Scott Kronick, on how communications and building relationships are important in business in society

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods.

Asia is my home now.

60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region. And the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, As well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now. Let's go, Jio.

Scott Kronick, my old friend. Excellent to see you and welcome to the pod. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott Kronick, who built The number one PR agency across the Asia Pacific from his lair in Beijing, built an incredible family and reputation and network. And it's lovely to see you here virtually. You're in Los Angeles, I'm in Bali, and we're talking about the speed of China.

Richie, welcome. Thank you. I am president of the Richie Robinson fan club. So part of the best, my greatest experiences has been meeting you, but That's kind of a theme of what, what makes people successful is the relationships that they build and how you build those. Guanxi, there's something true about the whole guanxi concept, but that has helped me a lot throughout my—

You have that fantastic newsletter that I love to read. And you talked about that Harvard study back in my hometown, in the city of Boston, that interviewed a bunch of Bostonians and interviewed a bunch of Harvard kids. And now it's stretched, I think, 80-plus years, almost 90 years. Now it's following their, their, their kids as well too. And the learnings from that are—

Are that the relationships are— people who live the longest and are the healthiest have very happy, productive relationships. And in this period of my life, that's more important to me than anything, is just the relationships that you build and create.

We both teach at Peking University, and I love to Now that we're both on the wrong side of 50, we can have little scabs and calluses and scar tissue, like armor, help people go into battle in life. And I tell people, if you're an MBA student at Peking University, you're already won in some regard. But like, you're talking about like wealth or status or impact or whatever it is. And like, that's all important, but that's not the ultimate goal. All of those are just resources to help you get to the top of the pyramid. The top of the pyramid is Relationships. That's what is funneling. That's what it should all funnel into.

There's something that you do very, very well that inspires me crazily, and that is when you see some raw potential of people and you see what they're capable of, and it's just kind of nurturing that talent and watching it fly. I get my greatest joy from that. And so the school has allowed me to do that. You can see some real talent and Working in China, you've had some— one thing about your theme of your podcast and your book about the speed of China is the development of talent.

Yeah.

And there's one young man, I remember the very first review I did, he couldn't believe that I kind of had tears in my eyes and I was doing it because I'm like, dude, man, you're doing so wonderfully and you've got such a trajectory ahead of you. Today he runs an agency. He's done extremely well, both with his family and financially. And we still get together today and I could see it. I get my energy out of those.

What's crazy is you tell me that story and I'm running through some names in my head of like who that could be, because it's actually multiple people. And one person who pinged me yesterday was Alex Acker, who started this really kick-ass successful microbrewery. And I remember seeing him when I was back in Beijing and he was just talking about how you changed the trajectory of his life. And that's so fulfilling, right? So wonderful. And speaking of trajectories, let's talk both about the trajectory of your life from a Midwestern guy on the path to the Middle Kingdom, and then your trajectory in the Middle Kingdom during the whole sort of like heady growth years, the past quarter century.

So first of all, I have had the great honor and delight to work with a fantastic company for the past 34 years, and that's Ogilvy& Mather. I was in the public relations business and started with Ogilvy. I was with a small firm first in New York, and a mentor once told me that instead of going to business school or law school, I should try to get experience in the Pacific Rim. And I said, that's exactly what I want to do. And so I joined Ogilvy. They had an international business. They were one of the first, the pioneers in developing a network in Asia. And I joined them in New York and spent 4 years just waiting, letting them know that I always wanted an Asia experience. I got the chance in 1990 to go to Australia, and this was at the peak of Crocodile Dundee and Olivia Newton-John's And I was like, wow, do I want to be in Australia? And that fell through. And it couldn't have been a luckier situation for me because a year later I got the chance to be the deputy in Taiwan.

Excellent.

And I went to Taiwan, Taipei. I was called in and the CEO told me I was going to go to Taipei. I said, that's exactly where I want to be. I ran back to my desk and looked up and we didn't have the internet back then as much. So there was like the encyclopedia, where's Taipei? And it was, Taiwan, and I said, "I want. I definitely want to be in Taiwan," and I moved to Taiwan, and ever since then, it's been an upward trajectory for me. I met my wife there. I've worked with some fantastic people, and couldn't have been a better choice. I spent four years in Taiwan, had a chance in 1995 to move to Beijing and open up Ogilvy Public Relations offices there, and that's where I've been since 1995. And with This last year, I'm serving now as a senior advisor to the firm, doing some of my own consulting and teaching and so forth, as you mentioned.

That's great. Yeah. So you grew the China office and then you took over the helm for Asia Pacific, and now you're a senior advisor for across Asia Pacific. So, I mean, what I think timing also is really important in life. They talk about how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, like their age, they were like the perfect age to ride the wave of PCs, but you were also part of this like pre-China wave of going to Taiwan because China wasn't quite as accessible in the '80s, early '90s. It was just starting to open up, but to basically get kind of a boot camp in Taiwan with the culture and the language and some of the cycles of learning there. And then you hit the ground in '95 when China really, the dragon was like already been awake for quite a while, but was like Riding his flying pigeon bicycle down the, down the road.

