At this very moment I am in a hotel in Bangkok, which is seemingly the only place in town where one can escape the barrage of stakeholders extolling the advantages of opening a factory in Thailand. Their reasoning is not unfounded, and it does not take much looking around to see the fertile ground where upon the next global manufacturing powerhouse may arise.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately as to what that magic set of ingredients might be. Where is the interesection of favorable trade rules, tax incentives, labor costs, and infrastructure, and how might a country create the ideal environment in which manufacturing might thrive?

Regular readers of my column know that I run a factory in China, and as an American citizen who has chosen to build a business overseas, I have had no shortage of opinions thrust upon me at countless cocktail parties. What I have spent a long time explaining is the reasons that we are here, for they are never as simple or clear cut as popular rhetoric or sound bites may lead you to believe.

We are not in China because of the low cost, and in fact, having set up and run a company here for the past few years, I can say unoquivicably that the cost advantage that we once enjoyed is fast vanishing. There are cheaper countries in which one can set up shop, and even now local factory owners are beginning to entertain the option of opening new facilities in other, lower cost locations.

The reason we are here is because this location is extremely well equipped to support manufacturing. China has become a center of excellence for many products, from simple items like stamped steel to high tech items like the iPhone that I am using to write this article.

In my business, retail fixtures, we build products from wood, metal, and plastic, and often integrate electronics like lighting or speakers and video screens.

In retail, as with many other industries, speed to market can make or break a company. Although we have a talented team of in house designers, we rely on our vendors to give us design feedback and help us sourcing the correct components. It is the proximity of these vendors and suppliers that make China the most valuable location for so many manufacturers today, ourselves included.

For all of the high tech collaboration and networking technology that we can deploy today, design and manufacturing is still a very hands-on business. Regardless of how perfect we can make a 3d computer model, once we make a prototype there are always changes that need to be made. Showing a prototype sheet metal shelf to one of my suppliers inevitably leads to a conversation about what I wanted to accomplish, and usually several new suggestions from that supplier about how we might bring that vision to life. The same process repeats itself for our plastics suppliers and electronics vendors. The proximity of so many qualified sub contractors, and their willingness to change their output to match our needs is what a true manufacturing advantage is made of.

And so it seems that the way to enrich the soil to drive manufacturing growth is to ensure the growth of all of the ancillary and supporting factors needed. A factory cannot survive as an island unto itself, it truely takes a village to support it’s growth.

Nokia recently aquiesed to this reality as their worsening financials forced them to close their factory in Romania. As Nokia put it in the official statement, the drive to gain efficiency has forced Nokia to “Focus its feature phone manufacturing on those locations with optimal proximity to suppliers and key markets…. Nokia’s high-volume Asian factories provide greater scale and proximity benefits.”

I am reluctant to blame their current economic situation for these cuts, as it simply is the most sensible thing to do. The invisible hand of the markets pushes us to produce our goods for the lowest cost possible at a given quality level; only by moving our manufacturing operations to areas that have a robust support network can we be assured of maximizing our efficiency.

You don’t have to be Nokia to realize the benefit of a robust network of suppliers in close proximity to your factory, and in fact, it is the smal to medium size manufacturers that stand to gain the most from these regional business relationships. I make lots of parts from injection moulded plastic, however I can not afford to purchase and run a complete moulding line.  Having a supplier nearby gives me the advantage of their scale at a price that allows me to be competitive.

It is not all doom and gloom however, but rather a new set of considerations that we must take into account. I have met some great manufacturers in the USA that ensured their survival by simply bringing more competencies in house. If your metal vendor closes up shop, perhaps the best option is to bring metalwork into your own factory.

Regardless of what it is that you make, understanding not just your role, but rather the entire ecosystem is necessary to ensure that you make the right decisions, whether it is a decision to relocate existing factories across the ocean or to add more competencies by expanding those facilities.

This humorous aside illustrates a very important lesson about conducting business in foreign lands: The context of the conversation matters just as much as, if not more than, the subject matter.  When making the move to outsourced manufacturing, context is easy to take for granted.

