Email: such a common tool, so often misused.
This is a real email we received (with a few details changed to protect the sender’s dignity):
Full of undefined acronyms, inappropriate abbreviations, and unnecessary personal details, this email does not give me much reason to trust this company. The writer says, “If there’s anything not clear, pls feel free to contact me.” I’m not sure if I want to.
I can tell that this email came from a non-native English speaker, but I don’t think this is an acceptable excuse. I believe that anyone with a basic command of English can learn to write effective emails, with just a bit of training.
A few weeks ago Drew and I delivered a lunchtime training on Effective Email Writing to about twenty employees of a leading law firm. Our presentation followed this outline: 
I personally think the most important part of an email is the subject line. I used to work for a company that did email marketing for non-profit organizations, and we obsessed over subject lines. Email marketing, of course, generates more statistics than typical emails between colleagues or clients, but I think it’s lessons are still valid: your subject line should describe the content of your email in a specific, concise way.
Here are some good subject lines:
- Staff Meeting: Thursday 2pm
- English Classes for Customer Service Team
- YSYC termination of contract with EasySoft
- Nice meeting you at dinner Tuesday
I try hard to follow these rules myself, but sending a quick email is so easy that sometimes I get careless. About a month ago, I invited a good friend of mine to dinner on Wednesday, and she suggested we attend an event on Tuesday instead. I sent my RSVP to the event’s organizer, not realizing that the subject line said “Dinner Wednesday?” I had inadvertently invited a 60-something man I’d never met to dinner! I sent him a quick follow-up to clarify, and, no, he didn’t think I was asking him out. But still, I think this illustrates my point well.
The hilarious Dave Barry relates the hypothetical historical consequences of this hastiness in his funny review of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office:
Imagine, for example, how useful it would have been for Paul Revere. … Since Revere was typing with his thumbs, his e-mail probably would have said something like, “teh nritish are cming.” As a result the recipients might not have grasped the urgency of the message. The Concord patriots might have assumed it was mainly intended for the Lexington patriots, while Lexington might have assumed Concord was going to handle it, and we would still be British subjects today. I’m not saying that would be a bad thing; I’m just saying it was not what Revere meant to accomplish. [more]
What email writing tips would you add? What’s the most hilarious email you’ve received in a business setting?
-Leslie
Lately I’ve read two pieces that approach talent and training in China from completely opposite perspectives.
The first is Yanmei Xie’s recent piece for Asia Calling, “The ‘Ants” of China Struggle for Small Rewards”.
The second is China CEO: Voices of Experience from 20 International Business Leaders, by Juan Antonio Fernandez and Laurie Underwood.
Together, they tell me that China has thousands and thousands of college graduates. They compete for low-paying jobs in China’s cities, and lack the skills to be top-flight candidates for multinational companies. Thus, recruiting, developing, and retaining talent continues to be one of the biggest challenges for companies operating here.
Xie’s “Ants” piece describes this dynamic from the bottom. It begins:
There’s a group of people in China who are called the tribe of ants .
Like ants, they are of humble roots. Like ants, they work diligently for small rewards like bread crumbs.
Like ants, they live in big clusters in crammed spaces.
They are recent college graduates who flock to big cities seeking to improve their lives their families’ but find themselves in uphill battles. [more]
I find the following lines poignant, especially since I used to teach at a Chinese university that’s partly privately-run. 22-year-old Zhang Pei
worked in sales for an advertising company. He quit yesterday after a fight with his manager. …
Pei went to a private college in Beijing. Since China relaxed regulations on higher-institutions ten years ago, privately-run schools sprouted up.
They let many more people get college degrees, but their graduates are often valued less than those from better-known state-run universities.
“We are different from those who graduate from brand-name colleges. There are too many college graduates. I feel I am not capable enough and don’t have much skill, so I do feel somewhat helpless.” [more]
I thought about Pei’s expression of helplessness and desire for skills training as I re-read a book focused on the opposite side of the business spectrum: China CEO. It came out in 2006 (which happens to be the year I arrived in China) but I think its lessons are still relevant today.