Well, people used to say Taiwan was a test market for China.

Yeah, indeed.

In fact, when I went, there were some people I took a course from Ken DeWoskin. He was at, I think, PwC at the time. His daughter was in Beijing working in public relations, Rachel. McGregor was in Taiwan. Jim McGregor was in Taiwan and then he moved to China. So I reached out to him. He was like chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce something. So there was a network of Taiwanese there that I had the chance to connect with and helped out a lot. My wife, I met my wife within my first year of being in Taiwan. And 4 years later, we were married and she's always been very helpful. There was some expatriates from, or if you call them expatriates, from Taiwan that were in the Beijing business that helped out a lot. But I'll tell you, you talk about timing and youth, I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, you've got this vision for things and you're testing them out. And someone said to me, what are you going to do? You got the big job now. What are you going to do? And I'm like, well, I'm going to get some clients and get some people and I'm going to be off to the races. And this one guy said, he said, what's your tail end strategy? What kind of business do you want to form? And so I had people that were probing and so forth that, but they helped out. They helped out a lot along the way.

Yeah. Sometimes just the vibrancy of youth. Can really just get you through it, right?

Back then I could work 20-hour days easily. I was, and I loved every minute of it. I mean, they always say that, what is it? Do what you love and the money will follow. I loved every minute of what I was doing. And I had some really good people that put me into positions where I'm punching above my weight and I'm like making it up as I go. And, but I love those situations.

But I'm glad that you admit that, Rebecca, because I think a lot of younger people, they don't understand that that's a lot of life is endeavoring to punch over your weight and just kind of making it up. Like, as they say in Chinese, like crossing the river by feeling the stones. Like there's rocks under there, you can't see them. And there's a rushing river and you just have to kind of put your toe in. And every once in a while you go under and you have to swim back to the shore, but then you learn, okay, now I know where the rocks are until you get to the other side. Right.

What do you like about working in China? Like we do, and when we did, is there's so much optimism, and there's so much confidence. And it's like everybody believes that it's not like somebody's done this before. I'm not going to do this or whatever. There's like a lot of energy and optimism, and people want to live better than their parents, and they can if they find the right mojo. They can do that.

Yeah, and there is that certain mojo, and that's really the one of the core things of the book is that there are some things about the speed of China that you don't necessarily. want to emulate, right? Working 70, 80 hours a week, like, that's not necessarily something that can really be applied to other markets, but there is a mindset and there is this mojo and optimism and cooperative attitude to really get things done that I think really can be learned from.

And from a Westerner perspective, one of the greatest things I've enjoyed— you have to have a sense of humor, which you have a fantastic one. But you have to, because there is the contrast of old and new everywhere you go.

Everywhere.

It's like you'll be driving down the street and there's a BMW that passes by and there's some guy, I remember this, driving, he had like a monkey in his bike basket or something and they're like driving next to each other and it's like, really? There's like these hutongs next to these fantastic buildings. And that's like one beauty of coming to China. You can just see, you can get a feel for the old and new, even the mentality of people, you know.

Certainly.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's completely odds with each other and it's kind of so seemingly conflicting, but it works, right? Just like, and it's something where you just have to really kind of suspend your biases and your sort of assumptions and then just, wow, I guess. Like one of the things like mobile payments, like, okay, it's the biggest country in the world and it's by population and arguably the oldest and they were the first ones to go cash, see you later. Like we'll just do everything electronically and every— it took a lot on the part of the populace to accept that, right?

Right.

And you'd think like, wow, China would be like, just given its size and history, it would be number 20 in line, right? Instead of A half decade ahead of the rest of the world, right?

Just the speed by which that's happened is amazing. That's why I have belief that when everybody has seen this, when China puts its mind to it, they can do, they can make it happen. I mean, even like take the adoption in the theme of your podcast and your book, take the adoption of cars. I mean, when you and I went to Beijing, everybody rode bicycles. There were no clogged streets. I mean, it's just—

400,000 cars, I think, in the whole city.

It was just, and then all of a sudden, poof, you can't, it takes an hour to go in from, to get from A to B. So it just, I mean, when you tell people that it used to be a city of bikes and now, you know, cars dominate the roads, it's emblematic of the theme of your book. I mean, you know, here's the deal. For the longest time, Everybody would come in. This is natural human behavior. They size up China to like how it's alike and different from the United States or Europe, and everybody would compare China to well back here we don't do it this way, we do it that way, and Europe. And I used to say, can we change the the the lens by which we look at this? Why don't you look at how far China's come since 1979 to now versus comparing it to the US and Europe or whatever? If you look at how much change has taken place over the course of that period of time, it gives you belief. And I've always felt like people like you and I have been the— I've always felt, I've always loved helping multinationals connect with Chinese companies because they have mutual interests. The multinational wants a little bit of to enter into China, the Chinese company wants to learn better practices. That took place for a while. We're looking at a new paradigm now, but I used to— that's one thing that's fueled my whole passion and desire is just the ability to help them connect. Now it's helping Chinese companies connect outside of, broaden their markets outside of, and what they have to offer. So more difficult now, but it's interesting.

