How Americans Can Win from China

The situation that we have been facing lately with China is an especially interesting scenario. It seems that most mass media aims to use scare tactics that devote too much attention to China’s rapid growth rate and why we should be concerned about it. I know I’m even a little guilty of calling our readers’ attentions to this fact. Now I’d like to elaborate on the flip side: why China’s growth could spur one of the biggest economic expansions ever, both in America and around the world.

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Command and Control

In my opinion, the presence of a dominant, alpha-male complex, is an integral part of the managerial psyche. However, I do agree with Bob Brennan, the Iron Mountain CEO, that the negative effects of this trait may interfere with the efficiency of a working environment. John T. Landy analyzes this balancing effect in Breaking the Command and Control Reflex. Effectively, both Brennan and Landy affirm that in the current upper-management arena, employees still operate with a questioning attitude towards cooperation. As Brennan presents it, “Most managers can’t help but see collaboration as a kind of threat to their territory, and they raise a variety of ‘defense mechanisms’ to thwart it.”

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Current Read: The Intelligent Entrepreneur by Bill Murphy

The Intelligent Entrepreneur is a fantastic mixture of entrepreneurial advice and challenging, yet encouraging, business anecdotes. The latter focus on the entrepreneurial evolution of three Harvard Business School graduates. In the first chapter, Murphy explains how he chose which aspiring businessmen and businesswomen to follow. Being that he was only assessing the development of HBS students, he realized that his subjects were already beginning at the top of the totem pole, however he tried to pick three students without profuse advantages that wouldn’t otherwise be available to the average entrepreneur.

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