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Managing the Dragon: How I'm Building a Billion-Dollar Business in China | 
 enlarge | Author: Jack Perkowski
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $13.69
You Save: $13.81 (50%)
New (32) Used (9) from $13.69
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 4613
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307393534
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.476292220951
EAN: 9780307393531
ASIN: 0307393534
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The first book by a westerner who built a company in China from scratch
The emergence of China as a world economic power is one of the biggest stories of our time. Every business that intends to be an important part of the fast-changing global economy needs to know how to play the game in China. Who better to be your guide than Jack Perkowski, the pioneer who went to China in the early 1990s. Equipped with just a concept, he built a company step-by-step from the ground up–ASIMCO Technologies–that became a major player in China’s fast-growing automotive business.
Perkowski’s story is as rich, involving, and improbable as those of nineteenth-century titans such as Rockefeller and Carnegie or of twentieth-century ones like Michael Dell and Bill Gates, but with one obvious difference: They and others built their companies when America was emerging or dominant. Perkowski built his at the dawn of the Chinese century.
Perkowski’s insights about the challenges and potential of western involvement in today’s great Chinese expansion–gained on the ground in China itself over the past fifteen years–are of inestimable value and relevance to us all. For instance:
• The good news about China: Everything is possible. The bad news: Nothing is easy.
• To build a business in China, you must develop a local management team–avoiding both former bureaucrats of the state-run enterprises and the country’s new breed of wildcat entrepreneurs.
• You must learn the real reason why China is able to produce goods so cheaply.
• Forget your notions about the Chinese economy being rigidly controlled by Beijing–it is, in fact, highly decentralized and locally driven. As the Chinese say, “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.”
Perkowski tells his story with clarity, lots of humor, and a gripping sense of adventure. He takes us along on his own version of the Long March, when he visited two factories a day for nine months, hitting every province, going through endless rounds of dinners and the inevitable drinking games, and eating what seemed like every part of every animal. He vividly describes what it’s like to be a westerner living and working in China and the dramatic transformation he’s seen in the country, from a place left behind by the modern world to a place where a new world is being born.
Filled with hard-nosed lessons for anyone with ambitions of breaking into the Chinese market, and a rich source of practical wisdom about the realities of China today, Managing the Dragon answers the questions people ask Perkowski most often about his unique experience, as well as those they never think of asking–but should.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Required reading for the Olympics May 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I must admit I wasn't convinced I would enjoy the subject matter. A friend told me it was a great read, and I agree totally after completing CHINESE ED 101!! The humor, warmth, and insight of what Mr. Perkowski has been doing in China comes through in great fashion. With the Olympics on the horizon, we've only been getting the bad news from China, so "Managing the Dragon" really gives us incite of what the people are like and how the country functions on a day to day routine. It should be required reading for everyone going to the Olympics.
Doing Business in China April 22, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Just finished Jack Perkowski's Managing the Dragon, and excellent book in three sections. I was fortunate enough to work with Jack and his team as a consultant for several years. Jack was generous with his time and insight, is able to distill the complex into plain-speak (some memorable phrases in the book), and an excellent listener. All are qualities enbedded in the book. Jack's best advice? Interested in doing business in China, then go there for yourself. This book will serve as a good framework for your fact-finding and due-dlilgence, but keep an open-mind, seek multiple views, and remember: in China, nothing is easy; everything possible. Oh ... and watch out for the mao-tai
Managing the Dragon April 20, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Jack Perkowski's "Managing the Dragon" definitely belongs to the most authoritative cast of literature when it comes to describe contemporary China's commercial leap. Foremost, there are the solid insights collected over a span of 15 years of successful industrialist exposure, that constitute the book's real value. These central themes are articulated in a very customary language. The book is enticing. It is THE highly recommended China book of the year so far! In confidence, the reader also faces an impartial judgement about things Chinese.
Insightful tale of business building in China April 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Just released last month, Jack Perkowski's Managing the Dragon recounts his story of building a business in China. In the mid-90's, Mr. Perkowski saw potential in China. So he took the bold step of moving to China and starting a company. It hasn't always been easy going, but ASIMCO, his company, now takes in $500 million in revenue each year producing automotive parts. The book often disagrees with "accepted" knowledge about China. Mr. Perkowski keeps the lessons entertaining with his story telling. The book is also quite candid about what worked and what didn't.