Yeah, I think that's going to be the increasingly common wave of Chinese companies, especially in the tech sector, being more present in other markets. I think up to now, you remember when there was, you know, really no internet, when it was only academics and governmental workers in '95, '96. And then every year in the last quarter of a century, it's grown now to nearly a billion internet users. And there's going to be another 100 or so million that's going to be added, but most of them are not necessarily that attractive, right? It's people from the hinterlands for these internet players. So they're going to be more companies like TikTok, the most valuable startup in the world headquartered in Beijing, are going to be expanding to the rest of Asia and Europe and US. We're going to see much more of that. And one of the purposes of the books is— this book is to raise awareness at how quickly things are happening in China, but also giving companies and entrepreneurs some tips about how they can, you know, learn from it and best compete as well too. Like, tell me about some of the things that you've witnessed with some of your clients without giving away any secret sauce and how quickly things have evolved from kind of before and after.

In thinking about your theme, there are some inflection points that I think are notable. WTO accession.

2001.

Yeah. The Olympics, the Beijing Olympics was a premier branding event for the country. I would say the 2010 to 2020 was like the rise of China and people getting comfortable and not comfortable with that. And so at each point, kind of their lessons, I think in with the WTO, I used to— IBM really helped build the banking sector in the modern banking sector in China. And I remember the CEO, Lou Gerstner, coming into China during those period of time. And he used to have these behind closed door meetings and used to talk very tough to the Chinese and say, look, you got to do this, you got to do this. But externally, He was supportive of their WTO accession, and it wasn't popular at the time, but he was a trusted kind of advisor, and he was— and IBM's business flourished at that period of time. That the world is suffering from a trust decline, and I think when that happens, things start going awry. You— I'm not saying you should be naive, but if you go in with a perspective of not being able to trust, you're not going to get very, you're not going to get very far. I think my own experience, I have many trusted colleagues and they've helped build our business strongly. I think the Olympics was another inflection. The Chinese always wanted everything to be reported about them rosy.

You were deeply involved with that, right?

You were doing the We had about 10 sponsors.

Okay, okay.

And I have a great anecdote here. I mean, during the torch relay in 2007, there were protests in France and Britain and San Francisco about China holding the Olympics. And I was freaking out. I'm like, how is this ever going to happen? And I called up a Chinese professor and I said, can you tell me what's going on here? Because I'm like really worried about the global perception of China and holding the Olympics? And he said, Scott, we won the public relations battle for the Olympics. I'm like, help me understand that. And he said, China is united. What was important to the Chinese and what is important to people who understand China is that social stability, domestic stability is more important than anything else.

Mm-hmm.

So instead of like, Factions fighting with each other inside China. The dissent outside of China brought people together inside China to say, don't deny us our chance to hold the Olympics. We're going to show you we can do this better and whatever. You've seen it now. Even the US and other markets are dealing with more— it's more domestic policies than international and how they manifest those. We had a number of client kind of crises and situations. Most of the time, these are misunderstandings that just need a clearer help in the narrative. And so we've had a kind of risk reputation business that has done very well over the course of time because people not really understanding that lack of trust and people not understanding the market.

Interesting. And I love how you point out the fact that the he xie, as they say in Chinese, right, that is the thing of paramount importance, right? Just harmony inside the society. And to be able to— I think actually a lot of people try to frame around this, you know, 70-year-old regime since 1949, when Mao took power. And if you look at the 5,000 years of Chinese history, right, that's you know, less than 2% of all of Chinese history. I think really to look at China and to understand it a bit better, I think you have to look at like dynastic China, like the historical dynasties and what was important across all of those dynasties. And I think that cliché and that harmony is something that really stood out among a number of other things.

I couldn't agree more. Look, I am by far not a China historian. I used to even say I'm a— Student of modern history because there's so many smart historians out there that I wouldn't— that I've learned to listen to. What I try to do is understand. I'm not that complicated of a person, so maybe my simplicity helps. Maybe that has helped us over the course of time.

Mm-hmm.

