I mentioned before that I was considering cultural traits and their impact on the practice of project management in China. A few thoughts....

Leadership.  One example that always comes up is that the Chinese education (and parenting) system has a large component of “Ting Hua” (do what I say) versus a more open approach that encouraging independent thinking.  You Chinese speakers will note that I’m being liberal in my translation but you get the idea.  You might suppose that this creates a tendency to follow without question directions from superiors.  So that if you want a more creative environment in which alternatives are encouraged it’s worth considering approaches to counter this tendency.  I understand that there is a program underway to embrace teaching concepts that focus more on creativity but for today’s workforce we need a strategy for dealing with this. 

Organization.  Recently one of my peers suggested that I needed to have a meeting of all our project managers and program managers to review our organization structure.  He told me that there were a few folks who didn’t really understand who they reported to and perhaps who they supervised.  We have recently (in the past 6 months) implemented what seemed to me a fairly straightforward structure that formalized the position of the program manager.  The program manager reports to a division manager (we have a couple of divisions in our global services department organized along geographic lines), and the program manager supervises some number of project managers.  There’s one complication. 

As I discussed this problem with my friend, himself a senior manager in another part of the company, he explained his theory that Chinese people have trouble understanding the concept of the organization chart.  He explained that in Chinese culture there is the concept of 圈子 (Quanzi), similar to 关系（Guanxi）but not the same.  This word translates into personal local contacts or connections, and the concept is some similar to an “inner circle” of friends or associates that wield a disproportionate amount of influence.  My friend used the example of the president’s driver being an important contributor to decision making in a company or a major government organization.  He’s not just a driver but a trusted confidante.  Well this issue of the “inner circle” is not unlike my own experience in the USA and we PMPs all understand the importance of the “political frame” in understanding organizations, but my friend says this runs much deeper in China.  It’s a concept, no a cultural characteristic, that is deeply embedded within the psyche of most Chinese and plays a much larger role in the day to day experience than a westerner might expect.  For my friend it explains the frequently unclear and apparently conflicting responsibility and accountability paths one sometimes finds in a Chinese organization. 

On the more immediate practical concern, it could explain why some people in my organization don’t understand our org chart.  A normal supposition might have been that lack of discipline and proper training were to blame.  But my friend says this is a purely western way of viewing the problem.

So naturally I started to consider what adaptation was needed to account for this characteristic.  But again my friend surprised me by saying that this was the wrong approach and in fact in our company’s drive to become a global player one focus is on moving the company culture in directions that will make it more compatible with our business objectives.  We needed a strategy to weed out (his word was closer to “eradicate”) this characteristic.  His advice was to explain what an org chart was, what it meant in terms of responsibility, authority and decision making, and that everyone was expected to act accordingly.  Well, perhaps somewhere between the evolution of company culture and the “crystal clear” of A Few Good Men there’s an answer for me.