As the American, the Korean and I wandered around Aleppo, two Syrians who happen to be driving around suddenly stopped and asked us where we were from. They asked if we could speak Chinese and I answered “yes.” The younger of the two was an interpreter for his Boss who only spoke Arabic. It turns out that they need to negotiate with their business partners in China but no one could speak Chinese. We agreed to follow them back to their office to help them.

They have been ordering supplies from a manufacturer in China for years. I asked what equipment they were ordering, and as the younger person explained, his boss told him that it was not important. I had fanciful visions of stumbling upon some clandestine nuclear imports, but the truth is probably the banal version of textile manufacturing.

They have been having major delays with the current shipment and have been unable to ascertain the reasons for it. Later, as I helped them work through their issues, I realized that two years of using English to communicate has led to layers of misunderstanding and mistrust piling up which neither side was resolving or even bringing up. The issues were complicated and often circular. The Syrians complained that their Chinese counterparts always delayed their orders. In return, the Chinese said they were unable to fulfill orders early because the Syrians were always late in their payments (and they added, often much later than international norms in the business). In return, the Syrians said they paid late because they got their goods late.

The Syrians were also insistent that the Chinese shipped the goods through Taiwan (which was what they had in an original contract). They can get a higher price by claiming that the equipment was “imported” from Taiwan. It turned out later that part of the reason was that they were afraid of the Chinese undercutting their middlemen role by selling directly to customers. By shipping the goods through Taiwan, they had a differentiating factor. The Chinese on the other hand mentioned that doing so caused delays and additional costs, as their old contact who helped “facilitate” the movement of goods through Taiwanese ports had apparently quit the business.

There was much haggling over who should bear the cost of this - the Syrians were very aggressive and the Chinese pretty much accommodated their demands. I was caught in the middle trying to bring both sides to an agreement. After 1.5 hours, we came to an agreement. I counselled the Syrians to clarify some outstanding issues and work with the Chinese to agree on shipment route, payment schedule and cost-sharing on transit, which I thought would be major issues in their future business relationships.

(Palenque, Mexico)

Chetumal -> Palenque

Before taking an overnight bus or sleeping in a train station (which I have done way too many times for my own good), I usually clean myself up in the public toilet. So far, I am impressed with the public toilets in Mexico. I wonder what accounts for the excessively clean toilets?

We arrived at Palenque the next day after an overnight bus from Chetumal. Palenque is a town that thrives on tourism at the nearby Mayan Ruins. I am again reminded of the Small World effect at the ruins when I ran into a former classmate of mine from the time I was studying Chinese in Beijing.

(Palenque, Mexico)

In my travels in this region, I am always asked if I am Japanese. I get blank looks when I say Singapore. At Palenque, a peddler´s second guess was “Corea Norte.” They can´t have that many North Korean tourists here so I wonder what possessed him to say that. Maybe my North Korean academic exchange project left its imprint on me.

(Palenque, Mexico)

The most outrageous guess was at the Mexican border with Guatemala. The Mexican immigration officer looked at my passport and asks me if it is from South Africa. I insisted that it is “Singapore” that is spelled on the front.

Melissa’s Facebook Comment: “Maybe its because you look Korean…but too poor to be from the South”

(Interlaken, Switzerland)

When I was younger, I was so much surer that I knew the answer for everything. I took my beliefs for granted. Now, there are many things for which I do not have an opinion as I realized that I have no clear reason to believe things one way or another. I have become an agnostic on most issues. This comes from realizing that most of our beliefs or opinions are based not on logic or evidence - even though we strongly believe otherwise. Instead, most of our beliefs are instinctive responses that are drilled into us as we grow up from a variety of sources.

As an example, over the summer, the US media reported that two US journalists were detained by North Korea. Initial news reports claimed that they were abducted on the Chinese side of the border and I believed the media. After travelling the length of the North Korea-China border over the summer, I realized that it would be incredibly difficult for North Koreans to drag people across the river, much less two ladies accompanied by two guys. Furthermore, for the North Koreans to be able to sneak across the river unseen by the journalists would be even more absurd. After they were released, the journalists confessed that they had crossed into North Korea.

Why did I believe the US media initially? It was definitely not logic or clear-headed analysis. Rather, it is an instinctive response based on biases accumulated over the years that makes me lean towards one viewpoint or another without relying on any evidence or reasoning. The same logic applies to so many other things in which I believe in. That is why I am such an agnostic these days.

(Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland)

I recently read an Economist article on the “Three Habits of Highly Irritating Management Gurus.” It’s a great read even coming from the perspective of someone interested in business academia. I agree with the article’s premise: management gurus tend to oversimplify solutions and act as cheerleaders to the sexiest business of the day. But that is what consumers want. The public often accuse academics of writing dense obscure academic tomes – but that’s often because reality is dense and complicated and representing it on paper isn’t easy. And admittedly, academics are fond of pretentious language.

At the same time, there are some management ideas that are not championed enough. An understated one is the idea of companies selling themselves as “prestigious.” I once attended a recruiting pitch by consulting conglomerate Mckinsey and a lady told us why she chose the firm: “Even my mom knows about Mckinsey…and she has no idea what they do! It is a very prestigious place to work at.”

I think “prestige” is a great invention of American corporations. If you can bill your company as “prestigious” and “selective,” you can get young willing bodies to work incredibly long hours for a discounted wage and still feel good about it. Perhaps the business cultural anthropologist should make a best-selling book out of this.