I try to understand. I mean, the essence of great communications is kind of understanding somebody else's view. And being respectful. The Chinese are entirely respectful. Okay. I've learned a ton of that from the whole face issue. Sometimes things are just a matter of face. So being respectful, knowing that, I do think that there's so much opportunity for domestic companies and multinationals to play in the China market that just listening and understanding what the market needs, not what we've had Western companies come in and say, This is what we do. We're not changing our way. By the way, anybody who's black and white, I've seen them come and go. They don't do very well here. You gotta be ambiguous. You gotta, you gotta be able to deal with some ambiguity. And so, but you need to understand what's the market need and how do you fit into that market need? And those people that come in and try to understand that, not to change your values as a company. But just understand how you fit in and what you're willing to do. And we talk a lot to companies about operating in China. Can't be a global company and not be able to market to the largest country in the world. And so I remember with pharmaceutical companies, I must've written this message a thousand times. For a lot of multinational pharmaceutical companies, they've had trouble accessing the China market. The reality is if you frame it in a consumer sense that Chinese consumers are entitled to the same effective and efficient medications that people throughout the world are, it changes the narrative. And we've been successful at, with market access issues to say, we're not trying to, it's not all about profit. It's about providing access. To a critical healthcare area that the Chinese consumer needs. By the way, the one big story in your book that you're going to see playing out is just the rise in the power of the middle class. And anybody that can— because that's the real story of the next decade, is really how the middle class evolves and how people tap into that. Both domestic and international companies.

Insanely attractive. Yeah. And it's not the, let's take our minivan and drive to Cheesecake Factory and then go shopping at the mall all day or whatever. Right. Or maybe people don't even shop at malls anymore because the rise of COVID One of my, as a side story, one of my favorite anecdotes about the US is that it took 20 years for the US to get to 20% of retail going through e-commerce. And then last year with COVID it took just a matter of weeks for it to be at 30%. So it literally grew a decade within— it was like an ultimate accelerant, COVID, not necessarily a change agent so much as bringing it to the future. And you see a lot of the delivery methods and the e-commerce sort of offerings in the US. You look, you know, you bring that to compare it to China and you're like, wow, it's actually— China's now a half decade ahead of the US. It used to be copy to China, but now it's copy from China. And I think there's a lot to be learned from that. And I think that kind of incredibly dynamic and fast-growing e-commerce culture, I mean, there's many aspects. I think one is, yes, you need to provide things that are critical to people. If you really care about people, then you should care just as much about the 1.4 billion Chinese people, right?

Right.

But also, you want to be in business you can't not be in China. But then, this isn't a political podcast or a political book, but you can't not engage with China. Like, the way forward is engagement.

Well, to being at the table, being at the table dynamic, just to even share. You can disagree, but you got to be at the table to— and that's been always my kind of motto. I've never wanted to be naive about the challenges and things of that nature. But to be in the game, just talking is more important than anything else. And there's so many things that China can work on with the world. China's going through this period of self-reliance. Everybody wants self-reliance. I mean, you know, it's just like—

Kind of the brand of America.

So I don't take that negatively. Everybody goes through that period. So it's just about finding ways to work together. Harmoniously is important. And that's what I'm hopeful for.

Yeah. So share a couple of anecdotes in your industry, like as you grew China and then you started to expand to the rest of Asia Pacific, were you seeing that some of the tactics and tips and tricks that you were using in China were applicable to the rest of Asia Pacific, maybe in a way that was different from say New York or London?

Well, I'm not sure it's like Look, China is expanding into Asia first and foremost. So we have, in my capacity of running Ogilvy PR in Asia Pacific, I can't tell you how many times I got an email from Indonesia to say, can you send some of your Chinese staff to help us, help us work and land these Chinese companies in Indonesia?

Mm-hmm.

Same thing in Vietnam. Now we're actually betting on Vietnam. We set up a China outbound business in New York. Actually, I'll tell you what I did. My boss, who I think Chris Graves, great guy, moved, came back to, came from Asia and he was the global CEO for Ogilvy PR that I was reporting into him. And Miles Young was the CEO of Ogilvy, who was also the CEO of Ogilvy Asia Pacific.

Mm-hmm.

beforehand. And Miles knows— Miles is one of those China historians that knew everything about China. And every single Chinese delegation knew of Ogilvy because Ogilvy is very famous in the branding side, and everybody who wanted to create a global brand would come to Ogilvy. And there's so many delegations going into New York that every week Chris and everybody was setting up welcoming dinners and briefings on how to enter the U.S. market and so forth. We actually helped Lenovo in a lot of the early branding and the communications when they did their deal with buying IBM's PC business. And I said to him, I'm going to do you one better. I had one of my staff come to me and said he wanted to move to New York. I said, we're going to set up a global China business, put a Chinese staffer inside This young guy went to Harvard's Kennedy School, and we'll put him in the New York office, and he'll be the recipient of all these delegations. I'll take this off of you. But we tried to do that, to be the concierge for Chinese companies that wanted to want to go global, and that practice still continues. And and I work very closely with that practice in helping. It's not only being a concierge for U.S. companies that don't have established China businesses because. Most of those businesses can just work through our China office, but also Chinese companies that are coming into the US and just helping them.

