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 enlarge | Author: Jack Perkowski
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $14.25
You Save: $13.25 (48%)
New (29) Used (13) from $12.89
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 93131
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
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Barely touched and never read, this book is in perfect condition, including dust cover. Will ship immediately.
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| Customer Reviews:
 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
9 out of 9 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.
A Great Adventure March 23, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Managing the Dragon provides very good insights into what was needed in the 90s to bring a successful fund into China to build a world-class Chinese automotive components company.
The author, Jack Perkowski, started out as a successful Wall Street investment banker. After twenty years, he took an interest in China, and moved his family to China, where he focused on raising funds to build a Chinese automotive components manufacturer, ASIMCO. When he went to China in the early 90s, the Chinese government was having trouble finding foreign investors for the auto parts industry, and was willing to give away foreign majority ownership. Seeing the potential of the industry, and Chinese government support, he decided to make his move, raising Wall Street capital while negotiating with Chinese partners to get started. Together with his team, he was able to make things happen, and now has a successful auto components company in China.
Aside from Perkowski being generally very smart, several things come through in the book:
-- He was keenly aware that there were different ways to do things in China, and he did not try to force down only one vision "because that's the way that it's done in America"
-- He did not try to negotiate from a superior position, but instead negotiated as an equal partner committed to China's long-term growth
-- He has a curious mind and is always willing to learn
-- He and his family now live happily in China, which in the eyes of many Chinese, shows his commitment to the country
Perkowski shows that China is really not that mysterious, but it takes time to learn and understand how it works. If one is willing to make that investment, then one day, you will get a good return on your investment.
To get a good view of what it was like doing the deals on the ground for Perkowski, you would be well-advised to read Mr. China: A Memoir.
If there is only one warning I would make, it is that many of the strategies and scenarios Perkowski outlines work well with highly capitalized manufacturing businesses. He had an advantage in dealing with Chinese officials because he had $150 million to invest. For smaller investors say, in the service sector, it would be quite different. Also, after joining the WTO in 2001, Chinese regulations have opened up considerably for non-Chinese investors. As for joint ventures, very few companies consider them anymore, so they are mostly off the table.
More than a great book on Chinese business March 20, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a book about a life and business adventure. I'm not particularly interested in how to do business in China, but I was fascinated by the decisions the author made. This is a wonderful book for anyone considering innovation. It describes how a successful 40-year-old decided to take his life in an entirely new direction, building on what he knew, but also taking chances on things he knew little about. It's people like this who change the world, learning how along the way. He has the insight and writing talent to relate his journey to his roots in impoverished coal country, as well as lessons learned playing football at Yale and working on Wall Street.
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