Chinese Charm School
HANGZHOU, China -- Chen Xi Guo, owner of the Zhejiang Dongfeng machinery factory, recently spent three days inside a classroom listening to talks on leadership and the importance of building client relationships. The former factory hand pondered worksheets instructing him how to sprinkle his e-mails with English phrases like "How are you?" "It was great to hear from you" and "Can we work together?"
For Mr. Chen, who hails from the city of Wenzhou in central China, the courses were a small revelation. No longer, he vowed, would his business e-mails consist only of a litany of prices and dates, and he promised to spend more time chitchatting with clients. "I will work hard to be nicer," says the 47-year-old Mr. Chen, whose small company makes machines that pack items such as sugar sachets.
The seminar is the brainchild of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.com, an Internet company begun here in 1999 that specializes in introducing Chinese manufacturers of everything from blue jeans to bed frames to global buyers. By working through the Alibaba Web site, customers from the U.S. and Europe, who previously had to scout for goods through layers of middlemen and trading companies, now go straight to the source.
But Mr. Ma, who named his company after Ali Baba of "The Thousand and One Nights" to connote riches, found that just linking buyer and seller wasn't enough. A large cultural chasm still loomed. Chinese factory owners have become adept at churning out massive quantities of goods at ever-cheaper prices. But when it comes to the basic protocol of international trade, many of them lack the manners, sophistication and experience to interact with customers halfway around the world.
Students at an Alibaba seminar exercise during a break in learning Western business etiquette.
Mr. Chen, for example, once sent some of his machinery to a customer in Malaysia, but wrote the address only in Chinese script. It never arrived. On another occasion, he shipped Chinese electric plugs to Australia, not knowing that the country had different sockets.
Says Mr. Ma: "Chinese businessmen are shrewd, but they need to learn to be more polished." That was evident to him last year when he attended the World Economic Forum in Beijing. He was "depressed," he says, by the way some local businessmen behaved in business situations. Many smoked constantly and held loud cellphone conversations, even during meetings. In other forums, held in Davos and Singapore, "nobody behaved like that," Mr. Ma says.
While multinational companies often hold training courses for local Chinese staff to accustom them to Western-style management, there are few options for small-scale firms, says Chris Barclay, chief executive of Guangzhou-based management-training company Altec, whose clients include Nike Inc. "There's a huge crying need for it," says Mr. Barclay.
Mr. Ma decided that Chinese factory owners really needed their own version of Miss Manners, someone to guide them through unfamiliar social terrain. Over the past year, Alibaba has trained more than 5,000 small-scale business owners in everything from how to write a polite business letter to Western table manners.
Cellphones are banned in Alibaba's classrooms. So are cigarettes -- a common enough practice in the West, but difficult to enforce in China, where 62% of the male population smoke.
Course trainer Jane Wang explains to a classroom packed with 30 managers the importance of replying to e-mail queries promptly. She even encourages them to send postcards and family snapshots to clients. It helps build a warm relationship, she explains. Students are supplied with booklets and CD-ROMs with bilingual samples of polite business letters.
"We not only teach them how to do business," says Ms. Wang, "we teach them how to be charming."
Porter Erisman, a Colorado native who is the company's vice president for marketing, shows attendees Western sites such as Google, which have a more straightforward design than similar Chinese sites such as Sina.com and Sohu.com. He tells the class to avoid the local taste for bright colors, cartoon icons and flickering pop-ups when designing their own Web sites. "Westerners don't like it," explains Mr. Erisman.
Alibaba staff members are regularly surprised by how even basic issues can end up vexing their customers. Savio Kwan, Alibaba's chief operations officer, remembers receiving a complaint from a customer who had received no orders even after listing on Alibaba. After investigating, he says, he discovered that the customer responded to international e-mails only once every three months -- when his English-speaking son returned from college. "We explained to him he needs to do it immediately," says Mr. Kwan. Alibaba subsequently helped the customer find a translator to reply to his e-mails.
Alibaba offers its courses as an extra service to top-tier subscribers, who pay $5,000 or more to be listed on the site. These services help Alibaba achieve its renewal target of 70%.
Alibaba, which received $25 million in total from Softbank Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Investor AB four years ago, had been running at a loss for three years until it started charging its suppliers to list online in 2002. At the end of fiscal year 2002, Alibaba was still unprofitable by generally accepted accounting principles, but made $1 above expenses, according to Chief Financial Officer Joe Tsai. The company also laid off a substantial portion of its overseas staff and instituted other cost-cutting measures, such as stopping free dinner services for its Hangzhou staff. In 2003, the company made $12 million profit, says Mr. Ma.
While the trading Web site remains Alibaba's core business, the company plans to turn its training courses into something more than just an extra frill for important customers. Mr. Ma is already laying plans to open the Alibaba Institute, which would offer courses on management and business etiquette for small manufacturers.