When placing an order with a supplier accustomed to doing business with US customers, there are countless contextual items that I know they understand without a long explanation being necessary.  These contextual items range from the complex, for example, understanding how to package our order into logical kits for multi-store rollouts, to more obscure, as in stipulating finishes that are LEED compliant, to simple things, like ensuring that all of our electronics and digital signage components have the requisite regulatory approvals.

The combination of our knowing what we need to deliver to our customer and my suppliers knowledge of all of the right questions to ask combine to provide a system of checks and balances that is often absent in supplier-client relationships that cross international boundaries.

In outsourcing some or all of our manufacturing activities, we must be cognizant of the need to provide context around what it is that we are designing and building, because more often than not, our manufacturing partners overseas lack the contextual understanding necessary to understand not just the parts that they are building, but how those parts fit into a larger ecosystem.

I’ve set out to create teachable context with our suppliers many times, and I’ve found that often it is the simplest lessons that have the most impact.

Keep it visual:

Whether you’re up against a language barrier, a culture barrier, or simply find some concepts difficult to articulate, using photos and videos is one of best ways to share your teachable point of view.  I’ve often found that what would take me hours to express in words can be understood quickly with just a few photos or a quick video store tour.

Keep it simple:

I find that the more technical the details are, the less I need to talk about it.  I rarely discuss critical dimensions in an initial presentation, because the drawings and solid models express that to a precise level.  What I have found much more valuable are simple overviews.  An explanation of how a particular store is laid out, an overview of the products we are displaying, even a brief description of the types of shoppers that we are targeting all come together to instill in our partners the context around what is it that we want to build.  Picture yourself as a tourguide moving through the experience of a store, a display, a product; leave out the technical details and focus on the highlights.

Focus on what, not how:

One of most important skills to hone when outsourcing is to detach yourself from your roots as a manufacturer, and reframe your projects in terms what you want to do, not how you want to do it.  Our instincts often tell us that the way to remove risk is to specify every part of our project with as much detail as possible, yet this is often counter productive.  By demanding an exact bill of materials and assembly methodology, we tie the hands of our partners, whereas they might be able to make the same product that we want better or at least, more efficiently.  Furthermore, by demanding a supplier use an unfamiliar process, we increase the likelihood of errors, adding needless rework costs to our bottom line.

Imparting a sense of context in your suppliers empowers them to create the experience that you want using methods with which they are familiar.  The small time investment that you make at the start of your project will pay countless dividends in current and future projects.

Act fast 

I’ve had several assignments that involved a relocation, and each time I’ve found that the key to success has been to act fast.  All of the things in your life have a certain momentum, and you have to lay the groundwork early to ensure that things don’t fall apart during the transition period.  It is amazing how fast bills and other milestones pile up when you’re off in a new location trying to scout out an apartment and turn on utilities in a foreign language. So my advice is, as soon as you can, rent a new place, get a PO box, sign up for a skype number, and settle in for a bit of a bumpy ride.

Take a hard look at all of the actions that you take on a monthly basis related to your current living situation. Bills. Phone calls.  Parent teacher meetings.  Little league coaching commitments. Book club. That gym membership you’ve been meaning to use. Whatever it is, it’s time to start setting up the systems to offload the responsibility for some or all of these tasks to other people or to technology.  Regardless of HOW you address each of these items, it is crucial to address them as early as possible.  Time, as it always does, will get away from you.

Bills

This is easily the most critical item, and possibly the most complex, save for those of you that are trying to line up a high quality english language immersion elementary school for your kids in the backwoods of Asia.  Most of your creditors today have no doubt been encouraging you to “go paperless”, and now is the best time to take them up on the offer. Start by listing all of the people to whom you pay money on a regular basis and perform a triage;  those that are not needed, cancel now (this is the best part, by the way), for all of the others, start by enquiring about paperless billing.  Autopay is even better, because you will almost certainly have other things on your mind.  For those creditors and customers that are stuck in the stone age, you’ll have to provide them with a new address for bills and payments.

I feel like I have relocated some many times that I almost have it down to a routine.  During my first international relocation I found a snag, however.  While before I had typically gone to my new city and set up a PO box at the nearest Mail Boxes Etc (Now the UPS store, albeit with the same basic features), relocating internationally meant that I had to find another place to send my mail.  What I found was a service that catered to the perpetually mobile, a PO box that would (under the supervision of bonded security guards, no joke!) open our mail, scan it, and email me a scan of the envelope and the contents. I found this service through a website advertising services for RV-ers, and regardless of intended audience, I’ll bet that there are more than a few expats that need such a service.  Another great place to look is in companies that provide services to military personnel and their families.

