A.Connector

China Quake relief/News

China Vortex put together a few links for those interested in news about and/or are interested in donating to help the victims of the Sichuan Wenchang earthquake of May 12 tragedy.

* Danwei earthquake updates
* Shanghaiist earthquake coverage
* MSNBC earthquake coverage
* BBC earthquake coverage
* Guardian earthquake coverage
* Youtube video earthquake coverage
* Tianya public forum
* Tudou video earthquake coverage
* QQ news center
* Sohu news center
* Sina news center
* CNReviews 24+ ways to give
* China Esquire earthquake update news and donation information

Technorati Tags: bbc, China, cnreviews, danwei, donations, earthquake, guardian, hyperlinks, links, msnbc, news, qq, redcross, shanghaiist, sina, sohu, tianya, tudou, video, youtube

Yang, Yahoo & Chinese business custom

Jerry Yang and Yahoo have been in the tech news a lot lately due having his “Texas Hold ‘Em” style bluff called by Miscrosoft’s Steve Ballmer. Sure it’s easy to second guess Jerry, and understand why shareholders would be really pissed at him in this world of , “Hey you made me lots of money 7 minutes ago but what have you done for me lately?” thinking and ethics. Yang’s biggest sin is being faithful to his cultural DNA. He is of Chinese descent. The Chinese are almost exclusively family businesses and are run like a family not like a company. Hence, there is a ton of emotion and passion tied-up in them. It’s very hard to distance one’s self from one’s company under the Chinese model way since they are so intertwined.

I am a small business owner myself and can empathize with Yang completely on this point. Sadly, I don’t have the comfort factor of hundreds of millions of dollars at my disposal to walk away gracefully and do something else. That’s the point though-Jerry is probably more focused on the intertwined identity of Yahoo/yang more than the financials. He has a lot to be proud of and his bruised ego will heal. Yahoo once a disruptor and trend setter has become a poorly managed behemoth. Time once again for Wall Street to devour what it has created.

Sometimes a great notion

There are times in business where you can still be pleasantly surprised even after you’ve mentally prepared yourself to bang your head against the wall in resignation to the unpleasant reality that nobody is listening to you or cares about what you have to say. in this case it’s a fairly large Taiwan-owned tire company that does a small tire for our customers sporting goods products. We have been doing business with them for the better part of 12 years. They recently decided to shift small tire production to one of their China factories. The only problem is that China has gotten smarter and smarter over the last few years and doesn’t let foreign-owned companies just bring anything they want into China-in this case the existing tooling for our tires! So I wasn’t entirely surprised when my suppliers beautiful dream to shift production over there hit a snag. What did trouble me was when I got a sample from their China factory that was lighter in weight(less material/thinner) which my customer of course reacted to as being unacceptable.

Lo and behold I just got an e-mail showing a very responsible attitude in the form of a notice that they will be running this batch at the Taiwan factory until they get their China line problems sorted out. This makes me a happy camper and enables me to share some reassuring news to an excellent long term customer. Rock on!