CHINA BUSINESS SECRETS
Book #1: Give Face or Get Lost (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
If you are doing business in China without knowing the unspoken rules that underlie virtually every transaction in Chinese business culture, there is one thing you can be sure of: it’s costing you.
It may be costing you in lost productivity. In cost overruns and delays. In not getting the contract. Or in never getting promised larger contracts.
But the biggest cost may be missed opportunities. The fact that we don’t know what we don’t know is what costs us the most in China. Western companies often have no idea of the untold millions they leave on the table by doing some small things wrong.
Commonly these small errors involve violations, however unwitting, of deeply entrenched codes of business conduct. Face, for example: Many of us have heard how overwhelmingly important the concept of face is to Chinese, but we often do not know how to save face and avoid costly mistakes.
This learning usually happens the hard way, through years of trial and error. In Give Face or Get Lost, Mia Doucet makes it easy to grasp the fundamentals, explaining them clearly in jargon-free language and giving practical, in-the-trenches advice about what to do as well as the reasons why.
Book #2: Pray to the Right Buddha (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
In China, “it’s not what you know, but who you know” is even more true than it is in the West. If you are not talking to the right person with connections to the right inner circle (guanxi), all business dealings in China will be slower and more difficult than need be—if they even move at all.Pray to the Right Buddha is an indispensable guide to understanding why this is so and how to work effectively within this environment. It lays out the fundamentals of how guanxiwang networks operate, explains the rules of social hierarchy and how to identify and approach the right person (known as the Buddha, or the King) from the start, and offers advice on finding a trusted go-between, which is often critical to getting deals done.This guidebook also lays out the whys behind the explanation and advice, such as why it’s bad business to approach the kingpin directly, without an introduction—and why finding the right go-between is so important. Any one of the road-tested pieces of advice in this book can accelerate your success and save you untold time and money. Because finding the right people to do business with in China makes all the difference.
BOOK #3: OLD: Keep It Serious and Social (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
Keep It Serious and Social is your insider’s guide to business culture basics in China, written in an easy-to-read style and full of truths you can put to work right away.It’s critical to learn these basics before getting down to business. Socializing with potential partners, for example—and getting drunk with them, or at least appearing to—is one of the fastest ways of building trust.But how you conduct yourself during this courtship ritual is critical. Multi-million dollar sales are lost in China because the key players from the West are unaware of certain small points of conduct. Everything seems to be going well, and then poof! At the very end, the Chinese partner-to-be decides to opt out of the deal.Keep It Serious and Social helps you avoid these pitfalls—with tips on how to socialize with potential partners in ways that establish trust, and how to treat business with the seriousness that Chinese expect. It also features precise, practical advice on adapting your behavior so that you can thrive in China, and, in the last chapter, reveals a great—and vastly underutilized—secret for putting your company way ahead of the competition.In all, it’s an indispensable primer on how business is really conducted in China.
BOOK #4: Wipe That Expression Off Your Face (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
Wipe That Expression Off Your Face is the fourth minibook in the China Business Secrets series. Each minibook in the series condenses key insights on a different theme of doing business in China, distilled from Mia Doucet’s more than 2,000 hours of research and interviews with China experts—CEOs, directors, managers, engineers, purchasers, consultants, and entrepreneurs from around the globe who live in or travel regularly to China on business.China Business Secrets represents their collective wisdom. It offers unique perspectives on how we as Westerners are perceived (in a word: different) and provides abundant tactical and strategic advice, with gems of insight from Chinese-born experts who reveal things they rarely or never share with their Western colleagues, clients, and suppliers.The author’s consulting clients have used these very secrets to win multi-million dollar contracts and to rescue deals that had stalled for reasons that seemed inexplicable. Properly applied, they can make or save you untold thousands—even millions—of dollars, just as they have for her clients.So potent are its lessons that the series should be required reading not only for business travelers to China, but for every single person who talks to your Chinese customers, suppliers, or staff on an ongoing basis.Other minibooks in the series include Give Face or Get Lost (revealing the unspoken rules underlying all business transactions in China), Pray to the Right Buddha (on cultivating relationships with your Chinese partners), and Get Drunk & Other Advice (on understanding the nuances of Chinese business culture).
