China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that French logistics student Pauline Bourderiou is about to sit her final examinations, helped on her way by a four-month internship at Impatex Freight Software, the UK’s leading freight and Customs software supplier.

During her stay with Impatex, Pauline has worked behind the scenes on the company’s 24/7 Help Desk to learn about the company’s software and the UK Customs system. She also translated Impatex’s Integrated Customs for Europe (ICE) and NetFreight software screens into French. In her final two months, she assisted in finding a French distributor for NetFreight, and also represented the company on its stand at a trade exhibition.

Pauline’s placement was arranged by Wiltshire College, where she has been studying in the UK; they publicised the availability of French interns through BIFA’s member newsletter. Wiltshire College operates an exchange scheme with IUT Laval, Pauline’s local business college close to her home near Le Mans, France.

In June, Pauline will sit her examinations for the “Licence Gestionnaire Import-Export” – equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in Import and Export; she will also receive an HNC in Business. In April, she sat and passed the Cambridge University Certificate in Business English.

To date, Pauline has spent two years studying international trade, with work placements in Spain and France that involved translation, organising and attending overseas exhibitions, identifying potential international distributors, supply chain analysis and accounting.

Says Pauline: “My last work placement in a logistics department in France, gave me the desire to follow my study in Import-export. For me, logistics is a really interesting sector because the aim is to coordinate all activities in the areas of procurement, production, handling, packaging, packing, storage, distribution and delivery.

“I was really pleased to do my work placement at Impatex; there is a really good atmosphere at work and everybody has been very welcoming when I arrived. This work placement gave me more knowledge about export and import documents, and how the UK trades with other countries using its software to prepare and manage their exports and imports. I learned how Customs works in England; it is quite unique, and different than French Customs.”

Pauline has her sights set firmly on a career in logistics; and although she favours a French company in the wine or foods sector, she is not against working in other countries or businesses: “I love travelling : it is the reason why I chose to study International trade. I would like to work as an export sales manager, because I really enjoy the contact with customers and it is a really important place within the logistics process.”

Adds Impatex MD Peter Day: “It has been a real pleasure helping Pauline with her studies, and she has also been a tremendous assistance to our business. We wish her very well for the future: she will be a real credit to whoever is lucky enough to employ her.”

China Watch Blog has learnt that from the kindergarten room to the boardroom, it’s commonly believed that a person’s perception of their potential will affect their behavior. This theory suggests you just think positive and somehow, magically, you’ll manifest the needed skills. But Al Bolea’s Applied Leadership Seminars turn this belief on its head.

“My position is that behavior drives potential,” says Bolea. “There’s been a great deal of research by contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists confirming this. Simply stated, when a person becomes aware of their behavior and changes it to adopt the behaviors of great leaders, they will become a great leader.”

People begin their leadership journey when they embrace the idea that their behavior determines their future potential, Bolea continues. This redefined potential-behavior relationship shines a new light on everything else in an organization.

While Al Bolea travels around the globe presenting this transformative approach to applied leadership, this summer a lucky few will have an extraordinary opportunity for personal and professional growth: the Alaskan Experience. From August 11 – 16, 2013, the Executive Leadership Retreat will combine topics from the Applied Leadership Seminars and guided fishing in the pristine waters of Alaska’s Inside Passage.

Spectacular natural wonders, stimulating leadership inquiry, team fishing in a rigorous environment, and evening dinners with gourmet Alaskan specialties offer a rare opportunity for leadership teams to re-envision their organization’s future.

Attendees will initially stay at the Cape Fox Lodge in Ketchikan, Alaska, then travel by sea plane to the Waterfall Resort, one of the finest remote sport fishing destinations in the world. Waterfall attracts anglers of all skill levels, from novice to avid, celebrities and professional athletes. The resort on Prince of Wales Island is the ideal all-inclusive Alaskan resort with a one-to-one staff-to-guest ratio.