Love it. Yeah. Increasingly so. Yeah. I've taught a course at Tsinghua before about some of the mistakes that US have made coming into the China market. And what are some of the things that you've experienced with US companies coming into China and Chinese companies coming into the US that are mistakes that can be avoided?

I think that. The one critical, you need to understand, you need to test. You don't go hog wild and try to do the whole country at once. You need to segment. You need to understand who you're selling to and you need to understand what drives them and pick a geography to begin with. Be very focused and learn. I mean, just don't start with trying to do 10 things. Do 1 or 2 things really, really well. I remember there was a, we had a payment card that was coming in and these guys told me that there are, what is it at the time? 1.3 billion people wear 2.6 billion mittens. And, and we're going after the whole market. And so I just feel like that kind of naivety gets you.

Mm-hmm.

The other thing is, we used to have a saying that a brand is not successful until the local market tells you so. McDonald's can't sell, won't be McDonald's unless the local market says, we welcome McDonald's. We want to eat your Big Mac that tastes the same as anywhere else in the world or whatever. But a brand is not successful unless you invest in it. Actually, I remember a conversation one of the Lenovo product heads had with one of our staff and they took apart the IBM PCs. And they said, we're doing this, we make the same PCs as this company does. How come they can sell it 2 times the price premium that we sell it? And it's because IBM had invested so much in the brand. And so I just think you gotta be focused in what you're trying to do. China can be a very expensive market. Just test the market. It's hard to do China from outside of China. So you gotta be there and be Get a feel for the marketplace. And, but focus would be my recommendation.

That's great. And I love how you talk about, look at China since '79, since real opening and what's happened over the last 40-plus years and sort of judge it on that criteria. And I think there's a chart that I'm going to include in the book and it shows US since 1900 to present day and China from 1979 to present day. And it's really kind of like a almost a 4-to-1 ratio, 3.9-to-1 ratio, and like what's happened in terms of the trajectory and the growth. And it's something that could maybe take 4 years in the US can be done in a year in China in terms of projects, but also just China speed. And I think maybe 20 years in the US is 5, half decade in China, that the cycles of innovation and pace are just so much faster. And have we seen some changes inside the industry in China and like what What was it like in '95 when you first got there and what's happening with the China office now in terms of PR and how things are pushed out to the public?

It was the public relations industry was a nascent industry back in '95. There are a couple of people that were in the market that I have great respect for. Serge Dumont, Scott Seligman. I don't know if you remember Scott Seligman, Curtis Chin. There's a guy by the name of Steve Drake. There were a bunch of Early people, Diane Terry, who helped me out a lot, the late Diane Terry.

But back in the day, if I, if I may interrupt, like Serge Dumont, as I understand, he lived in the Summer Palace. I don't know if you ever said his address was Summer Palace.

Serge knew how to cultivate relationships. He had a firm that he sold to one of my competitors, but the Western companies were all welcoming. We came together. There was a huge market. Enough business for everybody. And we came together to talk about how to shape, operate in the market and so forth. There were a couple of local firms, but not a lot. Over the course of time, a lot more local firms have evolved and it's gotten more sophisticated. Back then, having everybody you hired for attitude, trained for skill. We would just hire for someone that was great. Not a lot of people came in with a lot of Great experience, and you would train them. And I preferred that. I preferred bringing in people that didn't come with other cultures that they wanted to. That's what they wanted to. We created our own kind of culture. But I would say talent in the speed of China, talent before talent. Anybody who thinks China is a cheap talent market is no longer true.

Hasn't been. True for a while.

Yeah. So, I mean, you have to pay for talent. The biggest arguments we used to have was with our kind of our finance department and just said, how come everybody always needs a 100% increase? So everything was like that. I mean, you and I lived through, you talked about all I could think of, the e-commerce craze. We went to sleep and we woke up and all of a sudden There are all these motor scooters on the street delivering stuff. It was like overnight. It's like we went to sleep and all of a sudden WeChat Pay and Alipay did away with cash. I'm embarrassed to carry cash in China because they think I'm old. It's like nobody takes cash. So good on Alibaba, Tencent, and how they've developed that. But they're like those types of behavior changes. If you were to tell me 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that someday nobody's going to use cash, I'd say bullshit. But I think you've got to hand it to the tech, the Chinese tech community, and how innovative they've become. There were always these debates on Kind of Chinese creativity and how creative the Chinese were. And 20 years later, they're going to come back and there's going to be a thousand payment solutions. It's going to be like, this is how the world was changed from. I think we have the regulatory environment. Everybody uses gunpowder and the printing press kind for the betterment of humankind. That's a growth area because that's not only necessity in the West. But it needs to be a necessity in China as well.

