What GFC?

I had one of those weeks that started in Hong Kong and will end at the beach. Not bad, heh?

So here is what I am thinking. It’s Friday. Our editor has taken himself – and his good wife – off to the Grand Hyatt for a romantic long weekend. The poor bugger is a tragic Pies supporter and thought the footy would be done and dusted. Now he can’t check the copy, so I will rush through his brief to write about the collapse of the magazine Notebook (yes it’s sad, they didn’t move with the times, costs were too high, the internet is killing magazines and even intelligent women like celebrity trash) and thought I might share with you a few things I learnt this week.

Now if you ever want a shot in the arm or a reality check, have a drink, hop on the midnight flight to Hong Kong, wake up at 8am and by 9am you are drinking something that vaguely resembles coffee in one of the world’s most interesting cities.

This place is on some kind of perpetual high. I was over there looking at an interesting business opportunity. I quickly found that the locals (don’t call them Asian) seem to share a lot of characteristics with entrepreneurs. For starters they are born optimists. Business is hard so they are going to focus on the positive. Putting my journalist hat on, I asked one well educated local at a major bank whether she ever got sick of all the “go, go, go” hype and propaganda in the media. Our background is Confucius, she says, and life is hard, she says. We don’t really want to know what is happening. We want to be positive and look to the future. Chairman Mao would be proud, I thought as I traipsed off to my next meeting.

There, I made the mistake of talking about the GFC. A local picked me up. Don’t talk about the GFC in Hong Kong, he said. Why not, I asked? It means something else, he told me. It means Global Financial Centre which is how Dubai is marketing itself in Hong Kong.

Next meeting. And I was told again: don’t talk about the GFC in Hong Kong. But there was no mention of Dubai, this time. “The GFC is bullshit,” this local said. “Australians talk bullshit. In Asia there was no crisis. In Australia there was no crisis. Yet every Aussie I meet talks about the GFC. So why do the Aussies go on and on about this crisis when their future is so positive and China is buying all their resources?”

The underlying context? Who cares about the rest of the world when our neck of the woods is thriving? Got to love their focus.

Another thing I learnt this week was at a forum held by PwC on how to retain staff. Now there was lots of good advice given by the panel. But I loved this nugget. We ask our clients how they are going to measure our success. But do we tell our staff what real success looks like? We might give them KPIs but they only go so far. Do we actually outline to them the strategy so they can show initiative and take their role further than the KPIs? So that in a year’s time at the next performance review it is clear to themselves and you that they have been a success?
One of the ways to do this, it was suggested, was getting the employee to outline what success for your business look like in a year’s time and how they fit into that.
It’s a big ask and I think a lot of entrepreneurs would have trouble answering that themselves. But I am going to give it a go.

And now for the beach. It has been a bitterly cold winter in Melbourne, so cold all the wattles have flowered months late which is a nice spring surprise. But this Sunday it is going to be 23 degrees! It is icy pole weather and I intend to head to the beach and show my bare white unkept toes to the sun.

Have a great weekend.