Power of Attorney

Before I embarked on my first overseas assignment, I sought the advice of my father, an attorney, on what legal items I needed to have in place before I left the country for a long period of time.  He suggested, above all else, that my wife and I should to appoint a power of attorney to help us should we ever need to sign any documents for banks or other legal contracts.

As is typical in father-son relationships, I didn’t listen.  I mean, what are the chances, right?

Of course, less than 6 months into our time overseas, up crops some legal documents that my wife and I need to sign and notarize.  What would have been an innocuous action on US soil turned into quite an ordeal in our small town life overseas. After traveling to (and barely missing our appointment at) the US embassy, we forked over one hundred dollars for the consulate to notarize our forms, and another seventy dollars to FedEx these forms back to the USA.  Nearly two hundred dollars spent to sign two pieces of paper, all because I couldn’t be bothered to fill out my power of attorney forms.  As they say on the internet, learn from my failure

Excess Stuff

My wife and I moved in together after separately owning two 3-bedroom/2-bath homes.  Luckily we had a garage to hold all of the overlapping things that we brought together into our newly formed joint household.  It wasn’t until a few years later, on the eve of our first “family relocation” that we dealt with the cornucopia of excess that had been camping out in our little used spaces. It is only when faced with the prospect of having to put most of our things in storage that we considered whether we really needed four vacuums or seven televisions.

In the same vien, I am also a huge proponent of file digitization. Some time ago, I had the good fortune of working closely with the people at Fujitsu, who introduced me to their Scansnap scanners.  I don’t hesitate in telling you that these devices changed my life, and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t have their newest model in my laptop bag right now. Whereas we once had a large filing cabinet full of paper (not to mention piles on our desks), the scanner enabled us to digitize and catalog every document that we needed, and many that we didn’t need.  I can think of more than a few occasions where having a digital copy of an obscure receipt or loan document saved me from hours of needless tribulation.  For those of you with neither the time nor inclination do scan it all yourself, there are several services on the market that will happily take boxes of your files and trade you pdf files in return.

The little things

After six years working at Circuit City, I went to work for one of our vendors, a small one, based in New Zealand. My boss there was a great guy who had recently immigrated to New Zealand from Germany.  Early on in my time there, he said something to me that has stuck with me for the rest of my career.  He remarked, casually, that there is a huge difference between having a holiday abroad and working abroad. Throughout my career, this is a theme that has been reinforced time and again in my own experience.

It’s often the little things that you miss the most.  Life has a rhythm over time, and when we disturb that rhythm, our minds strive to get it back in line.  On holidays it’s fun, because you know that the period of discomfort is temporal, that it will be over soon and you’ll be able to go to Target to get your Bisquick and fairly traded coffee and chai tea concentrate (these are some of the things we buy, your mileage may vary). When you’re on holiday, you can laugh at the scorpion appetizer and spicy boiled frog soup, without thinking about whether tomorrow’s dishes will be more western.

I remember a particularly funny moment at the local gym when I was sitting down with one of the trainers and she asked me if I liked hamburgers. I jumped up in my seat and said “Wow, I sure do! Do you know any place around here to get a hamburger?” I was hoping upon hope that I had missed some secret small town hamburger joint, and she was about to clue me in.  ”No, I was just using that as an example to talk about nutrition, let’s talk about diet…..” well, anyway, I don’t remember the rest of the conversation because all I could think about were my shattered dreams of having a hamburger in some random small town overseas.

The expats that I have met that are successful over the long term have struck a balance between immersion in the local culture and holding on to the people back home through social media, email, streaming audio video, and other communication tools.  Me? Still not quite there.  But I’m working on it.

As someone who is a technologist by way of undergraduate education, and a manager by way of experience and graduate studies, this is a battle that I fight, internally, on a daily basis.  I have always been a doer, always the first one to get on a plane and sort

Late night, on the phone with the lead engineer, soldering it all together in time for a presentation to the customer in the morning

out whatever issue had cropped up at the moment. Transitioning to a managerial role means going against behavior that, for the first half of my career, had been instinctual.