Eli Lilly’s Christopher Shaw, who says the language classes he offers on company premises are well worth the investment, “This is something our employees value and something we value. We want to keep people and we want to promote people. It is very important. When they join my company, they say: ‘Eli Lilly is looking out for my future’”
The authors also point out an important caveat: the risk of “train and run.” This is something we’ve often heard in our meetings with human resources managers in China. Companies invest in training and struggle to communicate to employees that they expect something in return for this investment. One executive complains that staff members return from a training session and immediately start asking about the next, more advanced training.
The interviewees agreed that building employer-employee guanxi is the best defense against high staff turnover. Over and over, the authors heard that a workplace should be “like a family.”
I agree. I also believe that the best training is tailored to meet the companies’ needs as well as the individuals’ interests. Ideally, a training program can make the most of a tight budget, build ‘ants’ skills, make them feel like part of a family, and serve the company’s broader goals.
Yes, I know this sounds a bit utopian. What do you think?
First, a photo from a fabulous series from Hong Kong-based creative duo graphicairlines on NeochaEDGE. I like seeing how art and everyday life overlap:
Second, a brilliant comment on creativity from Caitie Whelan, Co-Founder of The Merasi School:
The best ideas are like taffy: they should only be consumed after rigorous pulling, stretching and challenging. The ideas behind social movements rarely emerge fully baked and ready for publication — rather, they are born from countless, often painful hours of sculpting and re-sculpting. When I first started forming some thoughts about education in India into a more coherent idea of a school for a community of lower-caste musicians, I became convinced that I was sitting on a goldmine, largely because my intentions were so good. [more]
Third, a thought-provoking response to our discussion about creativity in Chinese legal work, from Doug, writing on China Law Blog.
The most interesting bits of law are the ones where creativity is needed since these are the ones that are not settled. In China, I would think there would be plenty of situations where the law is not settled and plenty of cases where the law is vague enough that a good (and creative) legal argument could be made on both sides.
The capability for creativity and the wisdom to know when not to use it is what a good lawyer needs. In negotiations, for example, a creative interpretation that has a slim chance of sticking might be good negotiating leverage. Most routine cases, e.g. contract law involve putting together a very clear agreement that covers all eventualities with cases that have tested all the language – this is not very creative nor should it be. When a client wants to take some legal risk (or has already taken some and is in a tight spot) then trying to figure out untested legal avenues and creative solutions within the law might be just what is needed – anything on appeal almost always includes this as appeal courts deal with non-routine applications of law (well, and dumb errors by lower courts).
-Leslie
On Brazen Careerist, I’ve read a series of fascinating posts on how cultural stereotypes can be assets, by Valentina Thörner da Cruz, a German woman living in Barcelona. In this post she explains how her typically German emphasis on structure helps her at work. I think this is excellent advice for anyone writing for business, especially in a foreign language.
(1.) Worry about the content, not the language. Writing a well structured and easily understandable paper is not the same as “writing beautiful”. If I were to worry too much about the beauty of my language I would never get everything done. And here is the thing: I am not a copywriter. I do not write for marketing purposes. I write to explain things. To make complicated relations clear to people from outside (the company, the project, the team). If these things are to be published they need to go through the hands of a native-speaking copywriter anyway (as I usually write in foreign languages). So get rid of the idea to write everything in perfect style. The understandibility is the important thing (and yes, you may create new words if necessary).
…
(5) The first proofreader should be somebody who doesn’t know the project. This will give you relevant feedback on whether your style is easy enough for new people to understand it. Don’t underestimate the impact of your own implicit knowledge which you cannot expect everybody to have. [more]
In my experience, China’s educational system also values structure, but it’s more top-down-listen-to-the-teacher structure than let-me-figure-out-how-best-to-express-my-ideas structure. I look forward to sharing this advice with my students.
I can definitely identify with her idea of cultural stereotypes as assets. I’m American. Some of the positive stereotypes ascribed to my nationality: friendly to strangers, wealthy, sporty, etc. I think my friendliness has been an asset in the workplace, both at home and here in China. There are also plenty of negative ones: oblivious to the rest of the world, bad at learning foreign languages, etc. I find myself consciously challenging these stereotypes by reading a lot and speaking Chinese and Spanish as much as possible (though ideally not in the same conversation.)
What stereotypes are ascribed to you, based on your nationality, and how have they affected your professional communications?
