intro

Well, I have been wanting to start some blog for a while...most of my desire comes from the experience of having started working in Hong Kong in November 2007, and along came with the cultural differences - mostly in the businss environment.

So here is a few sentence of background of what has led me to my current working life in Hong Kong:

Upon completing my undergrad in 2000, I have worked for various IT companies in Canada and the US. In the early days of the millennium, it was a very glamorous thing to work for a technology/dot-com company, in particular, software companies. I had worked with software developers who really took pride in their work and some 12 hours work day was an industry norm. I guess the same could still be said for guys at Google, well, my salute to the Google guys.

After some five years of seeing a relative fast changing IT industry, I have decided to take a different career path and moved on to completing a MBA degree at the University of Toronto. As fate would have it, I received and accepted an offer from a regional conglomerate in Hong Kong. W Holdings, became my first company after graduating from business school. Like my classmates, I had high hopes to what I could achieve in this company. Although, well, high hope is what most MBA program wants you to have, especially at a tuition of over fifty grand in two years.

So here is how I would describe my typical day in Hong Kong: I wake up at 8:30 (my official office hour is 10am to 6pm), eat my breakfast at home, or on my way to work at Tai Kai Lok (Cafe De Coral). Touch down on my desk at 10 sharp, read the news for 30-60 minutes, and start on cleaning up/replying emails. Although this routine can be scrapped if I have meetings scheduled or my boss wants something really quick. And in Hong Kong, people tend to schedule a lot of meetings and quite a lot of them are ad-hoc. My routine do get scrapped very often.

If things don't go out of wrack, I will have my lunch at 12 sharp. Yes, only 2 hours after my breakfast. This is because foodcourts in business districts get very busy between 12:30 and 2:00. So unless you don't mind waiting in line for 30 minutes (and my observation tells me a lot of HK people actually don't mind), you either have your lunch at 12, or after 2.

I would finish my lunch in about 20 minutes, and sometimes less. I developed this habit since coming to Hong Kong, and I am hoping that this could change once I find my regular lunch-mate. I would head back to the office and start my afternoon work. And again, what happens in the afternoon depends on if there are any meetings scheduled.

I will be blessed if there is a meeting-free afternoon and I can actually get some work done. It is not that I dislike meetings. On the contrary, I think meetings is where men are made. It is the best channel for communication and learning if all relevant people show up on time and are prepared for the subject of discussion. Unforturnately, this is not the case here.

From my 4 months of service, I can't recall one meeting that started with everyone show up on time; 90% of meetings don't have a meeting agenda and most of them are booked with no end time. This, has been the most frustrating part so far in my business encounterments.

Having worked in North America for the last five years, I have learned to respect other's time (although my girlfriend may disagree...), particularly in a business setting. I mean, how does a meeting become productive if there isn't a meeting plan to follow through? And most importantly, I want to look smart in these meetings, I really do...or, well, at least, not dumb. But I can't. I could only be prepared for these meetings if I was given some notice of their subjects in advance. But, I digress, maybe this is a key to sucess in Asia/Hong Kong, you either somehow figure it out or get kicked out. After all, there are westeners in these meetings too, who are educated and worked overseas (so I assume they had some different type of work ethics before coming to work in Hong Kong). So during the process, I assume they probably resisted, adjusted, and finally fitted-in (or gave up).