Admiring effort but not quite great book March 23, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is an admiring effort by an American entrepreneur, as fairly reviewed by Victor Mallet for the Financial Times:
"Brash optimism of an American in China
You have to hand it to Jack Perkowski. The working-class Pittsburgh kid who won a football scholarship to Yale, spent 20 years on Wall Street and became head of investment banking at PaineWebber could have rested on his laurels and enjoyed his personal wealth.
Instead he chose in the 1990s to set up a new business in a difficult country and in a difficult industry he knew nothing about. This book is the story of how Perkowski went to China and established a Chinese motor components group called Asian Strategic Investments Corporation, now Asimco Technologies.
Managing the Dragon is not a great work of literature. The memoir Mr China by Tim Clissold, a Chinese-speaking accountant who helped Perkowski build Asimco, covered some of the same ground with more eloquence and wit four years ago. But Perkowski's book is worth reading, both for its insights into business in China and for its self-portrait of a relentlessly optimistic American entrepreneur who has persevered in spite of disasters and disappointments.
From a new vantage point - he spoke no Chinese but understood Wall Street and raised the money - Perkowski describes the horrors that also featured in Clissold's book: bureaucracy, fraud, corruption, competition from Asimco's Chinese joint venture partners, an inadequate legal system and invoices paid with trucks rather than cash.
As Perkowski admits, China is changing extraordinarily fast and most of these events happened a decade ago. But the book's central section - including a blow-by-blow account of how Asimco removed the awkward boss of a rubber products joint venture in Anhui province - make gripping reading for any industrial investor contemplating a move to China.
Clissold wrote that he was "confused" by the optimism of Perkowski - whom he described as "an enormous personality" and an "archetypal Wall Street adventurer" - and it is true that the American, even in his own writing, comes across as guileless and naive. Perkowski seems to crave recognition and at first appears surprised by how different Chinese habits are from American ones. Occasionally he draws lessons so obvious as to be useless, such as: "I have learnt that getting the strategy right is one of the most important things that a company can do."
Yet there is wisdom, too, on dealmaking and management in the world's most populous nation.
Perkowski chose the almost virgin business territory of China when he learnt that other Asian economies were in the grip of a few powerful business families (the subject of Joe Studwell's Asian Godfathers). He sensibly lays to rest the absurd myth that guanxi or connections are unique to Chinese dealmaking, pointing to his own use of guanxi as a graduate of Yale. And, half in jest, he recommends giving a new company eager for recognition a name beginning with A.
The core of Perkowski's argument is that investors in China face a "management gap" between bureaucratic managers reared in state-owned companies and managers so entrepreneurial that they "concocted deals with criminal elements or tried to set themselves up in competition with us".
Through painful years of trial and error, Perkowski and Asimco struggled to bridge this gap. They started with expatriate managers, but that did not work and Perkowski admits he made his biggest mistakes in the early days "when I discounted the views of my Chinese managers". Next, they tried converting the unsuitable "bureaucratic" and "entrepreneurial" Chinese managers they already had into the kind they wanted, but by and large that failed too.
Finally, they decided to find and empower Asimco's own "New China managers", open-minded mainlanders with some management experience, some exposure to modern management concepts and, typically, an engineering background. In retrospect this was as obvious as the need for a strategy, but it was evidently effective.
The question remains as to whether Perkowski needed to go through such agonies to build a company that now has 17 factories in eight provinces in China.
Clissold could not understand why Perkowski did not learn Chinese. This is a sore point for Perkowski. Although he writes that 90 per cent of the mistakes made in China are due to "misunderstanding and miscommunication", he spends nearly three pages justifying his reluctance to try to learn to speak Chinese.
Reading the two books together, one of the most valuable lessons to emerge is that if you want to build a billion-dollar business, it pays to learn the local language."
For more wisdom, I also recommend The Chine Executive by Wei Wang - a great thinker on this topic, in my view.
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