-Leslie
Here’s a great article by Didi Kirsten Tatlow, from the International Herald Tribune. I’ve recently been obsessed with creativity in China, and I think this adds a fascinating perspective:
“Our education system is like ancient Sparta. Not physically, but mentally,” she said over coffee in a Beijing mall, where white marble sparkled under powerful lights. “Our children learn to calculate fast, play the piano, to do everything well. They have a lot of skills. But when they grow up they are lost, because no one ever asked them to think about what they want.”
The agoge of Sparta took 7-year-old boys and molded them into an elite corps of disciplined warriors loyal to the state. At Chinese school a powerful blend of Communist and Confucian ideologies demands obedience to hierarchy, bone-hard study and uncritical thinking.
Starting at 6, children are buried under an avalanche of studies until they graduate from high school. Twelve-hour days (less on weekends, but no days off) are common among first-graders. For his first Chinese New Year semester break, my 6-year-old son was given 42 pages of math and 42 pages of Chinese homework to complete in four weeks. The goal? Entrance to an elite college like Peking or Tsinghua University. [more]
Hat tip to China Digital Times.
-Leslie
A European employee of one of the companies we’ve worked with just asked me for some English writing advice. He’s working on several personal writing projects, along with his work for this company. Here’s what I sent him:
(1) Write to Generate Ideas. Edit. Edit more.
Essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham shares this eloquent piece, “Writing, Briefly.”
I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
As for how to write well, here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over…[more]
(2) Leap.
I’ve already shared my admiration for the work of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She contributed this elegant piece of advice to Seth Godin’s recent eBook What Matters Now.
image credit: What Matters Now.
(3) Revise your sentences.
When I teach writing classes, Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab helps me tremendously. I like this list of suggestions for improving sentence clarity.
I think it’s both clever and relevant to our work; A commenter reacting to a post on ChinaGeeks has called Rein a tool. I like @JeffreyJDavis‘ Twitter response: “Tools get things done. Be proud.”
He spends most of his article describing “macro” China, particularly its recent ascendancy to superpower status:
It has just gotten its seat at the adults’ table and is trying to learn how to deal with other nations as not just a fellow G20 member but as a superpower.
I think this paragraph connects most closely with our work:
Like many teenage boys, China still has a few pimples. It needs a few more years in college to fully emerge as an adult. It has new muscles, but it also has much to learn from the U.S. and the rest of the world. It needs to vastly improve an outdated education system that doesn’t properly train its best and brightest for a globalized world. It needs a system more like the American liberal arts one, which focuses on analysis rather than rote memory and test-taking. It needs to learn to be less fearful. After all, its citizens are happy and support it.
[Nope, our clients don't have pimples 
That's not what I'm talking about.]
In my experience, Chinese professionals in many sectors may lack the appropriate training and experience to serve their clients to an international standard. Interacting with foreigners every day can be a new challenge. Entirely new industries have emerged, such as renewable energy and mobile gaming. Of course these new industries have also sprouted up in other countries too but here it might require a larger leap in terms of skills, for employees educated in China’s strict school system.
I also think that this strict school system means that Chinese employees respond particularly well to training. The Chinese people that I know value education so much and respect teachers. A large percentage of the individuals we’ve trained have spent their own money on English (or Spanish or Japanese) lessons.
In my experience, English training in corporate settings is a great point of alignment between the employees’ personal interests and the company’s specific needs. My colleague Drew Ross wrote here about how to use training as a staff retention tool. Along with industry-specific lessons like email writing, presentation skills, grammar, and vocabulary, I tailor my classes to individual requests. These have included topics as varied as Michelle Obama, cross-cultural anthropology, and tea parties in American history.
These conversations have been so helpful to my development as a teacher of skills and a student of China.