(Jungfraujoch, Switzerland) Finding the right path

I recently attended a conference in Geneva, where I presented my research on ethics in finance and received a part of the $20 000 Robin Cosgrove Prize as a first prize winner. The prize was established in memory of a former investment banker and this made me muse about how banking executives who sponsor research on the ethics of finance must seem strangely masochistic. During the annual ritual of awarding such prizes, they are excoriated for their bad behavior and irresponsibility. And then everyone goes home happy, feeling that they have done their part to make the world a better place.

My paper looked at how internationalism, institutions and individuals comprise three layers in an interlocking system of ethics. The individual layer in particular was almost an ethnographical account of what I saw was wrong in my undergraduate business education. Coming to this event to me is a reminder that I cannot just go home richer and happy thinking that I had done my part. Instead, I need to remember my longer-term passion for reforming the mission of business school education.

(Grindelwad, Switzerland) I don’t know what this has to do with the topic but I just had to put it up

I was in Geneva a couple of days ago presenting at a conference organized by the Observatoire de la Finance. The keynote speaker for the conference is Stephen Marglin, the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His research tackles interesting problems caused by the discipline of economics. Prof. Marglin argues that economics is not just normative or positive; instead, it is constructive. The way economics is taught is meant to build the world in the image of economics, not just to predict results or to advocate policies. The obsession economists have with efficiency as the purpose and method of society reveals this compulsion.

Prof. Marglin’s speech also reminded me that markets as we know it today are not the natural state of human organization. Rather, it is but just one of the several methods we have for organizing human society. He cites the example of the Amish community - a society that lives in what we would consider a ‘primitive state’ - in Philadelphia. The Amish community chooses which technology or innovations to accept based on how it contribute to or detract from community building.

They reject modern insurance by arguing that this innovation replaces community support with a faceless market-based system. If a house burns down, the neighbors chip in to rebuild. This form of ‘insurance’ is fundamentally different from that of a larger aggregated corporate-run insurance system. While he does not advocate the Amish way of life, Prof. Marglin cites this to explain how markets can replace communities.

He goes on to explain how this creeping marketization is related to the subprime crisis by bringing in the concepts of ‘algorithmic knowledge’ and ‘experiential knowledge.’ Algorithmic knowledge reduces decision-making to a set of numbers. For example, in making a loan, banks try to reduce each customer to a set of statistics that determines their payback rate. Experiential knowledge instead depends on the holistic knowledge a banker might have of the clients he deals with on a consistent and long-term basis, and taps this depth and width of information to make a decision. And its not just stuffy academics who think this is a problem. Investment banking legend Joseph Perella, whom I met three years ago in Philadelphia, also raised this issue.

I suspect that the scaling up of organizations is part of the reason why the algorithmic approach has become the norm. As organizations become larger, rules and heuristics become more important for running the system. Perhaps innovations in organizational forms are necessary if experiential knowledge is to be made consistent with large-scale organizations.

(Buenos Aires, Argentina) Capturing what goes on behind the scenes

I met someone who claimed to have knowledge of what went behind the scenes in Coca Cola’s failed attempt to acquire Huiyuan Juice Group in China. Early this year, Coca Cola announced a bid to acquire Huiyuan. However, China’s Ministry of Commerce blocked the deal, leading to China being pilloried by the world press for its protectionism (in particular, by the Economist).

The person whom I met gave a different account. Coca Cola balked at the high price of Huiyuan after it announced its bid and wanted to back out of the deal without taking blame for it. Hence, they submitted shoddy and late paperwork to the Ministry of Commerce leading to the Ministry rejecting the deal. It was a smart move as the government took the blame.

I do not know if his account is accurate but it provides us with interesting insights into how the Chinese government behaves and how companies manipulate government procedures and the global media to achieve strategic goals. I asked why the Ministry of Commerce did not come out with its side of the case. We can only speculate but if his account is true, it could be that the Ministry did not want to explain its ruling as it would create precedents for future deals (which it might truly want to block/allow).

(Angkor Wat, Cambodia)

Every organization has rites of passage: motions that everyone has to go through in order to reach the upper echelons of an organization. These rites exist whether one is a newly minted investment banker, a consulting grunt, or a toiling academic. However, the activities required by these rites might seem to some to be silly, wasteful or even abusive…but that is how organizations work.

What are some of these rites? Investment bankers talk about how they have to spend years working on dreadfully boring excel jobs bordering on data entry before they can reach the excitement of advising on financial strategies. Consultants are similarly involved in a lot of excel number crunching, despite the sales pitch to the contrary. Academics toil under the tyranny of powerful professors – they are the apprentice and the word of their masters makes all the difference in their research. Even non-profits have rites of passage: a friend at Doctors without Borders (MSF) relate how ex-McKinsey consultants working towards graduate schools often end up doing secretarial work at the organization.

Why do rites of passage exist? Although this process might be about accumulating experience necessary for performing higher level work, I suspect that the rites are simply a means for a community to establish a sense of hierarchy. In entering a community, completing the rites is a process of acquiring legitimacy within the community in order to move upwards. Power is acquired by saying I had been there and done that.

But of course all these rites are different. Saying that it exists for any organization obscures how each of these rites is very much different in its qualitatitive content. If you are a young adventurous youth striking out from college, do you want to take part in these rites for a number of years or strike out on your own?