A World Appart

Rapidly approaching 4 years in Singapore and I'm still fascinated by the APAC region. From the sublime to the ridiculous, wealth to poverty, and from developed to developing.

One thing that is certain is that you have to live here to really understand the cultural and to a great extent business dynamics, watching the latest HSBC ad won't cut it, neither will reading the odd blog or book on the region.

The region has a large number of smart and well educated individuals but there is an increasing problem with the lack of exposure they have had. Yes Multinational Corporations operate in the regional hubs (specifically, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai), but the problems lies in the type of work undertaken, the level of autonomy afforded to them and yes their exposure to areas like business strategy and new product development.

MNC's in general, do not encourage cross-learning (I don't mean a 2 day seminar in Cannes), it's important that skills and experiences are shared across the globe, secondments should be a minimum of 1 year to allow for real immersion and ideally 2 years (Nokia practice this).

The World is an increasingly smaller place but most of the time we barely touch the surface of a place, yet still claim to be experts in the market. Next time you go on a business trip or on holiday, try to step off the well trodden path for a day (at least) and immerse yourself in the culture of the place (don't arrange a cultural trip, as it will be staged), you might just learn something new.