BOOK #5: Leave Western Ways At Home (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
When doing business with the Chinese, whether in China or elsewhere, it’s critically important to know the deeply embedded—usually unspoken—protocols that your business prospects and partners are living by.Leave Western Ways At Home is an essential guide to the most important of these protocols, including how to greet and bow appropriately, how to make a good first impression, what to give for gifts, how to properly exchange business cards, and how to navigate the all-important business dinner (including proper seating hierarchy and chopstick etiquette). It also includes a section for first time travelers to China with notes on what to pack and what to expect.It can take years to learn these details on your own, but this indispensable guide condenses the most important ones for you.By learning how to do the small things right, you give face and show respect to your Chinese counterparts—and thus put yourself and your company way ahead of the foreign competition.TAGS: Chinese business, Chinese business protocols, business protocols, travel to China, Mia Doucet, author
BOOK #6: Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains is a revelation for Westerners negotiating with the Chinese. It features priceless gems of strategic and tactical advice for going head-to-head with some of the shrewdest negotiators on the planet.You will learn what to expect in terms of initial gambits, who should accompany you at the table, how to work the minefield of concessions, frank talk on what a contract actually means in China, endgame tactics, and hard-won, hands-on advice regarding the many things you can do to keep control over the things you can control—and how to adapt to the rest.It also includes a précis of The Thirty-Six Stratagems, ancient military maxims that underlie many of the gambits you will face, as well as a step-by-step guide for creating working papers that leave no room for ambiguity while instilling trust with your Chinese partners.Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains is a package you will not find anywhere else—a unique document that will be critical to your negotiations with Chinese, in China or elsewhere.
BOOK #7: Stop Giving It All Away (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition]
What’s your plan to protect your intellectual property (IP) in China? If you’re seeking to do business in China and you don’t have a plan to protect your IP, get one. Reliance on litigation is not a plan, nor is waiting for harsher crackdowns under pressure from Western governments.This minibook gives you concrete steps for making a plan and taking action to protect your intellectual assets. There is a great deal you can do to stop IP theft at source in China before it even has a chance to arise.Stop Giving It All Away also reveals why IP theft is so rampant in China. The reasons are actually quite simple, and once you understand the cultural factors behind the phenomenon—that is, once you up your cultural intelligence—you will have the insight necessary to adapt to Chinese business culture and do business more effectively in the world’s second largest economy.
CHINA BUSINESS SECRETS
Book #1: Give Face or Get Lost (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOWIf you are doing business in China without knowing the unspoken rules that underlie virtually every transaction in Chinese business culture, there is one thing you can be sure of: it’s costing you.It may be costing you in lost productivity. In cost overruns and delays. In not getting the contract. Or in never getting promised larger contracts.But the biggest cost may be missed opportunities. The fact that we don’t know what we don’t know is what costs us the most in China. Western companies often have no idea of the untold millions they leave on the table by doing some small things wrong.Commonly these small errors involve violations, however unwitting, of deeply entrenched codes of business conduct. Face, for example: Many of us have heard how overwhelmingly important the concept of face is to Chinese, but we often do not know how to save face and avoid costly mistakes.This learning usually happens the hard way, through years of trial and error. In Give Face or Get Lost, Mia Doucet makes it easy to grasp the fundamentals, explaining them clearly in jargon-free language and giving practical, in-the-trenches advice about what to do as well as the reasons why.
Book #2: Pray to the Right Buddha (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW In China, “it’s not what you know, but who you know” is even more true than it is in the West. If you are not talking to the right person with connections to the right inner circle (guanxi), all business dealings in China will be slower and more difficult than need be—if they even move at all.Pray to the Right Buddha is an indispensable guide to understanding why this is so and how to work effectively within this environment. It lays out the fundamentals of how guanxiwang networks operate, explains the rules of social hierarchy and how to identify and approach the right person (known as the Buddha, or the King) from the start, and offers advice on finding a trusted go-between, which is often critical to getting deals done.This guidebook also lays out the whys behind the explanation and advice, such as why it’s bad business to approach the kingpin directly, without an introduction—and why finding the right go-between is so important. Any one of the road-tested pieces of advice in this book can accelerate your success and save you untold time and money. Because finding the right people to do business with in China makes all the difference.
