Shanghai

Wow, I am learning a lot. I hope that you don't mind that my emails or telephone conversations with you are so random...

The Chinese seem very excited for the Olympics aka their "coming out party". I heard that they have spent 60,000,000,000 US dollars preparing for the games so far...more than five times the amount of the next biggest Olympics!

Tuesday before we left for Shanghai, a BYU professor of global supply chain management came and lectured our class about "economic globalization". There were multiple ideas that I took away from his lecture, but the one that I liked most was: The symptoms of pride, and the symptoms of insecurity are often very similar, but the cure for the two is different. We need to make sure that we don't try to fix pride if insecurity is the real issue.

In preparing for a talk that I will be giving this Sunday, I found a quote that I really like by President Monson: "Youth need fewer critics and more models". I've also had some nice conversations regarding parenting with some of my classmates, I am sure that I will benefit from their added perspectives.

After class on Tuesday we walked to a Metro Station in Nanjing and rode the Metro to the local train station. There we boarded a really nice high-speed train to Shanghai. I think that I enjoyed that train ride more than any other transportation we have taken so far. The ride was smooth, quiet, and relatively short. (2.5 Hours) We then got on the Shanghai metro and rode it to our hotel downtown. Total cost for the trip was fourteen dollars. I am getting really excited for the Front Runner when I get back to Utah, I think I'm going to sell my car and get a bike!

Tuesday night we walked down to the waterfront in Shanghai, but a lot of the buildings weren't lit up because of the government's official three day mourning period for the Earthquake in the Sichuan province. The view was still pretty and we had a good time that night shopping and eating.

Wednesday we went to Hewlett-Packard Shanghai, and had a long Q&A session with a Chinese BYU alumni who is working there. He told us that for entry level positions, develpment opportunity is much more important than salary. He also helped to paint a picture for us of the Chinese market, which is booming. He told us that we shouldn't worry about the blue-collar jobs that are being exported to China, but rather focus on continuing to lead innovation and bleeding edge technology. I'm getting the feeling over here that all the "grunt work" that is able to be digitized will be shipped out of the US before we know it. I also bet that China still has ten or twenty years before they are going to start competing with us in innovation. The alumni said that China is a very fast learner, and that it has aspirations to develop it's own computer processors, cars, and even airplanes.

Later that day, we toured Shanghai GM, which is a 50/50 merger between a big Chinese car company and our own General Motors. We were met by an American BYU alumni who helped us to realize the current success of GM in China and the huge potential of the market for cars. There is a growing market here for the humble to the Escalade and beyond. Interesting fact: Buick is viewed by the Chinese as being very cool. We got to tour one of the car factories, which was fascinating.

The guy who had introduced the company had worked for Microsoft in Thailand for a while, trying to work with the software used for medical tourism. He is a former MTC teacher, so when I got to take him aside, and ask him for suggestions for a career, he suggested: "Technical Training in Thailand".

Today we toured two more very prosperous companies over here: QSMC which is the manufacturing division of Quanta (they make aprox one out of every three laptops in the world), and ACRD the Research and Develpment division of Autodesk (a very huge engineering software company).

At Quanta, we got to watch the assembly line for an HP laptop, it was fascinating, but I am so glad that I don't work there...the people were doing some of the most monotonous tasks you can imagine, such as applying 1,500 stickers an hour to parts. The employees work there 12 hours a day for about $250 a month.

A couple years ago I interviewed my former boss, Rich Moore, for my career development class. The main thing that I remember from that interview, is that many of the new college graduates are coming to the workforce with a sense of entitlement. They expect to start out making lots of money and to not get their hands dirty. His theory was that respect/trust needed to be earned. Today, I heard the same thing from the Vice President of ACRD. The VP also said that because of China's one child policy, lots of the kids coming into the workforce are spoiled, which hurts them a lot in the workplace. I am realizing that starting out doing relatively humble jobs and doing them well could be a big help to my career in the long run.

We have been encouraged to learn Chinese culture by staying away from the tourist spots, and talking to as many Chinese as we can. In that spirit, today four of us opted not to take our chartered bus back to the hotel, but rather to figure out our own way home. Three hours later we walked up to the hotel in good spirits and kind of proud of ourselves.