Happy Chinese New Year: The Tiger

Gung Hay Fat Choy / Gong Xi Fa Cai

This weekend we enter the Chinese Year of the Tiger, year 4708 of the Chinese calendar and the third in the cycle of 12 years in the Chinese zodiac.

Today I want to wish all my friends, colleagues and clients throughout Asia and around the world a prosperous and healthy year ahead!


Goodbye to the Ox

Last year was the Year of the Ox, which was meant to bring prosperity through fortitude and hard work. It's usually a conservative year, one of traditions and values, of stability and growth where patience and diligence pay off.

Perhaps the first stirrings of economic recovery that we've seen at the tail end of the year have been a product of societies resetting their moral compass and looking to more conservative practices in the financial sector...?

Welcome to the Year of the Metal Tiger

Hot passion meets cold steel with the arrival of the year of the Metal Tiger. This combined sign signifies both the energy to begin activity and the determination to follow it through to the end.

Forget about last year’s slow plodding! Events set in motion now will pick up speed and continue until either the objective is attained...or the whole endeavour crashes and burns.

A character trait of high-spirited Metal Tigers is that they tend to jump to conclusions. To stay on the positive side of this energetic year, a useful corrective to this habit that we all exhibit on occasion is to ask lots of questions rather than making unfounded assumptions.

If you are in a leadership role this year, you may do well to remember the following:

In the past the best leader was the one with the best answers.
Today the best leader is the person who knows how to ask the best questions.

Tigers - powerful and proud...yet endangered

Even if you do not follow Chinese astrology, there is a crisis this year that is very real and that you can help to do something about.

The world's tiger population is under threat.

It is the WWF's goal to ensure wild tigers are no longer facing extinction by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. You can help support their work to save tigers by making a donation.


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Formula for success: good news and a global century

Over the past two weeks in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore I've spoken to locals about topics ranging from Asia's place in the world, expat life, starting and sustaining businesses and, inevitably, the global financial crisis. The result is an Asia-based comment I want to share, but first let me address this last item.

Where's the good news?

A recurring theme I heard is the people are fatigued by the gloom-and-doom media coverage of the GFC (yes, it's even got its own acronym now) with ceaseless bad news and warnings of worse yet to come.

It's a prime example of the media's primary business model and, coincidentally, an answer to the age-old question of why we don't see more good-news stories: the media broadcasts bad news to drive people into an alarmed limbic state - because fearful people crave more information to develop their survival strategies and thereby become regular consumers of more and more (bad) news. It's an endless cycle.

So I want to counter this and encourage you to do so as well.

For my part, I've taken to posting feel-good news snippets and stories via the twitter micro-blogging platform (you'll see some examples in the top left-hand side of my main blog page). If you're interested, tweet yourself to some free "feel-goods".

What can you do? Turn off the news and go talk to people (like I've been doing). My hunch is that you'll enjoy a much more nuanced, detailed and interactive picture of what's really happening "out there" and you'll have made a genuine human contact as well. We're social, tribal creatures - I suggest we can all benefit from getting informed of what's happening with real people and tone down our consumption of the media's abstract and incessant stream of global bad news.


In other Asian news...

With this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix race the F1 returns to Asia. How appropriate, really. During my travels I observed that the GFC-besotted world right now is a lot like an F1 race.

The ceaseless quest to go ever-faster has produced a multi-car pileup on the track. When this happens the yellow flag is shown, all cars must slow down and no passing is allowed - in other words, it's a holding pattern. Eventually, the carnage and debris are removed and the race resumes as the green flag is shown.

As I see it, when the global green flag flies again and the race resumes, the cars at the front of the pack will all be Asian. Following behind are the rest of the global contenders (some Europeans, Canada looking peppy with its conservative fiscal practices, and a host of others).

And what of America? Well, well with its shaken confidence, and its balance of trade and spending deficeits, it's a bit like a car running on low-grade fuel with borrowed tires. With President Obama now heading up the pit crew, it'll be interesting to see if the performance can be tweaked before the green flag is out again.

The Asian Century

A running debate has existed since the mid-80's about the ascendancy of Asia and whether the 21st will be the Asian Century. Whether viewed in economic or demographic terms, a shift is undoubtedly taking place.

The 19th century has been called the British Century, followed by the 20th, American Century...but it's not as though a changing of the guard happened in the year 1900. Rather, a complicated dance has taken place between these two empires and continues to do so (witness, for example, the pre-GFC ascendency of London to replace New York as the world financial capital). So it will be with Asia as this century unfolds.

That said, you could say that Asia's current advantage in the "global financial Formula One" stems from having done this sort of thing before: in 1997 there was the Asian financial crisis and in 2003 the SARS outbreak. Experience counts a lot in fostering resilience (the London bombings of 2005 were only the latest in a series of assaults on the British capital, and did not have the same deep psychological impact as did 9/11 on the US) and coping strategies.


What about a "Global Century"?

Taking a wider holistic view, there are many signs that humans are getting things pretty spectacularly (and unsustainably) wrong - not just financially but environmentally, interpersonally, and in our development as individuals.