-Leslie
China as a Teenage Boy: How this Affects Corporate Training Shaun Rein of the China Market Research Group wrote a provocative post for Forbes comparing China to a teenage boy. I personally think it's clever; ChinaGeeks has called Rein a tool. I liked @____'s Twitter reponse to this: "Tools get things done. Be proud." I think Rein's analogy is a useful one for our field. Chinese professionals in many sectors may lack the appropriate training and experience to serve their clients to an international standard. Interacting with foreigners every day can be a new challenge. Entirely new industries have emerged, such as renewable energy and mobile gaming. Of course these new industries have also sprouted up in other countries too but here it might require a larger leap in terms of skills, for employees educated in China's strict school system. I also think that this strict school system means that Chinese employees respond particularly well to training. The Chinese people that I know value education so much and respect teachers. A large percentage of my clients have spent their own money on English (or Spanish or Japanese) lessons. In my experience, English training in corporate settings is a great point of alignment between the employees' personal interests and the company's specific needs. My colleague Drew Ross wrote here about how to use training as a staff retention tool. Along with industry-specific lessons like email writing, presentation skills, grammar, and vocabulary, I tailor my classes to individual requests. These have included topics as varied as Michelle Obama, cross-cultural psychology, and tea parties in American history. These conversations have been so helpful to my development as a teacher of skills and a student of China. -Leslie
First of all, thank you China Law Blog!
Dan Harris reacted here to my post about creativity in Chinese legal work. He pointed to an article he’d written about working with Chinese and Korean lawyers, and suggested that lawyers’ creativity could be correlated with the distinction between common law and civil law countries. It’s great to see this newborn blog inspiring comments from the China-focused blogging community.
Update: More Thoughts on Chinese Lawyers and Creativity
Today I spoke with a different attorney from the same firm, and asked, “Do you think you are creative?” His response? “Definitely.” He often deals with lawsuits, and he needs to analyze information from many sources and assemble it in a way that will help meet his clients’ goals. He’s also constantly dealing with people from other countries and needs to be creative to communicate in a way that resonates with them. And he mentioned the need to be creative in motivating his staff.
I mention this because I want to avoid presenting a single story of Chinese lawyers and creativity.
My personal blog is called “Beyond China’s Single Story.” The title comes from Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brilliant TED Talk about the importance of recognizing many stories about a given place.
I first learned of this TED Talk and how it relates to China from this excellent post from All Roads Lead to China.
-Leslie
This article originally appeared on China Success Stories on September 17, 2008. Be sure to check out the comments on the original post.
In western countries, many companies already see that offering comprehensive training programmes to their staff is an effective way of retaining their employees. In China, however, where staff retention is such a major issue, many companies attempt to keep staff by throwing more money at them when, in many cases, competitors match these packages, thereby creating only a short-term solution.
The added value in using training and development is proven and clear. Training creates an increase in attendance, company loyalty, innovation, skills, and productivity. Ongoing training as part of a general, employee-focused culture – one that values and responds to the needs of the employee – will help to create a strong, loyal workforce, that has no desire to move onto ‘greener pastures’ or the next big thing.
The Issues
Research undertaken in 2007 by Development Dimensions International (DDI) showed that Chinese companies saw a considerable increase in professional and support staff turnover in the years 2006 and 2007.
The employees surveyed cited two main reasons for changing jobs: lack of growth and development opportunities with their current employer and the perception of having better career opportunities elsewhere.
I just had a fascinating conversation with one of my students, an attorney at a leading intellectual property law firm. We read “Fright Bulb: How to Crush Your Last Shard of Creativity,” the editor’s letter from the December 2009 issue of Psychology Today. [The article doesn't appear to be online. I teach him and his colleagues advanced, industry-specific, one-on-one English lessons.]
This note from editor Kaja Perina (yes, that’s her picture, from Psychology Today) begins:
For some people, there is no greater buzzkill than the chirpy imperative, “Be creative!” These words are especially irksome when accompanied by the clicking of a stopwatch or the knowledge that the speaker himself cannot solve the problem in question. The idea of creativity on demand can intimidate — or at least irritate — an otherwise innovative brain.
My student found this paragraph tricky for several reasons. He first noticed the unfamiliar colloquiallisms in the first few lines: “buzzkill,” “chirpy,” “irksome.” Once we tackled this vocabulary, the underlying sentiment surprised him more.
He kept saying, “I’m not creative.” In his work, it is rare for anyone to make “Be creative” a chirpy imperative. Legal work depends on both established procedures and clients’ expectations, and it would be quite odd for a manager to insist on explicitly creative output.
Also, he mentioned that a Chinese manager would lose face if he admitted that he “himself cannot solve the problem in question.” In the rare circumstance that he would communicate such a thing, he would do so in a roundabout way that would both maintain his dignity and imply the desire for assistance.
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