個案總覽

Challenging business threats and opportunities abound, yet few Renaissance men/women exist to help organizations move forward creatively in response to these challenges. Too much information exists today for a true rebirth to happen. However, self-perpetuating, quasi-renaissance managers might assimilate patterns of thinking and behavior into their professional/personal lives that ultimately make them more intersectional and innovative. Specifically, we point to five habits and three methods managers can implement to lower associative barriers and enhance intersectionality. We then introduce a culling process that helps managers find the few highly creative ideas from larger batches of mediocre ideas, thus enabling enhanced creativity.

For many American firms engaging with Chinese business partners, patterns of negotiated promises made but not kept by their Chinese counterparts often prove rule rather than exception. While various issues play a role in this unfortunate condition, many contributing factors are not subject to control or correction by U.S. negotiators. But two singularly damaging factors can be controlled and corrected by U.S. managers. First is their tendency to negotiate from decidedly Western sociocultural perspectives. Second is that managers often negotiate in states of relative ignorance about certain key cultural values that heavily influence Chinese negotiating practices. Grounded in Bing Fa, this article describes approaches designed to enable managers to negotiate more effectively with Chinese partners. By turns, the approaches instruct U.S. managers regarding why and how they should (when negotiating with Chinese counterparts): embrace the unusual as normal; begin with hard ends in mind; anticipate/prepare for conflict; never resist resistances, [instead] always retreat gracefully; disclose with discretion; act like ladies and gentlemen; and never die with bullets in [their] guns. Adopt these tactics, and U.S. managers would lessen the impact of two factors that, when present, degrade their negotiating effectiveness.