Contact us at +91 44 4263 6318 | contactus@maxires.com

Doing Business in Asia-Pacific

1. Given the economic growth and blossoming of billionaires in the region, Asia is likely to produce the world’s first trillionaire.

Anonymous. Quoted in Asia, Inc. (September 1996)

 

2. Confronted with a fully developed world market, it is impossible for a country which cuts itself off ad relies on the spontaneous role of its home market to catch up, let alone surpass the economically advanced countries.

Anonymous. Referring to China’s industry and commerce. Beijing Review (November 2-8, 1987)

 

3. Hard work is an Asian compulsion. In Hong Kong, people work hard to make a profit. In Tokyo, they work hard to impress their bosses. But in Singapore, we work hard to compete in the rat race.

Anonymous. Quoted in Chasing Mammon: Travels in the Pursuit of Money (Douglas Kennedy; 1992)

 

4. For the building of a new Japan

Lat’s put our mind and strength together,

Doing our best to promote production,

Sending our goods to the peoples of the world.

Anonymous. Matsushita Electrical Company anthem. Quoted in Iemoto, the Heart of Japan (F. L. K. Hsu; 1975)

 

5. Five Rules for Doing Business in China:

  1. Think small-focus on one region at a time.
  2. Skip the manager, talk to the clerk.
  3. Study the side streets.
  4. Get the goods to market.
  5. Above all be flexible.

Anonymous. Quoted in New York Times Magazine (February 18, 1996)

 

6. Live together like brothers and do business like strangers.

Anonymous. Arab proverb.

 

7. Experience has shown us that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence.

Chester Alan Arthur (1829-86) U.S. president, Message to the Senate (April 4, 1882)

 

8. Bribes, backhanders and favours for “cronies” are commonplace in business and government life in Southeast Asia.

James Batholomew (b.1950) British writer. The World’s Richest Man: The Sultan of Brunei (1989)

 

9. The trade of the East has always been the richest jewel in the diadem of commerce. All nations, in all ages, have sought it; and those which obtained it, or even a share of it, attained the highest degree of opulence, refinement, and power.

Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) U.S. politician. Speech in the Senate (1847)

 

10. A company’s reputation does not necessarily follow it into India, which has been a closed market for so long that established global brands have no meaning for the Indian consumer.

Rajiv Desai, Indian journalist and public relations executive. Indian Business Culture (1999)

 

11. Indian businesses can be critical as partners at the time international firms are seeking to enter India.

Rajiv Desai, Indian journalist and public relations executive. Indian Business Culture (1999)

 

12. Indian businesses often appear to be weak partners…however, they are formidable opponents who can subvert the best-laid plans of international firms.

Rajiv Desai, Indian journalist and public relations executive. Indian Business Culture (1999)

 

13. Swadeshi is the doctrine that advocates restrictions on foreign investment with a view to protecting Indian business interests against those of International firms.

Rajiv Desai, Indian journalist and public relations executive. Indian Business Culture (1999)

 

14. This road of industrialization was not planned in advance by theoreticians. Rather, it has been created by the peasants on the basis of their experience in real life.

Fei Xiaotong (b.1910) Chinese social anthropologist. Comparing China’s industrialization favorably to that of the West, where modern industry had grown at the expense of the countryside. Beijing Review (1985), no. 21

 

15. In Japan, the best and brightest young people aspire to become bureaucrats, not businessmen, and there is intense competition for bureaucratic jobs.

Francis Fukuyama (b.1952) U.S. economist and writer. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995)

 

16. Japan’s …rapid rise from a predominantly agricultural society to a modern industrial power following the Meji Restoration in 1868 is closely associated with the growth of the zaibatsu, the huge family-owned conglomerates like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo.

Francis Fukuyama (b.1952) U.S. economist and writer. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995)

 

17. Never visit a Japanese company without tons of business cards. Basically, no “meshi” (name cards) means no existence for you on this earth.

Mark Gauthier, U.S. travel writer. Making It in Japan: Work, Life, Leisure and Beyond (1993)

 

18. Never “tell it like it is” in company meetings. Speaking your mind and gushing out frank statements displays immaturity and is bad for group harmony.

