Fortune Makers
The Leaders Creating China's Great Global Companies
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Fortune Makers analyzes and brings to light the distinctive practices of business leaders who are the future of the Chinese economy. These leaders oversee not the old state-owned enterprises, but private companies that have had to invent their way forward out of the wreckage of an economy in tatters following the Cultural Revolution.
Outside of brand names such as Alibaba and Lenovo, little is known, even by the Chinese themselves, about the people present at the creation of these innovative businesses. Fortune Makers provides sharp insights into their unique styles -- a distinctive blend of the entrepreneur, the street fighter, and practices developed by the Communist Party -- and their distinctive ways of leading and managing their organizations that are unlike anything the West is familiar with.
When Peter Drucker published Concept of the Corporation in 1946, he revealed what made large American corporations tick. Similarly, when Japanese companies emerged as a global force in the 1980s, insightful analysts explained the practices that brought Japan's economy out of the ashes -- and what managers elsewhere could learn to compete with them. Now, based on unprecedented access, Fortune Makers allows business leaders in the United States and the rest of the West to understand the essential character and style of Chinese corporate life and its dominant players, whose businesses are the foundation of the domestic Chinese market and are now making their mark globally.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four business school professors deliver a lively exploration of the Chinese way of doing business. As the introduction emphasizes, China's economy has accelerated with astonishing speed in recent decades, and without the political liberties typically associated with capitalism. For readers interested in understanding this process from the inside, the authors describe how the leaders of Chinese companies such as Haier, Alibaba, and Lenovo think about business. They break down this unique mindset into seven key phrases or terms "their own way forward," "the learning company," "strategic agility for the long game," "talent management," "the big boss," "growth as gospel," and "governance as partnership" and devote a chapter to each. The authors also give a history of the growth of Chinese business in the 1980s and '90s and provide highly detailed case studies from the companies under discussion. In the final chapter they observe that these once pioneering businesses have now attained a certain level of maturity and may become models for non-Chinese companies. The book also leaves readers with a question: with China's culture shifting once again as a less-deferential generation enters the workforce, is the "China way" of business sustainable?
