Managing the Dragon: How I'm Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China

Managing the Dragon: How I'm Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China

by Jack Perkowski
Managing the Dragon: How I'm Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China

Managing the Dragon: How I'm Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China

by Jack Perkowski

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Overview

The first book by a westerner who built a company in China from scratch

The emergence of China as a world economic power is one of the biggest stories of our time. Every business that intends to be an important part of the fast-changing global economy needs to know how to play the game in China. Who better to be your guide than Jack Perkowski, the pioneer who went to China in the early 1990s. Equipped with just a concept, he built a company step-by-step from the ground up–ASIMCO Technologies–that became a major player in China’s fast-growing automotive business.

Perkowski’s story is as rich, involving, and improbable as those of nineteenth-century titans such as Rockefeller and Carnegie or of twentieth-century ones like Michael Dell and Bill Gates, but with one obvious difference: They and others built their companies when America was emerging or dominant. Perkowski built his at the dawn of the Chinese century.

Perkowski’s insights about the challenges and potential of western involvement in today’s great Chinese expansion–gained on the ground in China itself over the past fifteen years–are of inestimable value and relevance to us all. For instance:

• The good news about China: Everything is possible. The bad news: Nothing is easy.
• To build a business in China, you must develop a local management team–avoiding both former bureaucrats of the state-run enterprises and the country’s new breed of wildcat entrepreneurs.
• You must learn the real reason why China is able to produce goods so cheaply.
• Forget your notions about the Chinese economy being rigidly controlled by Beijing–it is, in fact, highly decentralized and locally driven. As the Chinese say, “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.”

Perkowski tells his story with clarity, lots of humor, and a gripping sense of adventure. He takes us along on his own version of the Long March, when he visited two factories a day for nine months, hitting every province, going through endless rounds of dinners and the inevitable drinking games, and eating what seemed like every part of every animal. He vividly describes what it’s like to be a westerner living and working in China and the dramatic transformation he’s seen in the country, from a place left behind by the modern world to a place where a new world is being born.

Filled with hard-nosed lessons for anyone with ambitions of breaking into the Chinese market, and a rich source of practical wisdom about the realities of China today, Managing the Dragon answers the questions people ask Perkowski most often about his unique experience, as well as those they never think of asking–but should.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307409843
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/18/2008
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 336
File size: 477 KB

About the Author

JACK PERKOWSKI was a working-class kid from western Pennsylvania who got a football scholarship to Yale and went on to a successful career as an investment banker for Paine Webber. After twenty years on Wall Street, he asked himself whether he had the guts to do something completely different. He chucked his New York City lifestyle and bet the farm on China at a time when it was seen as an emerging economy, not the powerhouse it is today. He is now chairman and CEO of ASIMCO Technologies, among China’s largest automobile components makers, with twelve thousand employees in seventeen plants in eight provinces.

Table of Contents

Introduction     1
"Who Is Jack Perkowski?"     11
Stay in New York or Move to Hong Kong?     34
A Blank-Sheet Approach to China     57
One Hundred Factories in Forty Cities     75
Eating, Drinking, and Sleeping on the Long March     92
Developing Our New China Management Strategy     105
Closing China's Management Gap     122
Guerrilla Warfare in Anhui     139
A Peaceful Transition in Langfang     160
An Election in Mao's Backyard     179
Building for the Long Term     193
Decentralization and China's Local Governments     205
China's Different Cost Perspective     221
China's Two Markets     235
China's Technology Gap     255
Establishing a Business in China     271
Challenges of Running a Business in China Today     290
"Where Is It All Headed?"     303
Acknowledgments     311
Index     315
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