Al Bolea offers Applied Leadership Seminars year-round. Designed as team experiences, they are ideal for groups of 12-16 attendees. Teams will gain new leadership tools and build greater cooperation among the members, achieving lasting personal and professional transformations. Eleven seminar options range from 5 days in length for “Leadership Transformation” to a 1 day seminar for “Being A Leader.”

The founder and architect of the Applied Leadership Seminars, Al Bolea is an executive leadership coach with clients in many industries. He is the former CEO/GM of Dubai Petroleum and a retired BP executive. His industry career spans almost forty years, including assignments in the US, UK and Middle East. He lectures at the University of Houston, and is the Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Leadership at the University of Alaska.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Turkey’s national airline has barred female flight attendants from wearing red lipstick and nail polish, striking a nerve among secular Turks worried the country is becoming more Islamic.

Turkish Airlines turning more Islamic

Turkish Airlines, Europe’s fourth-biggest carrier, said the ban was aimed at keeping crews “artless and well-groomed with makeup in pastel tones”, as a natural look improved communication with passengers.

“As a consequence of our current cabin uniforms not including red, dark pink, et cetera, the use of lipstick and nail polish in these colours by our cabin crew impairs visual integrity,” the statement said.

Turkish Airlines declined a request for comment.

The guideline follows other restrictions on employees’ appearance and on serving alcohol. Critics say they reflect the influence of the government’s conservative religious values at the fast-growing state-run airline.

“This new guideline is totally down to Turkish Airlines management’s desire to shape the company to fit its own political and ideological stance,” Atilay Aycin, president of the airline’s Hava-Is union, told Reuters.

“No one can deny that Turkey has become a more conservative, religious country.”

Turkey is 99 percent Muslim but the NATO state and European Union candidate has a secular constitution.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, which traces its roots to a banned Islamic party, has relaxed the state’s control over the expression of religion, such as once-strict limits imposed on wearing the Islamic headscarf.

Such restrictions were aimed at reining in Islamism and improving women’s rights, but effectively prevented many devout women from studying at university or taking government jobs.

Turkish Airlines scrapped its own ban on the headscarf more than a year ago, and covered women now work at check-in counters and at other positions in the company, Aycin said.

Other Turkish carriers also have guidelines on the appearance of cabin personnel.

China Watch Blog has learnt that half of the Hong Kong women interviewed in a survey said they’d suffered sexual harassment, and one-in-seven complained about sexual abuse. The findings were compiled by the Women’s Coalition on Equal Opportunities.

The group also found that a quarter of women had been victims of domestic violence. The group said female restaurant workers had the worst experiences of sexual harassment and abuse, RTHK reports.

A spokeswoman for the group, Elaine Lam, said the high number of cases was shocking.

China Watch Blog has learnt that sales training and coaching strategies that focus primarily on behaviors aren’t adequately preparing sales professionals to connect, persuade and win in today’s tough environment.

The reason, according to Herrmann International research, is that selling approaches and buying decisions are rooted in thinking, not behaviors. By embedding thinking into development strategies, companies will be able to improve sales training results and generate higher revenue, account penetration and client loyalty levels.

“Our more than 30 years of research on the brain and business performance has shown that thinking styles impact how we process information, how we buy and sell, what we pay most attention to, and how we make decisions,” says Ann Herrmann-Nehdi, CEO of Herrmann International. “Behavioral approaches can help the salesperson manage a sales conversation in an efficient way, but they don’t reflect the mental processes that actually drive sales activities or purchasing decisions, so they don’t provide the complete set of tools to be persuasive, effective and responsive. Particularly in today’s demanding world, many external factors are impacting behavior; thinking is what’s constant.”

Herrmann-Nehdi says the company advises clients to look at the entire sales process for opportunities to maximize efforts through a framework of thinking, including:

• Mapping the mental demands of the sales job to find alignment and uncover gaps
• Using thinking preference data to maximize time spent in training
• Optimizing coaching strategies by taking into account the thinking styles of the manager/coach and the salesperson
• Providing training and tools to uncover customer thinking preferences and communicate, present and sell with the customer in mind

“The best part is this doesn’t require throwing out everything you’re already doing or slowing down the process,” Orin Salas, VP of Sales at Herrmann International, adds. “It actually helps salespeople get prepared, proficient and closing larger, more profitable deals on a faster pace. In fact, one client reduced training time from 24 months to 7 using this approach. It also allows the salesperson to focus their attention in the most high-value way, which is especially important in today’s noisy, pressure-filled environment.”

