Tamara Giltsoff

June 2012

Jetlag is not easily resolved on a week that is as intense and stimulating as the Leaders’ Quest week. When you mix jetlag with full scheduled days and evenings, questioning and insightful conversations in a new culture thrown together with 20 other diverse and successful business leaders, what you end up with are highly stimulated minds. My mind didn’t want to sleep most of the week. Nor did many of my fellow leaders.

Lack of sleep brings with it a quality of its own: a slightly altered state that sees the world from a different angle. It certainly intensifies things. Sometimes this brought me great clarity and insight on the country I was visiting and the people around me. Sometimes it brought a sense of being totally lost in translation. Long evenings drinking wine, deep in discussion with my fellow Questers, also brought significant learning and new perspective. Many of those late night conversations were invaluable and have led me to quite significant decisions – not least a decision to start-up my own business venture!

One memorable night, I barely slept. Awake from 230am, by 430am I decided to head out for an early morning run through Shanghai inspired by a fellow Quester who’d done the same the night before. I’m a runner. There’s no better way to feel out a strange city than taking to the roads on foot. I didn’t imagine I’d get quite such a glimpse of the people of the city at that time of day.

I took the Yangtze River path that divides the old Shanghai with the new Shanghai. So many people talked of the speed of development of this part of the city, which was only until recently rural land. Along the path I met many fellow runners, some in large groups and mostly men. I got ‘high-fives’ and big smiles as I ran head-on into the people of China. I passed kite flyers, their charge at least a mile-high in the clouds. A certain calm was with these people of the morning who made their art look so simple and easy. I passed t’ai-chi practice. And I witnessed the strength of community and togetherness that little understood outside of China. I was also part of this togetherness, somehow invited in on this special early morning club. The rural views of a bygone Shanghai may have been replaced by a vision of urban development but the gathering of these early-morning people, many of them an older generation, served to remind me that people transcend development and human needs remain.

June 2012

Words get in the way. And they seemed to get in the way often in China. What I mean is that some of the best, most knowing experiences I had were not in conversation but were in observation and experience. Spending a weekend in rural China, outside of Changsha in the Hunan Province, was one of these revealing moments. Yet at the same time nothing was really ever revealed. Things were often not said and questions unanswered.

Throughout our two-day trip into rural China, government officials accompanied us the Leaders’ Quest group of eight. Questions posed to our hosts were sometimes redirected and often never answered. The discussion carried ahead as it needed to carry ahead and much learning came despite this. The plan was never quite clear i.e., where we were heading next or where we were residing for the night. Mystery reigned.

Behind the ‘face’ of China, the mystery and the unanswered questions, is a human China: a deeply complex culture steeped in history and a strong identity. In the countryside I experienced warmth and a pride that was not told in words but was expressed in interactions. I was served the most incredible spread of tasty food, in a farmer’s family home. And before I knew it I was hugging, clicking glasses, smoking cigarettes (I don’t smoke) and posing for pictures with families that welcomed us like we were part old family and part VIPs. I experienced the emotion of a senior government official who had returned to the area having made his wealth to give back in person to the countryside that had served him so well. His connection to the land and the spiritual history surrounding us came alive in his eyes. The presence he held at the lunch table as he fed stories to Jason – our LQ host who in turn fed relevant bits of translated information to us – was quite astounding.

Another official, so overwhelmed by the significance of hosting us, his important English guests, expressed a whole different emotion at the table. His behaviour, largely affected by endless toasts of rice wine, became impassioned and almost child-like in its intensity. He was seeking the attention of his guests by over-adoring each of us – male and female alike! Nothing was said. Nobody flinched. The other officials carried on regardless, ignoring his rather outrageous and courageous behaviour. What we got to experience was the vulnerability behind the ‘face’ of China. The sensitivities that lie within every human were shared in experience versus in words on this rural trip. The questions never answered become irrelevant when the experience reveals all.

June 2012

Education was a timely and critical topic of conversation that came up again and again throughout the visit. China has acknowledged that although its students outweigh the performance of Western students in academic terms, there is a significant gap in learning in their society being felt across the country. The gap is of creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, and innovation skills. The General Manager of a large manufacturing facility, himself MBA educated outside of China, talked candidly about the skills gap that China faces and the manufacturing margins lost to likes of Steve Jobs. He recognised the limitations of the copy fast and brilliantly culture of growth in China.

The government in China is increasing the minimum wage around 15% year-on-year, which is slicing the margins of cheap manufacturing. Manufacturers are being forced to move up the value chain, shedding the cheaper contracts and turning away business and trying to scale up a workforce. But the experience and culture of experiment and innovation is lacking across the country. As is highly skilled manufacturing and leadership talent, according to the General Manager.

Most of the successful and senior leaders we met had at some stage experienced education outside of the country in Western institutions (largely the US and UK according to anecdotes). Families with money are increasingly sending their children abroad to be educated outside the Chinese system and Western schools are setting-up shop across Asia. Dulwich College has opened an academic institution in Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, and Seoul, and is due to have presence in Singapore by 2014, to bring a Western education system into Asia. An incredible sign of times and the appetite for foreign education.

Fascinating to me is that there is such hunger from East to learn creative thinking, innovation and leadership skills from the West. Yet despite the gulf of learning the West requires to fully embrace and understand the emerging powers of the East, in order to thrive in this century, there seems to be much less hunger to learn from West to East.

It was a stroke of luck to be attending the Quest week alongside an education leader from St Paul’s School in London. He had strong views about the need for education to evolve globally and for greater connections in education and learning to be forged globally. For myself the education discussion has left me ever more curious than ever about a sector that is already being quietly disrupted by digital technology and collaborative business models.