<Dell-China>Uncommon Pair-An Irishman & Singaporean in an ancient land selling Dell.
Mark:
Nice write-up about Dell's China operations,how Dell is learning to adapt to the local culture. One of the thing that got me was that the employees do not seem to understand the value of the stock they got through stock option plan,at least not yet,may be after the split today they will know better.<g>
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Uncommon pair take on task of overcoming cultural obstacles
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By Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel
American-Statesman International Staff
Published: March 7, 1999
XIAMEN, China -- One is a soft-spoken Singaporean, the other an exuberant Irishman. Together they are the flint and steel of the sales fire Dell Computer Corp. wants to sweep across the world's biggest potential market.
David Chan and Buddy Griffin are the uncommon pair the Round Rock-based Dell teamed up to convey its new and very Western go-go style into this ancient land that even today often moves to a slow cadence of tradition.
"In the last six months, we have gone out and met the media, met with the key customer organizations, both international and Chinese companies," said Chan, president of operations in China and Hong Kong.
"I find that sometimes they don't buy into our model, so this means that people are not sure whether the direct model will work."
While Chan, 43, is responsible overall for China, he is essentially the outside man in charge of sales and strategic planning. He is a clever choice, a marketing specialist with 15 years experience with IBM and contacts throughout the region.
He also has Chinese parents. Chan carries a sense of Asian centeredness that keeps him calm when discussing the urgency of business, comfortable in a casual sweater when surrounded by suits and ties.
"The products are great. Product, quality, pricing, that's not a problem," he said. "People continue to be our biggest challenge."
His job is convincing China's foremost bureaucrats, enterprise directors and entrepreneurs that they can buy complicated, expensive equipment in a new way. They can write their own specs, hand them directly to Dell and get the product delivered fast, without paying anyone in the middle to tell them what they need.
In a society eternally hierarchical, from long before Confucius to decades after Mao Tse-tung, that means persuading people they can safely take on new responsibility. They won't need anyone to blame when something goes wrong, because they can do it themselves and do it right.
Chan, a Dell believer recruited to the company's Malaysia operation in 1996, also has to convince his own salespeople. They work here and in seven other urban sales and service offices around China.
To grow at the rate he wants to grow, Chan said, he must better train the sales, service and technical staff in "how to go after the bigger market." Chan himself travels constantly to multiply Dell sales in China, averaging one-and-a-half days at each stop and speaking a bit wistfully of seeing his wife and two children in Singapore only on Sundays.
'Babies of the moment'
Griffin is the inside man, the nuts-and-bolts executive who gets the machines made and delivered -- after building up the factory, hiring the hands and starting the assembly line. His Dell team accomplished that last August, four and a half months after Dell announced the decision to locate its China Customer Center in Xiamen.
"Dell Austin one day was as small as we are," said Griffin, describing in his rolling Irish brogue an expectation of explosive growth. "We are the babies of the moment. China won't be the baby forever."
Griffin, 50, has seen that growth. He personally started up two other major Dell centers: First, the Limerick supplier for European operations in Ireland when he joined Dell in 1990; then, five years later, the plant in Penang, Malaysia. Now he is vice president-manufacturing at the China Customer Center for Dell, Asia Pacific.
Discipline and organization are qualities central to his job. And Griffin surely harbors them, describing a routine of sleeping from midnight to 5 a.m., then rising from the Xiamen hotel suite where he lives to jog every morning before donning a crisp white shirt and tie.
When he isn't answering e-mail or kidding the elevator operator, he seems to be massaging relations with city officials, who are key to untangling China's skeins of red tape. Or he's chatting up Xiamen's university and community figures, who are key to supplying a steady workforce.
A demonstrably friendly fellow, Griffin doesn't even print his formal name -- John Francis -- on his business cards. It's just Buddy, the name his sister bestowed 40-odd years ago.
Despite his optimistic outlook, Griffin, too, must handle up-close encounters at the cultural divide. It separates adapt-to-the-moment capitalists from a Chinese people still straining the strictures of a communist order that guaranteed a minimum wage and prohibited maximum profit.
"Whether we like it or not, our business oscillates. And we oscillate. And we knee-jerk, and we have to rush and hurry it," he said. "I'd say that we're a culture shock to many people. We're a build-to-order company. Today, right now, my bet is that our production guys won't know what they'll be doing tomorrow."
As it happened, on that Monday afternoon in early February, his production guys weren't working. Needed parts hadn't arrived. But they did eventually, and the assembly line ran from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Workers were at it again at 8 the next morning.
That is not normal in China. White-collar workers usually take a two-hour lunch break and often can't be found after 5 p.m. Factories have set shifts with strictly regulated overtime.
Learning to adapt
Dell has adapted, too. It runs a dormitory next to the factory for about 50 key Chinese workers who live too far away to commute and runs a series of buses for employees with homes in Xiamen proper, about 15 miles away.
Dell's use of internal competitions, of individual goals and targets, was adopted here as easily as in Austin or Limerick. In fact, the wall boards charting employees' sales vs. their quotas and their speed in answering help-line phone calls aren't much different from posters the Communist Party and government work units still use to spur workers.
The Chinese set goals for everything from steel production to babies born per village. But Dell's charts are probably more accurately reported.
Chan said he motivates workers by giving them "a sense of the overall plan and the vision," but acknowledged financial compensation is a natural incentive. It helps keep workers working at strange hours and jobs -- such as telephone sales, which are a novelty here.
"We believe in paying our folks higher than the market rate," said Chan.
He agreed the going rate for clerical workers at a Western company in urban China ranges from 1,000-1,500 renminbi a month. It's about the same for manufacturing workers. That equals $120 to $180 a month, or loosely calculated, a range of about 75 cents to $1.20 an hour for a 40-hour work week.
Chan pointed out that Dell China sales personnel do promotion and business development, putting them in a higher category than clerical.
"They get paid a lot more," he said, declining to elaborate.
But cultural glitches have scratched the compensation scheme.
Griffin had to get formal government approval when Michael Dell wanted to offer his Xiamen workers stock options similar to those given elsewhere. He got permission, but Griffin still isn't sure his staff got the point of the 200 shares Dell personally offered each one in November.
"I can tell you we have a concern among ourselves that people don't realize the value of these things," he said. "This is one of the things about shares. When you're not holding them in your hand, when it's a transaction that's happening in your bank, it doesn't quite mean the same to you as when somebody hands you some money or a check."
Executives explained the value of Dell shares twice, but they would go over it again at the next plant meeting, Griffin said. |