中国企业家入读“魅力培训学校”
浙江东风机械厂(Zhejiang Dongfeng)的老板陈希国(Chen Xiguo，音译)最近上了三天的课，听讲关于领导才能以及培养客户关系重要性的培训。从前是工人的陈希国聚精会神地研究著一份工作表。这是一份指导如何在电子邮件中插入“How are you?”（你好么？）、“It was great to hear from you”（很高兴收到您的来信。）以及“Can we work together?”（我们能否合作？）等短语的工作表。
对于浙江温州的陈希国来说，这个课程却有一定的启示作用。47岁的陈希国下定决心，决不再让冗长的报价和日期成为他商务电子邮件的全部内容，他表示，今后将花费更多的时间与客户聊天。
陈希国的工厂从事包装机的生产。他说，“我将努力让自己更进一步。”这个讲座的创意来自于阿里巴巴(Alibaba.com)的创始人马云(Jack Ma)，阿里巴巴是1999年创立的一家互联网公司，公司名称取自《一千零一夜》中阿里巴巴的故事，主要从事将中国制造商介绍给国际买家的业务。借助阿里巴巴网站，美国和欧洲客户可以直接找到供货方，而以前他们则需要透过重重中间商和贸易公司来寻找所需货物。
但是马云很快发现只将买卖双方联系在一起还不够。一道巨大的文化鸿沟依然存在。中国工厂的老板对于以甚低价格大量出售货物这种交易模式驾轻就熟。但许多人缺乏与全球客户交流的礼仪、必要技巧和经验，而这些是国际贸易的一些基本要素。
拿陈希国来说，有一次他将部分设备运往马来西亚的一个客户，但是只用中文书写了交付地址。这批货物最后没能到达客户的手中。另外有一次，他向澳大利亚运送一批电源插头，但是他却不知道澳大利亚使用不同类型的插座。
马云说，“中国商人很精明，但是他们需要更加干练。”他去年参加在北京举行的世界经济论坛(World Economic Forum)时，对此他有深刻的感受。他说，当时他对一些中国商人在商务场合的举止感到“沮丧万分”。许多人不断地吸烟，甚至在会议过程中旁若无人地打电话。马云说，在达沃斯和新加坡举办的其他论坛中，“没有人会做出这样的举动。”
中国商人以前几乎没有机会练习商业礼仪。今天许多小型企业的老板都是成长于文化大革命期间，在国有企业工作。“企业家”文化受到压制。没有多少人经常出游外地。大多数人对英文一窍不通。
广州管理培训公司Altec的首席执行长克里斯?巴克莱(Chris Barclay)说，跨国公司经常为中国员工举办培训课程，帮助他们适应西方式的管理，但小型企业却没有这样的机会。他说，小型企业对这方面的需求非常强烈。Altec的客户包括耐克公司(Nike Inc.)、朗讯科技公司(Lucent Technologies Inc.)等。
马云认为，中国工厂老板需要自己的一套礼仪培训，以让他们熟悉这一对他们来说仍很陌生的领域。在过去一年，阿里巴巴培训了超过5,000名小型企业主，培训内容从如何写一封礼貌的商业信函到恰当的餐桌礼仪无所不包。
这些企业正迅速发展成为中国经济的中坚力量。据中国统计局(China's Department of Statistics)称，中小型企业贡献了全国出口总额的60%，税收收入占全国的近一半。
在阿里巴巴的课堂上禁止使用手机，同时还禁止吸烟，这在西方是很普通的惯例，但是在中国执行起来却很难。在中国，62%的男性吸烟。
培训师Jane Wang向教室中30名经理解释及时回复电子邮件的重要性。她甚至鼓励他们将贺卡和家庭合影照发给客户。她解释道，这有助于建立融洽的关系。学员们获得了小册子和电脑光盘，内有中英文的礼貌商业信函范本。
Wang说，“我们不仅仅教他们如何做生意，同时还教他们如何变得富有魅力。”来自美国科罗拉多州的波特?埃里森曼(Porter Erisman)是该公司的营销副总裁，他向学员们演示了Google等一些西方网站，这些网站的设计比新浪(Sina.com)和搜狐(Sohu.com)等中国同类网站要简单明了的多。他对学员们说，在设计他们自己的网站时，要避免使用中国网站普遍使用的明亮颜色、卡通图像以及闪动的弹出窗口等等。Erisman解释说，西方人不喜欢这样的东西。
经常让阿里巴巴员工感到吃惊的是，一些非常基本的问题会让他们的客户无可适从。阿里巴巴首席营运长Savio Kwan回忆道，一次一名客户向他抱怨，参加阿里巴巴的培训后，他仍然没有收到订单。Kwan在调查后说，他发现这个客户每三个月才回复一次国际客户的邮件－－他上大学会讲英文的儿子每三个月返家一次。Kwan说，“我们向他解释，他需要立即回复邮件。”阿里巴巴随后帮助该客户找到一名翻译回复他的邮件。
阿里巴巴将此课程作为其网站高级订户的一种额外服务，高级订户是指那些支付5,000美元或更高金额将公司名字列在网站之上的订户。Kwan说，这些服务帮助阿里巴巴实现了其70%续签率的目标，这一目标对该公司能否持续刚刚取得赢利至关重要。
阿里巴巴4年前从软库公司(Softbank Corp.)、高盛集团(Godlman Sachs Group Inc.)以及Investor AB共获得了2,500万美元的投资，但此后3年一直处于亏损状态，这种情形直到2002年该公司开始对在网站上列名的供货公司收取费用才得以改变。截至2002财年年底，按照美国公认会计准则该公司仍然亏损。但首席财务长Joe Tsai称，该公司当年收入较支出高出1美元。