Indeed. I think this whole pace of like this 4-to-1 ratio kind of took the West by surprise in a way. China is a copycat culture and there's air cover from Big Brother and that's why we can't be successful in there, but local companies can. And if you pull those threads, there's, you know, some truth to them. But the, the real truth that I have lived and breathed and you've lived and breathed is that it's absolutely gladiatorily competitive. And there's true innovation. Like, that's actually— those are the 2 engines that really drive things forward.

Here's the one thing. I mean, I don't doubt there are lots of IP infringement cases that have happened over the course of time. I get a little exercised when someone that's never been to China gets on television and talks about the IP environment because they don't know that Chinese companies are suing Chinese companies now, and that's providing a healthier IP environment. I was told by a friend that a large percentage of the cases of Westerners suing Chinese for IP infringements in China have been decided on the— for the Western companies. So I just feel like—

Things cheer you up.

—China sits there and just says, oh, they steal everything we have. It's just like, well, that could have been a narrative back 10 years ago, but I'm not sure it exists now. I'm not saying that I'm not naive and that doesn't happen, but, but I just feel like it's a blanket statement that people use.

Yeah. There's straight up espionage politically and commercially, but I mean, those things, that's not the topic of discussion today. And that certainly happens on, on all sides, not to justify it at all, but copying, like, of course copying happens. But what's happening now is that there's a lot of copying from China. I think that's actually what's happening. And like, it's not so much that a creativity issue, it's more of a stage of the market. I think back in the day, the Brits stole the quote unquote technology for porcelain or for tea curing. And then the US back in the early days took books in German, French, and English and took technology around the Industrial Revolution. Like, it's just a stage of the market. And China, of course, Of course, copied liberally. We're the eBay of China. We're the Facebook of China. We're the Twitter of China. And then I think probably about five, six, seven years ago, it started to be more difficult to go on a road show because you were like, "You are the of China." And it's like I talked to the CEO of YY.com doing live streaming, and he's like, "There is no real equivalent in the U.S." But the company has gone on to do really amazing things. And I think my thesis now is that there's four billion people, say, on the internet, and eight billion people in the world will probably tap out at. 10 or 12 billion. So there's going to be another 4 billion people getting on the internet in the next decade or so. Latin America, Asia, Africa, who's going to mop that up? Is it going to be Silicon Valley or is it going to be China? And I think in some ways China's better poised to go into these markets because they're more developing markets that China has experience around. And so this is like a rallying cry, like as much as I love China, like U.S. is my mother and you know China is my wife in some regards, right? That comedian Joe Wong, I don't know if you saw when I brought Joe Wong out to perform out in Shenyi, and he's like, China's my mother and America is my wife, and they're arguing in the kitchen and I'm hiding in the cellar. But they both have nuclear weapons, so I really want them to get along, right? And so I want there to be understanding and engagement, but I also want this to be kind of like a Sputnik. Right. When we, we saw that Russian rocket launch and we thought, we're going up there too, like we're going to compete. And I think there's a lot that the West can learn, right? Even if you don't like my beloved New England Patriots, especially during the Brady dynasty, you couldn't be like, yeah, I'm not even going to watch that tape. I don't even want to watch those guys play. It's like, what? There's so much to be learned from Belichick and Brady, even if you don't like them. Right. So.

It doesn't have to be all confrontation. I mean, I think you and I share a passion for cross-cultural communication and engagement, and you've done it with your comedy and your humor. And I thought you provided a lot of us throughout our formative years with a lot of great comedy. But I, I think that was from the professionals, not from me.

My job was to get up there and make them look at the beginning, but that was my job, is to get up and make them look just that much better.

When you come down, you and I are going to do an open mic night together. Let's do it.

I did open mic night at the Comedy Store in 1988, so I'm, I'm due, due for another.

But my family tells me that I think I'm a lot more funny than I am, so— and I, I only laugh at my own jokes.

I, I love, I love, I love your book, all the anecdotes and confusion about China. There's endless jokes about that.

It's— well, that will be my material Actually, I start talking about the relationship with my wife and I say, I always ask her if she wants the spoon and she said she'd rather like to chopstick with me.

Excellent. That's great. I love it. Yeah, I talk about how I lived 4 years in Hong Kong and I studied Chinese the whole time I was there. Then I moved to China and I had a phone call with a Chinese businessman, used my Chinese name, speak all in Chinese, and we meet in person. And he's shocked that I'm this foreign businessman because he said on the phone, I sounded just like a Chinese 5-year-old. Right. Which, right. Isn't that a great compliment? I've been studying for 4 years. I sound like a 5-year-old and those Chinese kids are really smart and I'm a year ahead of them. So thank you. Good night.

I said, I sat on a plane once and went back and some guy was on his phone and said, oh, so what? Most people don't know that you had the baby pig.