Mark Gauthier, U.S. travel writer. Making It in Japan: Work, Life, Leisure and Beyond (1993)

 

19. Acts of marketing insanity such as the U.S. firm that invested heavily in a campaign to sell cake mix to the Japanese-in profound and dismal ignorance of the fact that hardly any homes in Japan have ones.

Robert Heller (b.1932) British management writer. The Supermarketers (1987)

 

20. There is nothing Japan really wants to buy from foreign countries except, possibly, neckties with unusual designs.

Yoshihiro Inayama (1904-87) Japanese business executive. Quoted in “Sayings of the Week,” Sydney Morning Herald (August 3, 1985)

 

21. Japan’s strength and weakness-both-are its sense of national distinctiveness and superiority. This stimulates the Japanese to high levels of performance, but it also makes it hard them to work with others as equal partners.

David S. Landes (b.1924) U.S. economic historian. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998)

 

22. Old Asian commercial networks, for all their wealth and experience, yielded the juiciest transactions to foreign agency houses, and India’s economic development from the late eighteenth century came to be shaped more by British imperial policy than by indigenous initiative.

David S. Landes (b.1924) U.S. economic historian. Referring to the legacy of such exploitative trading companies as the British East India Company. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998)

 

23. For us the core of management is the art of mobilizing and putting together the intellectual resources of all employees in the firm.

Konosuke Matsushita (1894-1989) Japanese electronics executive, entrepreneur, and inventor. Speaking to a visiting delegation of Western business people. Speech (May 1979)

 

24. The Japanese constantly pare down and reduce the complexity of products and ideas to the barest minimum…The influence of Zen and haiku poetry are often evident in the simplicity and utility of Japanese designs.

Akio Morita (1921-99) Japanese business executive. Made in Japan (1986)

 

25. Industry in India is not what industry is said to be in other parts of the world. It has its horrors; but…it does not dehumanize…Men handling new machines, exercising technical skills that to them are new, can also discover themselves as men, as individuals.

  1. S. Naipaul (b.1932) Trinidadian writer and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

 

26. Old India requires few tools, few skills, and many hands.

  1. S. Naipaul (b.1932) Trinidadian writer and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

 

27. Most Japanese corporations lack even an approximation of an organization chart.

Kenichi Ohmae (b.1943) Japanese management consultant and theorist. “The Myth and Reality of the Japanese Corporation,” Chief Executive (Summer 1981)

 

28. I’m not going to rest until we’re shipping cars to Japan.

  1. Ross Perot (b.1930) U.S. entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and politician. Forbes (1986)

 

29. Japan is notoriously consensus oriented, and companies have strong tendency to mediate differences among individuals rather than accentuate them. Strategy, on the other hand, requires hard choices.

Michael Porter (b. 1947) U.S. strategist. Harvard Business Review (November-December 1996)

 

30. If England and France print linens with great elegance; if so many stuffs, formerly unknown in our climates, now employ our best artists, are we not indebted to India for all these advantages?

Guillaume Raynal (1713-96) French historian and philosopher. The Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1776), vol. 2

 

31. In Sydney, you’re in Asia, but not of Asia. Basing your Asian operations in Sydney is like basing your American operations in Rio.

Donald Saunders, Australian business executive. Asia Inc. (December 1996)

 

32. Chinese managers and employees perceive that they have as many problems with foreign business representatives as the other way around.

Jan Selmer (b.1942) Swedish academic and author. International Management in China: Cross-cultural Issues (Jan Selmer, ed.; 1998)

 

33. I founded Wang Laboratories…to show that Chinese could excel at things other than running laundries and restaurants.

An Wang (1920-90) U.S. entrepreneur, business executive, electrical engineer and founder of Wang Laboratories. Boston Magazine (December 1986)

 

34. It is not by force and violence that His Majesty intends to establish a commercial intercourse between his subjects and China; but by other conciliatory measures so strongly inculcated in all the instructions which you have received.

Arthur Wellesley Wellington (1769-1852) British general and statesman. Letter to Lord Napier (February 2, 1835)

 

35. Foreign investing companies operating in China often face a choice between maintaining their standard of knowledge and expertise base with local Chinese partners.

Yanni Yan (b.1958) Chinese business author and academic. “Managerial and Organization-Learning in Chinese Firms,” China’s Managerial Revolution (Malcolm Warner, ed.; 1999)