Success in this global F1, I would argue, will require more than just pole position and ever-faster innovations to increase the speed of business-as-usual. Increasingly compelling global events show that we need to apply our energies to something different. I would argue that instead of an F1-style contest in which countries endlessly chase each other on a circular track that is actually a road to nowhere, a useful shift in focus would be to move beyond shifting regional hegemonies represented by the British/American/Asian Centuries and foster an integrated view - the Global Century.

In this way we would be much better placed to have integral and holistic global solutions to the ceaseless stream of global bad news that the media deliver for our consumption - which would put us all in a more cheerful frame of mind. A formula for success indeed.
TM

Happy Chinese New Year: The Ox

Gung Hay Fat Choy / Gong Xi Fa Cai

Today we enter the Chinese Year of the Ox and I wish all my friends, colleagues and clients a prosperous and healthy year ahead.

Last year was the Year of the Rat, the first in the cycle of 12 years in the Chinese calendar. I've read that Rat years are fast-paced, a time of new opportunities and fresh starts, of renewal through reinvention and also of upheaval.

Certainly in keeping with the theme of renewal and upheaval in a Rat year, 2008 saw its fair share of crises. In fact the events of last year call to my mind the purported Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times, as well as the old saw that the same Chinese character (or ideogram) is used for both the words crisis and opportunity.

In keeping with the Chinese theme of this post, however, I'd like to examine a few of the phrases and concepts that have gotten a bit mangled in their East-to-West translation.

Crisis = Opportunity?

In my previous post I quite explicitly made the point that you have the power of choice over whether to view a situation as a crisis or an opportunity - something that I still hold to be true. However it seems that the concept does not have its roots in the use of the same Chinese character for both crisis and opportunity (see here and here for details).

Similarly there is no reference that can be found for a Chinese curse, let alone saying, May you live in interesting times. According to Wikipedia the expression may have its roots in an interpretation of a Chinese phrase that may be translated as follows:

the times produce their heroes
(pinyin: shí shì zào yīng xióng)

I rather like this, for several reasons: first off, it's not a curse(!); it neatly encapsulates the element of personal agency and choice mentioned above; I think it taps into the underlying truism that each age needs to produce heroes that are appropriate to the moment - with the presumption that each of us has heroism within us that's waiting to be manifested and shine through.

Rat-cunning & Ox-solid

The Rat year 2008 was certainly marked by upheaval and the start of a process of (forceable and possibly overdue) renewal - not least in the financial sector. The signs of continued global climate change were starkly evident. Not all was negative, though, as in 2008 America ushered in a new era marked by the promise of change and of hope by collectively saying Yes We Can.

The Ox year 2009, meanwhile, promises prosperity through fortitude and hard work.

It's meant to be a conservative year, one of traditions and values, of stability and growth where patience and diligence pay off.

It's a year of harvest - when we reap what we have sown and consolidate the progress that the Rat's speediness and destruction/renewal has produced, in which any recent setbacks or obstacles can be overcome.

Even if you put no store by Chinese astrology, I'd suggest that these guiding principles will hold you in good stead this year as people the world over learn how to be the heroes that their times require. We, as well as our communities and the planet, deserve nothing less.

In keeping with the theme, my next post will assess President Obama's inauguration speech to see what kind of Ox year he has in mind for America and, by extension, the world community.
TM

Hong Kong - millions of people, 9 core belief types

(Photo credit: Base64, retouched by CarolSpears)

I've spent the latter half of last week in Hong Kong learning more about the nine personality styles, which I've previously referred to within the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) as Core Belief Types or NeuroLimbic Types; "core belief" because these styles act as the filter through which each individual views the world and him- or herself, and "neurolimbic" because these reactions tend to be immediate, knee-jerk, and located in the limbic or emotionally reactive centres of the brain (which you'll recognize as the place where our fight-flight-freeze response originates, which I've also referred to as the "mental gearbox" of forward-reverse-neutral).

When you speak to people in the language they understand, you get results

I'm always impressed when I can go out and immediately make practical application of new learning, and that was what I was able to do this week with what I learned in the workshop.

The situation: I'd been trying to have a successful conversation with a friend for some weeks now and she had proven unresponsive to my overtures.

Applying this knowledge, I noticed that I was speaking to her from MY perspective rather than hers - so in a sense I was speaking my language rather than speaking in her language. Once I was able to write something that made sense to her in her own terms I received an immediate reply and satisfactory resolution of an ongoing concern of mine.

This seems quite a commonsense thing - if you try speaking Hindi to a bunch of Germans, chances are we won't get very far. Sometimes our solution, like that of some monolingual tourists travelling abroad, is to SPEAK EVEN MORE LOUDLY AND SLOWLY in the hopes that these "foreigners" will understand.

Well just as no one is a foreigner in their own country, likewise each person's personality style makes perfect sense from their point of view. So I suppose I've learned a little more about the nine languages that people use to make sense of themselves and the world around them, as well as a bit of proficiency speaking the other eight that aren't my "first language".

What was particularly impressive to me is that around 75% of the participants in the workshop were from Hong Kong and another 15% or so were from countries across southeast Asia, yet the core belief types held true across all cultures. Since these types stem from the limbic brain centre of all humans, this makes sense at a scientific level, but my sceptical side was gratified to see that this is a system with such broad-based applicability - not just among the millions living in Hong Kong and the billion-plus in China, but all over the world...

More to come!
TM