Yeah. That pig for, uh, telegraph. Full grown till it was about, about 2 and a half years. And we had it from 1 kilo to 84 kilos. And it started to outweigh me. And it lived with us. So here's a crazy story, like, Peng Shiyi, like, who is the real estate mogul of China, he, his first development in China was called Shendai Cheng in Dawanglu. And we lived on the bottom floor, which had an outside patio. And he lived in the penthouse. And then he looked out his window, and he'd see this pig out in the patio. And you'd think that like, wait a second, the guy who's the biggest real estate developer on his way to be, he would just say, what is that filthy animal doing there? No way. It's actually a symbol of luck, right? Like the symbol for jia, for family in Chinese has the pig in it, right? Because the pig was like under the house and you would just throw all the scraps underneath there, right? So he opened up, uh, Gen Y SoHo and he asked the, the pig to, uh, join him on stage.

Yeah.

And his staff came and Helped us bathe the pig and like got him in a special truck and took the pig to there and put a bow on her head. And he was up on stage with, with Zoe the pig. The pig was wildly intelligent, but all business. So we had to get rid of it because it tried to attack our oldest son when he was eating ice cream. So anyway.

No, but people like Jiang Xing and Pan Sherry, Jack Ma, they're all part of that theme of China at China speed because back then, That was just the formative years. I mean, my kids went to elementary school with Pancho and Jiangxing's kids, but I remember Jack talking to us about a potential listing someday. And he was talking to Porter at the time and I was like, Porter.

Yeah. Because you, you had, well, you had Porter Harris, man, who worked for you. And then he went and ran comms for Jack and wrote that amazing book and made that documentary. A crocodile in the Yangtze?

Yeah. So, I mean, but we used to talk, we used to joke and say, there actually weren't a lot of local companies that could take away our, not only our Western staff, but domestic staff too. But Jack had that gift of vision.

Amazing. Yeah. So charismatic. I remember the very first time that I met him, it was '99 in Hong Kong. And he just closed money from Goldman Sachs. And he came to Hong Kong. And funnily enough, it was a reporter from the South China Morning Post, which he now owns. And I organized an event with my friend John Hakim, was called Eye and Eye. And we had Jack come and speak. And there was 380 people there. And I had brought an old school guy, I wish I could remember his name, from Leo Burnett Advertising. I love the guy. School of hog knocks, mate. He was an advertising guy, copyright guy his whole life. Never went to college, but he was advertising guy in his blood. And he was in his early 60s and he came to see Jack speak. And somebody from SCMP said, what about revenues? And Jack looked at him and then scurried to the other side of the audience and then pointed at that guy and said, revenues? And then he went right, ran over back to the guy and he said, we're running too fast to care about revenues.

Right.

And this advertising guy that I knew slammed his drink down and splashed it and said, charlatan. And then he left. And then I think Jack then became the richest man in China, but anyway, and now he owns the SCMP. But I think back then in the dot-com boom days, it was heady times and a little bit different, but you could taste in the back of your teeth, the charisma of Jack, right?

This is one thing I learned, and I don't by any means think that we operate at the speed of China. I mean, I'm like a little bit too conservative for that, unfortunately, because I have a risk adversity to— I want to make sure it's successful. But what we would do, everybody would joke about my business plan every year because my business plan would be, I'm going to do the same thing I did, but a little bit better. And I'm going to do one other thing to explore. So that was the frame of my business plan. So in 1999, I said, this is what we're doing well with. I'm going to continue doing this. And I'm going to bring over a financial expert to help all these Chinese companies list. And you remember Renee and Sage? Very well. Yeah. Renee came over with Sage and Renee ran our investor relations business and that thing Crazy. She was writing contracts from her desk. I mean, we must've done the first— it was like the second, like 5 listings after that. Then in the mid-2000s, the auto business was taking off and we had one young guy who was crazy about developing the auto business. So the one area we were going to invest in developing the auto team and that guy's business took off and now we have a huge team. So It was just like smelling where the opportunity was, and not everything worked out. I mean, we also wanted to go after domestic pharma business, but that was always hard to crack. But we had like every year we had one new initiative that we were going to try to put our energy in tackle. That was just the PR business. But Chris Ryder in the direct business at that time did the same thing on his end.

He scaled that into a monster. So you may have gone fast, quote unquote, to go slow, right? And to be able to make sure you served people well, but there was nothing slow about the scaling up and the growth of what you did.

We rode that wave for sure. And we had a company that was totally supportive of that. And it's done Ogilvy very well. It pales— at the time we were hiring hundreds of people. But I was taking briefs from IBM who had like they needed to hire like thousands of people at a time. This is in the early 2000s, so the scale for me, I was always excited because I came out of the New York office, came to China, and every week there was a big brand that was conducting a new pitch for their business. I'm like, really? I mean, this week it's IBM, next week it's Intel, next week it's. Fortune magazine. And it was just like, when they're, I mean, really all these huge opportunities, they only came once in a quarter. They all had established relationships, but when you're setting up in China and then you're just really trying to find people that could have the—

People.