BOOK #3: OLD: Keep It Serious and Social (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW Keep It Serious and Social is your insider’s guide to business culture basics in China, written in an easy-to-read style and full of truths you can put to work right away.It’s critical to learn these basics before getting down to business. Socializing with potential partners, for example—and getting drunk with them, or at least appearing to—is one of the fastest ways of building trust.But how you conduct yourself during this courtship ritual is critical. Multi-million dollar sales are lost in China because the key players from the West are unaware of certain small points of conduct. Everything seems to be going well, and then poof! At the very end, the Chinese partner-to-be decides to opt out of the deal.Keep It Serious and Social helps you avoid these pitfalls—with tips on how to socialize with potential partners in ways that establish trust, and how to treat business with the seriousness that Chinese expect. It also features precise, practical advice on adapting your behavior so that you can thrive in China, and, in the last chapter, reveals a great—and vastly underutilized—secret for putting your company way ahead of the competition.In all, it’s an indispensable primer on how business is really conducted in China.
BOOK #4: Wipe That Expression Off Your Face (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW Wipe That Expression Off Your Face is the fourth minibook in the China Business Secrets series. Each minibook in the series condenses key insights on a different theme of doing business in China, distilled from Mia Doucet’s more than 2,000 hours of research and interviews with China experts—CEOs, directors, managers, engineers, purchasers, consultants, and entrepreneurs from around the globe who live in or travel regularly to China on business.China Business Secrets represents their collective wisdom. It offers unique perspectives on how we as Westerners are perceived (in a word: different) and provides abundant tactical and strategic advice, with gems of insight from Chinese-born experts who reveal things they rarely or never share with their Western colleagues, clients, and suppliers.The author’s consulting clients have used these very secrets to win multi-million dollar contracts and to rescue deals that had stalled for reasons that seemed inexplicable. Properly applied, they can make or save you untold thousands—even millions—of dollars, just as they have for her clients.So potent are its lessons that the series should be required reading not only for business travelers to China, but for every single person who talks to your Chinese customers, suppliers, or staff on an ongoing basis.Other minibooks in the series include Give Face or Get Lost (revealing the unspoken rules underlying all business transactions in China), Pray to the Right Buddha (on cultivating relationships with your Chinese partners), and Get Drunk & Other Advice (on understanding the nuances of Chinese business culture).
BOOK #5: Leave Western Ways At Home (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW When doing business with the Chinese, whether in China or elsewhere, it’s critically important to know the deeply embedded—usually unspoken—protocols that your business prospects and partners are living by.Leave Western Ways At Home is an essential guide to the most important of these protocols, including how to greet and bow appropriately, how to make a good first impression, what to give for gifts, how to properly exchange business cards, and how to navigate the all-important business dinner (including proper seating hierarchy and chopstick etiquette). It also includes a section for first time travelers to China with notes on what to pack and what to expect.It can take years to learn these details on your own, but this indispensable guide condenses the most important ones for you.By learning how to do the small things right, you give face and show respect to your Chinese counterparts—and thus put yourself and your company way ahead of the foreign competition.TAGS: Chinese business, Chinese business protocols, business protocols, travel to China, Mia Doucet, author
BOOK #6: Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains is a revelation for Westerners negotiating with the Chinese. It features priceless gems of strategic and tactical advice for going head-to-head with some of the shrewdest negotiators on the planet.You will learn what to expect in terms of initial gambits, who should accompany you at the table, how to work the minefield of concessions, frank talk on what a contract actually means in China, endgame tactics, and hard-won, hands-on advice regarding the many things you can do to keep control over the things you can control—and how to adapt to the rest.It also includes a précis of The Thirty-Six Stratagems, ancient military maxims that underlie many of the gambits you will face, as well as a step-by-step guide for creating working papers that leave no room for ambiguity while instilling trust with your Chinese partners.Protect Tiger Lured from Mountains is a package you will not find anywhere else—a unique document that will be critical to your negotiations with Chinese, in China or elsewhere.
BOOK #7: Stop Giving It All Away (China Business Secrets) [Kindle Edition] BUY NOW What’s your plan to protect your intellectual property (IP) in China? If you’re seeking to do business in China and you don’t have a plan to protect your IP, get one. Reliance on litigation is not a plan, nor is waiting for harsher crackdowns under pressure from Western governments.This minibook gives you concrete steps for making a plan and taking action to protect your intellectual assets. There is a great deal you can do to stop IP theft at source in China before it even has a chance to arise.Stop Giving It All Away also reveals why IP theft is so rampant in China. The reasons are actually quite simple, and once you understand the cultural factors behind the phenomenon—that is, once you up your cultural intelligence—you will have the insight necessary to adapt to Chinese business culture and do business more effectively in the world’s second largest economy.