Crossing Cultures

Meet two alums who used their American education to bridge cultures and build successful businesses in Asia. And find out how you can emulate them—even if you skipped study abroad.

By Bari Walsh

THE WORLD MAY BE GETTING SMALLER, but the cultural gaffes that businesses make when trying to navigate the global economy can still be amusingly large. There’s the American CEO who chooses as his in-country manager the person who speaks the best English—a qualification that may be irrelevant on a daily basis. There’s the international partnership that sours when supposedly shared assumptions turn out to be wholly at odds: One player wanted profitability and is disappointed; the other wanted new knowledge or new technology and is perfectly content.

Today, barriers between businesses, customers, and countries are lower than ever, and an emerging set of common standards has created more opportunities to do business almost anywhere. And yet vast differences in social norms and management philosophies percolate below the surface, putting a premium on cultural fluency—and the managers who have it.

Executives who develop the tools to be bridge builders—moving easily between cultures and countries—are increasingly valuable in today’s marketplace, says George Chen (BSBA’72), chairman and CEO of Hong Kong–based China Distribution & Logistics Ltd. Chen is one of those bridge builders, riding the cross-cultural currents to launch and run successful, globally oriented businesses in America and in Asia. For Chen and the many other international students who study at Boston University and then take their knowledge back home, the perspectives they gain from immersing themselves in American business norms and in Questrom’s globally diverse classrooms can yield enormous opportunities.

For decades, BU has enjoyed a reputation as a university that is especially welcoming to international students. Questrom’s international population has grown steadily; in 2014, students representing 24 countries accounted for almost 40 percent of the incoming MBA and MS classes. Classrooms are hot spots for connection and career building, as well as for an exchange of global perspectives. “I can pick one student from one side of the world, one student from the other side of the world, and let them learn from each other,” says Senior Lecturer Yoo Taek Lee, an expert in global supply chain management who leads an Asian Field Seminar for his MBA students.

International voices are often reticent at first, adjusting to the US classroom and its freewheeling, mostly nonhierarchical norms. But as they open themselves to what Elaine Sullivan, director of student engagement at Questrom’s Feld Career Center, calls “the ongoing exchange of ideas,” they lose their shyness. “They get comfortable speaking up and expressing an opinion, and they leave here with more confidence about being who they are.”

In the process, international students gain something intangible, something of lasting value: “They enlarge their scope and the way they view the world,” Lee says. It’s a journey that helps them build common cause with classmates from around the world while preserving knowledge of their own society’s practices and operational strengths.

That broader perspective is one of the key takeaways of the Questrom experience, as Chen realized early on. By the time he graduated, he had already figured out that he liked sales and marketing, having mastered the art of the hard sell as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman during his undergraduate days at BU. And from his experience as a hospital janitor making “something like $2 an hour,” he had also gained an equally important understanding of what he didn’t want to do. A born entrepreneur, Chen realized that he could develop a vast new US market for his father’s Hong Kong travel agency, and he ultimately built one of America’s largest travel wholesale companies, C. L. Thomson, which he ran until 1992.

As China began to emerge as an economic powerhouse, Chen saw an opportunity to expand his role as an East-West bridge builder. He moved back to Hong Kong and shifted his focus to fast-moving consumer goods, heading two large distributors before founding CDL, now one of the largest food and beverage distribution companies in China. Chen is also the major shareholder in a company set to enter the high-end bottled water market in the United States with a product called 5100 Tibet, sourced from a glacier spring high in the mountains of Tibet.

One of the things he gained from BU was an appreciation for how US norms could help him in global settings that are superficially quite different. “In the American education system, people are more open, and that openness is a very good American trait. Through openness, you can have honest discussion,” Chen says. “In the Asian culture, because of its hierarchical structure, people tend to hold their tongues. But people feel they can talk to me more, because I’m more open myself. So they let go of some of those self-imposed constraints.”

But success in global markets comes not so much from trying to change local norms as from accommodating them in savvy ways, which entails building strong networks, Chen says—another key takeaway of his US experience.

“You’ve got to know what you’re good at, and you’ve got to know what you’re weak at. As Americans, we are weak at knowing China, we’re weak at the language, and we’re really weak at understanding the infrastructure and how things work there. So finding the right partners overseas is crucial,” he says. “If you have such a cultural gap that people feel you’re naïve, you’re almost bound to fail. Creating that network and that friendship and that bond with the right partners is key. You have to find someone you really trust and who’s really good—not just someone who speaks English.”

When Michael Lee (MBA’86) returned to Hong Kong after BU and two years of work in the United States, he was struck by the fact that American and Asian businesses often have philosophical differences that trickle down to the operational level. “In the US, the focus for businesses is how to create shareholder value. But in Asia, many businesses are family businesses, managed by generation after generation, and there are legacy issues that may affect how companies are run,” says Lee, a director at Oxer Limited and at HKEx, the Hong Kong stock exchange, among other financial leadership roles. “The focus of family-controlled companies is different. Profitability is obviously important, but you have to look at legacy, as well.”

Employees stay put for decades, Lee says, and their dedication is valued by the managing families, despite any shortcomings in their performance. “Fresh off my MBA program and armed with all these management theories, I thought that if a company’s major objective is to create value, then obviously you’d want the best people running it,” Lee says. “So I found it a bit odd.”

Lee says the most significant lesson of his US education—one he has carried with him into all his leadership roles in Hong Kong—is the importance of instituting good governance and a robust sense of ethics into even the most long-standing legacy businesses. “If good governance is established, a company can change in terms of its businesses, or its products, but there won’t be any messy surprises. You create a culture that will enable employees to work diligently, but at the same time they know what the gray areas are that they shouldn’t be treading over.”

Governance is now a key word in Asia, Lee says, certainly in terms of investors. He is moved to instill the same good governance in his extensive philanthropic work, helping the nonprofits he supports operate more efficiently and attract new donors.

Businesses across Asia, Lee says, have made a shift toward transparency in recent years, and Asian governments are moving to ensure that regulatory bodies align themselves with international standards. So it’s easier to do business on a structural level, he says. But the corporate landscape is littered with high-profile failures of partnerships between Western and Asian companies, and “unless you understand the culture and understand the objectives, things can go very wrong,” he says. “Having a US education enables me to understand Western culture and how US businesses are run. Having gone through the MBA program, I understand why decisions are made and where the focus is, which enables me to at least communicate with Western counterparts.”

Having a more nuanced appreciation of how companies around the world operate could help US businesses, Lee adds. “I think Hong Kong businesses are very versatile,” he says. “With Hong Kong being an international, cosmopolitan city, we deal with businesses around the world, and we really understand that different countries have different cultures and different emphases. American businesses may be very successful, but they tend to have one focus: creating shareholder value. If short-term profitability is one of the major objectives, then sometimes the long-term value equation can suffer.”

Chen echoes the notion that American businesses could benefit by adopting a more flexible, less “America-centric” approach. He thinks America’s multiculturalism will help it lead in new ideas and new technologies, but that it should look outward and recognize the new ground rules. “Americans and Europeans have so many years of prosperity that our [American] way of life has become very important to us, our quality of life,” he says, pointing to in-demand benefits like flexible work schedules or longer parental leaves. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we must understand that the competition around the world is leapfrogging and catching up.”