Yeah. People and nurturing the people and creating a culture. Actually, Ogilvy is coming out with a, we've got a couple of books coming out. With just how we built the culture in the early days.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. And your mafia, your Ogilvy China mafia have gone on to do amazing things. Like you talked about mid-'90s, how you basically had to take raw clay and mold it. But I think now there's really this sort of like senior group that's graduated from there. But also now I think what's happening in China is that there's a lot more like entrepreneurial activity and a lot more Savvy and sophisticated executives as well too. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like what you see, like compared to maybe Western companies, like Chinese execs?

Here's the, here's the one piece of advice I'm going to give that I think is worth a million bucks. And that is how somebody leaves the company is almost more important than how they come to the company.

Great.

We celebrated every, you know, that half of our clients are former Ogilvy people. Because when they leave— McKinsey is famous for doing this.

McKinsey, it's funny you say that. That's what I was going to say.

Under Marvin Bower at the time, they write about this, but every McKinsey client was a former McKinsey partner or something like that at one moment in time. But they kind of groom CEOs and then they go on and then they hire McKinsey back. For us, it was like When somebody leaves, they get maybe a very competent CMO or Chief Communications Officer, but those people always need a team to help them consult, deliver what they were doing. And so we would celebrate people that when someone comes in and says they're going to leave, that's natural. I mean, that's natural, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I'm fortunate enough that a lot of the people that have stayed with our business have been there for More than 15 years or whatever, so I've got a cultivated long-term staff. But when somebody leaves, we celebrate them, and they've all of my friends are former Ogilvy people working somewhere doing something interesting. And but that's helped us always build greater pipeline of opportunities. They go out; they say, "Oh, Ogilvy's really good at that," or they have this whatever. So actually, I learned that from T.B. Song, my boss for many years. I mean, he's one of the when you say the Taiwan, the Oval View, but he's been my boss forever. But one person left very early on in my career with him and I said, oh, we got to have her sign an NDA and she can't take clients, she can't take people. And he said, we don't do things that way. He said, you let her go. There are naturally going to be some competitive issues, but that's not the way we do things. So the culture eats strategy bit. Live and well exist in China.

Yeah, create great relationships and also just become more competitive and just become more attractive to your existing and prospective clients, right? And I think that's a kind of a great lesson for, I think, what's happening between, you know, US and China right now. I'm really advocating that the US just becomes more, you know, competitive in 5G, 6G, and other areas as well too, and uses some of these lessons from China to be able to compete with China, engage with China, and coopetition.

Yeah, exactly. I'm with you there. I, I think you have to be at the table discussing things and be honest. I'm hopeful with this administration that is a little bit more predictable that can happen. There's so much positive things that can be done in healthcare and in climate and to grow both markets. I mean, the reality, and everybody needs to understand this, is China is still a very huge market for many American, European brands. And those— that access to this market helps Chinese consumers, but also helps the home market as well. And that connectivity helps society overall. So you need to continue and nurture that. The isolation, the fractured dialogue doesn't help anybody. That's the way I've operated myself. Again, I'm not naive to the challenges. I don't think everything has to be hunky-dory, but we need to go in with an honest assessment.

Sure.

I do feel like what the US, I think, doesn't understand is I think China understands the US system really, really well, and I'm not sure US understands China as well. So there are some people that we need to be front and center during this period of time, and I'm hopeful.

Yeah, as our mutual friend Mitch Presnick says, I'm neither a panda hugger nor am I a panda slug. I just want to engage, right? I really do.

Talk about a guy who's done exceptionally well. I mean, Mitch, when I talked about Serge and those guys, Mitch was amongst that group of people as well and has done phenomenally well.

And why Mitch?

Because Mitch is, he's a goomer. He is someone that he trusts people and he's kind of developed it and looked for synergies and he did extremely well in that process.

And deserved to do so. Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much, my steel buddy, or however it translates in. I really appreciate that sweeping arc of the last 30 years of your life. And I think the next 30 years chapter is going to be equally as interesting. And I thank you so much.

Richie, I appreciate this opportunity. I've got some materials on kind of China's rise during this period of time that I'll keep sending you. And I love what you're doing. I think you've got, you're onto something with China Speed. And I just don't want to get too old so I can keep up with China Speed. You know?

I just want to at least have a front row seat as everything is whizzing by.

I think I can play basketball the way I have that. I have still ambition to stay young. So.

That's the thing. You take your D1 soccer experience from Syracuse. into the basketball court where we first met and into the business world, but into life. I love that about you. Hey, love and good vibes to you and yours, my friend, and thanks again.

We'll stay close, Richie. Anything we can do, I appreciate it. Best of luck with this. You're on to something great.

I really appreciate it.

Okay.

Hey, buddy, thank you so much.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rich Robinson Show, Season 1, at the speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian.

Cheers, y'all.