated throughout the book. This writing technique is not unique to Donald Sull, and indeed characterizes most management books aimed at the general public--here the `Blue Ocean Strategy' comes to mind, but there are many other examples. The result is that each book tends to form an island of idiosyncratic vocabularies and metaphors, each aiming to provide a unique worldview of the management process, with very little dialogue or overlapping between these different frameworks. This stands against the cumulative view of science, which is only possible if authors adopt a common vocabulary.

Some management scholars, best exemplified by Sumantra Ghoshal, tried to follow a double-track career: they published research articles in scholarly journals, and they wrote books or articles in popular management series in order to disseminate their research findings and to offer practical lessons for managers. This way they left their imprint on the academic field as well as on management practice. They did so by playing the rules of academia: publish in peer-reviewed journals; propose research designs that combine empirical observation with theory building; use quantitative tools to test hypotheses; challenge existing theories by offering valid alternatives. I may be wrong, but my impression is that Donald Sull is bypassing this first step in his effort to produce lessons that are of direct practical relevance for managers. His bibliography referred to in the endnotes mostly lists publications in trade magazines and flagship journals of elite business schools like the Harvard Business Review or London Business School's Business Strategy Review, not grey-covered journals attached to academic societies like the Strategy Management Journal or the Academy of Management Review, which cater only to an academic readership and tend to define the ethos of the discipline. The research design that forms the basis of Made in China, presented in an annex, didn't particularly impress me for its rigor or originality. There are no statistical tests, no financial analysis, no reference to model testing and hypothesis building. To be true, the display of a scientific apparatus often masks the lack of substance of the message, and one should not exaggerate the virtues of academic scholarship. It is also true that Donald Sull refers to management theory in footnotes and thereby demonstrates a good grasp of the academic literature. But my wish is that he would also challenge business academics on their own turf.

For, as I mentioned, Made in China is an ambitious and innovative management essay. Don Sull makes a strong case for scrapping the five year corporate plan and taking a more nimble approach to seizing opportunities. As he puts it, managers "must abandon the illusion that the future stretches out before them and that they can peer over the horizon, predict the future, and plan with accuracy and certainty". Instead, they should adopt an unfolding view of time in which a steady stream of unanticipated threats and opportunities emerge. They should substitute "organizational agility" to corporate mission, priorities to vision, process to purpose, execution to conception. This means that the rulebook of corporate planning can be put in the dustbin, and with it most of the literature in the field of strategic management. The corporate planning process often fails because "it is too linear, attempts to impose a preconceived strategy on an emergent situation, divorces strategy from operations, fails to align the company with the importance of time and timing, and focuses on big bets rather than cumulative advantages". Clearly, a new model is needed.

To elaborate a new model of corporate strategy, management specialists need not start from scratch, but they can learn from the profession who invented the very notion of strategy: the military. Strategic management has often paid tribute to the great theorists of warfare, from Sun Tzu to Karl von Clausewitz; but their borrowing has often been superficial, aiming more at giving business leadership a whiff of nobility and ancient wisdom than at providing it with practical lessons. Don Sull is not interested by the mystique of war, but by the lessons of combat-tested experience. He sees the army as a model of a flexible hierarchy, an organizational form in which top commanders set top-down priorities for the organization, but allow middle officers and rank soldiers great latitude in negotiating their specific objectives and autonomy in executing them. The battlefield provides him with a metaphor of a turbulent environment, characterized by disorder, uncertainty, friction, and fluidity. It is precisely this natural disorder which creates the conditions ripe for exploitation by an opportunistic will. Managers and officers don't succeed by getting their plan right the first time but by finding out where it is wrong (and fixing it) quicker than the enemy or competitor revises his plan. In Sull's own terms, Clauzewitz's "fog of war" becomes the "fog of the future", and managers conduct "reconnaissance" missions in order to adapt their mental maps. Drilling takes the form of conscious experiments, and the principles of effective warfare are adapted with the same shorthand conciseness ("recon pull versus plan push", "observe-orient-decide-act").

Another virtue of this book rests in the author's belief that best practices are global, not just American. Very often business studies oscillate between the apology of difference ("the secrets of Japanese management") and the replication of a business model presented as universal but closely linked to the American context. Made in China avoids the easy exotica of books about business in China. Here you won't find any discussions on "guanxi" or on "face", on Sun Tzu's Art of War or on the Thirty-Six Stratagems. After all, this is not what Don Sull's increasing number of Chinese MBA students pay for when they enroll in top business schools. They want the best management has to offer, tools they can apply in diverse contexts where the rules are not yet settled. In the past, when managers looked for best practices, they typically turned to the United States and Western Europe, sometimes Japan. But in our era of globalization the rules of business are not necessarily written by Western multinationals. Chinese managers can also learn lessons coming from places like Brazil, a country that Donald Sull also studied closely. Some of these lessons are surprising, like the virtues of transparency in an opaque environment. According to the author, firms in emerging countries can gain a competitive advantage by opening up their books, reporting more information than the capital markets require, committing to a clear governance structure, and making transparency the core of their organization. This is not the only point where Don Sull develops counterintuitive arguments. But business leaders need to be prepared: China, Brazil and other fast-changing economies are no longer at the receiving end of management wisdom, and they may offer some lessons of their own. Donald Sull's book allows us to prepare for the time when business ideas and theories, not just industrial products and processes, will be made in China.