All posts by Eyejinx

Game Industry, Project Management

Working With China: Partners

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Not only is it a good idea to have a local partner when doing business in China, in many cases, it’s necessary.  Legally, foreign entities cannot own companies in China, so depending on the scale of business that you’re looking to do, you’re going to need someone on the ground to help you do it.

Things to look for in a partner:

  • Language skills.  A surprising number of Chinese students opt to learn English, but unless you are a fluent speaker of Mandarin or one of the local dialects, your partner needs to be your interface with the feet on the ground.  This means not only knowing English (or whatever your primary language of business is) fluently, but also being a strong and effective communicator in the local language.  This can be difficult to test for, but if you’re going to be doing important work with folks in China, you’re going to want to have one or more fluent Mandarin speakers on your end, so they can help assess your potential partner’s skills.
  • Willingness to work odd hours.  There are very few natural crossover points in the workday between China and the US (more in Europe), so either you or your partner needs to be willing and able to work around the time difference, preferably both.  With Skype and other voice/video chat tools, it’s easy to connect with people halfway around the world, but much better if they’re willing to interrupt dinner and deal with a crisis, or jump on at 3AM local time when the server goes down.
  • Willingness to travel.  One of the most important things about any relationship is spending time together.  In order to do this effectively with partners in China, your senior people (including you, most likely) will need to spend a lot of time in China – not a day or two, but weeks and months.  It also helps to have your Chinese partners come and live with you for a while, particularly at the start of a project, so that they are part of the process of defining needs, standards, etc.  In general, most of the people I worked with in China loved this and saw it as a great opportunity, but make sure you get on this early as visas to/from China still involve a fair amount of red tape.
  • Empathy.  This may seem like a strange one, but what you need out of your partner in China is the ability to understand and effectively represent your needs.  Empathy is a key skill and not one that is commonly foregrounded in business.  A partner who empathizes with you will be a much more effective advocate for you in the long run.
  • Experience working with foreigners.  This isn’t strictly necessary, but it’s definitely a benefit.  There are a lot of cultural differences between Chinese and American culture, from obvious things like the importance of hierarchy to subtle things like how critiques are communicated.  This is going to put a strain on both sides, but if your partner has been able to make this work before, the chances are better that they’re going to be able to make it work with you.  By the way, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re going to be immune to cultural differences.  You will make mistakes.  Lots of them.  Without knowing it.
  • Willingness to speak truth to power.  Again, this is a tough one to test for, but there are going to be things that you need to be told that are going to be uncomfortable to tell you.  Whether it’s personnel issues or scheduling changes, conflicts with national holidays or bureaucratic requirements, cost overruns or missed deliverables, something’s going to go wrong, and when it starts to go wrong is when you want to hear about it, not when it’s too late to do anything about it.  In Chinese culture, especially, it is traditionally looked upon as disrespectful and rude to disrupt those above you on the totem pole; younger Chinese can be more flexible about this, but you need to look for this trait and then positively reinforce it whenever possible.

This is hardly an exclusive list.  Working with China is a long and complex topic, certainly too much to cover in any one blog post, but hopefully this will help you get started.

Television

If You Don’t Know Steven Moffat by Now…

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Season 3 of Sherlock just showed recently in the US on PBS.  Fans of the show are rabid, hardcore.  Part of it, no doubt, is due to Benedict Cumberbatch and his astonishingly otter-like face, and in television, as in film or games, almost all products are the result of great teams, not simply exceptional individuals.  But, if you discount Moffat’s contributions, you do so at your own peril.

A little red-haired Scottish girl solemnly intones, “Dear Santa. Thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It’s Easter now, so I hope I didn’t wake you, but honest, it is an emergency. There’s a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it’s just an ordinary crack, but I know it’s not, because at night there’s voices, so please, please, could you send someone to fix it?”  That’s the opening to Season 5, Episode 1 of the re-launched Dr. Who (credit to Doctor Who Transcripts for the text).  Moffat had written for Dr. Who regularly since the re-launch, but the fifth season was when he took over as the show-runner, essentially the creative head of the franchise.  There are plenty of critics of Matt Smith and especially in the Matt Smith years of Amelia Pond (played by Karen Gillan), but there’s little doubt that the series has flourished and grown under Moffat’s stewardship.

Before any of that, there was Coupling, sort of a British version of Friends, a sitcom featuring three young, generally attractive male leads and three extremely attractive female leads.  While it is, in many ways, a fairly straightforward sitcom, even at this early stage, Moffat was experimenting with television as a medium and storytelling within that framework.  For example, there was the episode that played out in reverse-chronological order, starting with the ending and gradually revealing all the incidents that had led up to that moment; or, the episode where the main character speaks English in the first half to an uncomprehending foreigner, and in the second half, he speaks Italian and the foreigner’s dialogue is in English – for the characters, the same disconnect, but for the viewer, a shift in perspectives that unveils a larger picture.

As a writer, as a director, as a show-runner, Moffat has been pushing the quality bar on what can be done in television for over a dozen years; he’s widely recognized in the UK, even receiving a special BAFTA award in 2012.  The moment to be hiply conscious of him has passed; the fascination with the success of his works has already become a repeated topic for him to tackle in the last year.  But, if you like your television with humor, self-awareness, experimentation, and excellent production values, you would do well to acquaint yourself with his body of work.  The only question left is whether he will stick with television or make the jump to the movies.