Herrmann International has compiled best practices, research and tips for using a thinking-based framework to improve sales performance in the free white paper, Wired for Sales: Supercharge Sales Professionals’ Performance in a Demanding World. The paper explores the reasons traditional behavior-based sales training comes up short, the role thinking preferences play in buying decisions and selling approaches, tips for assessing and applying thinking to sales development strategies, and techniques to quickly build the proficiency and performance sales professionals. Additional tools will be available at the Herrmann International booth at the Sales 2.0 Conference, April 9-10 in San Francisco.

For more information, please visit: www.herrmannsolutions.com.

About Herrmann International

The originator of the Whole Brain® system and the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) thinking styles assessment, Herrmann International works with organizations around the world to help them put their full brainpower to work to outthink, outpace and outperform the competition. The company’s Whole Brain® Thinking framework, which includes a variety of learning solutions, facilitation resources, job aids and business tools, has helped nine out of 10 of the Fortune 100 harness their collective intelligence to sell more, spend less, innovate faster, and develop and retain the best talent.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, released results of a website performance case study that documented variations in load times during live DDoS attacks.

The study tracked performance of two financial institutions; one website had average website load times of two seconds or less, while the other experienced multiple site outages and lengthy delays in server response times.

The headline-making attacks were publicly announced on underground hacker sites before they started. Based on that information, Prolexic was able to track the same DDoS attack against two financial services companies simultaneously.

One firm used Prolexic’s PLXrouted DDoS protection service while the other financial institution was engaged with another DDoS protection provider. Response time – how long a page takes to load on a website – was tracked for both firms using the Compuware Gomez Application Performance Monitor, from multiple worldwide locations.

Data shows that the user experience was far superior with Prolexic. The Prolexic client suffered zero outages and pages typically loaded in a tolerable two seconds, even though the financial services firm was under a significant DDoS attack. In contrast, the firm that did not use Prolexic suffered three separate outages and website users had to endure page-loading times as high as 50 seconds in some cases, making the site unusable.

“Minimizing the impact of an attack is job number one for DDoS mitigation providers,” said Stuart Scholly, president at Prolexic. “Even if your website is under a severe attack, Prolexic can help ensure the user experience is maintained at acceptable levels.”

The public can learn more about Prolexic’s performance under attack conditions in Booth 2539 at the RSA Conference, Feb. 25 – March 1 in San Francisco, or by viewing our website latency video at prolexic.com/latency.

China Watch Blog has learnt that as a guide to hygiene levels in China’s public toilets has been met with ridicule online and by expats living in Shanghai. A draft sanitation standard using the number of flies has been proposed: three flies good, four flies bad.

Comments on the initiative from the Ministry of Health ranged from “odd” to “too funny” and “ridiculous”, according to a Shanghai Daily report.

The ministry is proposing a standard for toilets inside public buildings that would specify no more than one fly per square meter. Stand-alone public toilets should have no more than three per square meter. And the limit for maggots is zero.

The ministry is seeking public opinion on its draft regulations, which also list standards for odor control, toilet cleaning and disinfection.

They also suggest the number of stalls for women should be double that for men in some places. Erecting panels between male urinals and doors for toilet stalls is also advised in the draft.

However, it is the fly count that has attracted most attention.

“I think that if there are flies present, it is an indication that the toilet is dirty. Why not just make a regulation that every public toilet needs to be cleaned at least, for example, four times a day?” Tero Sarkkinen, an expat from Finland, told Shanghai Daily.

“If a toilet has three flies per square meter it would meet the standard, but just imagine how insanitary it would be with that many flies going around,” he said.

Online, there were jokes about a new job opportunity as a fliers’ counter. Others asked why there was no standard for mosquitoes while some lamented that the new standard would cause the flies (driven away from toilets) to feel they had been born in the wrong country.

More serious comments included questions about different standards in different seasons.

“There are more flies in summer than in winter, and in daytime than in nighttime, therefore, does it mean there should be several versions of the standards?” was one comment.

Celine Chanut, a Frenchwoman who has been living in Shanghai for three years, said the proposed standard “sounded funny.”

“The rule of one or three flies would be very difficult to control,” she said.

But she did welcome the idea of standards if they improved conditions at the city’s public toilets.

“If I can choose, I usually do not use outside public toilets but those in 5-star hotels or in a cafe. If I can’t choose, or in case of emergency, I choose the squat toilets, which seem to be cleaner than the Western-style toilets.”

She said she would appreciate toilets that cleaned themselves automatically with appropriate disinfection products. And she said there should be training to encourage people to keep public toilets clean.

Standards of hygiene in China’s public toilets, particularly at scenic spots, have long been a cause for concern. There are also complaints over the shortage of public facilities. In some popular Shanghai tourist spots, long queues often form for public restrooms.

On the Bund, for example, there are only five public toilets, about 400 meters apart. But the riverfront area gets about 500,000 visitors on a normal day and up to a million tourists every day during holiday periods.

There are no department stores or other buildings along that stretch of the Huangpu River where people desperate to relieve themselves can go.

China Watch Blog wishes all its loyal readers a wonderful and prosperous New Year in 2013, and may this new year bring joy, happiness and good health and prosperity to all.

May we have world peace, and people of all religious backgrounds show even greater tolerance to people from other religious backgrounds. Let each person to live life according to his or her own beliefs.

May global trade be strengthened, and those people in power show greater mercy to the haves and the have-nots, and allow people to have greater confidence in the justice systems around the world.

China Watch Blog has learnt that one billion tourists have traveled internationally in 2012 according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the United Nations specialized agency for sustainable tourism.

This is equivalent to one in every seven people on the planet traveling the world in 2012, up from just 25 million in 1950.

The figure establishes tourism as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing economic sectors, accounting for:

· 9% of global GDP (direct, indirect and induced)

· 1 in every 12 jobs worldwide (direct, indirect and induced)

· US$ 1.2 trillion in exports a year

· 6% of world trade

· 8% of the exports of least developed countries

For developing countries, tourism brings much needed foreign exchange and investment. Tourism has also proven an extremely resilient sector, despite uncertain economic conditions, and is key to supporting the global economy in the current challenging times.

UNWTO forecasts point to the one-billionth tourist arriving somewhere in the world in December. UNWTO has chosen 13 December as the symbolic arrival date of the one-billionth tourist.

To celebrate, UNWTO has been running a global campaign to raise awareness of the power of one billion tourists to affect positive change by making small changes to their travel behaviour. The campaign, One Billion Tourists: One Billion Opportunities, calls on the one billion tourists to make their actions count by saving water and energy, using public transport, protecting heritage and more.

China Watcb Blog reports that IntroAmerica is an educational consulting business targeting mainland Chinese students who wish to study in America.

Contest Flyer

“We are working with US colleges interested in recruiting Chinese students, while at the same time trying to provide invaluable information to Chinese students seeking information about American culture, college life and the college admissions process. More simply, IntroAmerica aims to be a ‘bilingual match.com for US colleges and Chinese students,” says head of Product, Sondra WuDunn.

She is responsible for its website www.IntroAmerica.com as well as overseeing various aspects of the company’s social media platform. In conjunction with its launch last week, the company is are hosting a video contest and inviting all college students in the US to partake.

All they need to do is create a short video about their college life, submit to Sondra’s website or facebook page, www.facebook.com/introamerica, get their friends and family to ‘like’ our facebook fan page, and ultimately vote. Winners will be announced next month, with the top video contestant earning $3,000.

I invite you to check out our new website and ‘like’ our facebook page, but, more importantly, help spread the word about our video contest to any friend, associate or relative attending college who might wish to participate –please see the formal email announcement below and the attached flyer.