During a job interview or yearly review, you may be asked to discuss your weaknesses (or shall we say, “opportunities for growth and improvement”).  This one is mine.  Almost daily, I fight the urge to fix the issues as they occur. When a problem arises, I almost instinctively want to rush to the site of whatever it is that has gone wrong, and give that one situation my singular focus.

The issue is that, by giving one problem my sole focus, all of the other decisions and course corrections that I need to make throughout the day fall to the side. By ignoring the forest and focusing on one tree, I will have probably created more issues than I will have solved.  You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand that working in this way is simply not sustainable.

Transitioning into management is akin to becoming an orchestral conductor.  You need to have a great ear, to keep your finger on the pulse of the operation.  You must be able to correct the course quickly, and at all times know where it is that you are going before you get there. As a manager, your employees are not served by you taking on their responsibilities any more than an orchestra is served by the conductor picking up a instrument and playing along.

Count to ten

We’ve probably all heard the old adage, that when you’re overwhelmed, you should stop and “count to ten” before you act.  I use this same technique at work.  Nobody would be served were I to simply dash out of the room to chase every issue that arose.  And so, in making decisions in a managerial capacity, I find that taking the time to consciously stop, take stock, and (mentally) count to ten helps to put everything in perspective.

The right man for the right job

There is an old story about Henry Ford. Legend has it that, while being grilled by reporters about his automotive industry credentials, he offered to answer any of their questions.  The first, a question about engineering: when queried, he did not answer, but offered up his lead engineer to answer the question.  This continued, with questions answered not by Henry himself, but by the person most qualified to answer on behalf of the company.

As a manager, I do my best to adopt a similar mindset.  As in my previous point, above, I constantly do battle with the desire to simply get things done on my own.  Yet, I am most certainly not the best man for the job.  Throughout my career, I have sought to surround myself with people more skilled than I am.  When I was younger, this manifested itself in my desire to have mentors in every phase of my career.  Later, I sought out these same types of qualities in those people that have come to work for me.  Whether the student or the teacher, I never want to be the smartest person in the room, just the best manager.

One last thing

That is not to say that as a manager you cannot dash from the room to deal with emergencies, and in fact many times you will have to do so. In the world of manufacturing, things can and will go wrong, and knowing when a situation has reached the tipping point is just as important as being able to hold back and send someone else in your stead.

On the ground with Best Buy China

China was where I wanted to be. Being a technologist by training, I had always had in my mind that an MBA was going to become more and more necessary to fill in the gaps in my business knowledge.  After a few years of China experience, I knew that I needed to go back to school and focus on International business.

In late 2007 and early 2008, I started exploring my options for International Business programs, and time and again, a school right in my own backyard kept rising to the top of the list.  I had been relocated to Scottsdale for work, so it took only a few minutes to head over to Thunderbird for an information session one night after work.

I remember listening to several Alumni tell stories just like mine, feeling all at once like a fish out of water and knowing that they were in a place where they belonged.

And so, after much deliberation, I took a two year break from work to attend Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Recently, I have joined the team of Lynx Innovation as the General Manager of our soon-to-be-opened design and manufacturing center in China.  Over the past five months, I’ve traveled to China countless times, and the feeling that I have while there could not be more different.  Although I am far from knowing everything about any foreign culture, I understand the differences in communication, in cultural understanding, and in communicating across not just language but cultural barriers as well.  I even found myself discussing the nuances of communications across these cultures to some of my colleagues.  Quite a difference from how I felt during my first few trips.

I was reminded of this change by a recent article posted on bNet about this very topic, where they quote Thunderbird and the lessons in communication taught there.  I can say without a doubt that I am better for having learned these lessons and you would all be well advised to read this article.

In addition, I have a few teachable points of view to share with my fellow fixture manufacturing professionals:

Learn a little language: You would be amazed at how much traction you will get in even just trying to speak the language of those with whom you are doing business.  Especially in a “High-Context” culture where actions quite literally speak louder than words, this can really help to open the doors of communication with your hosts.  There are countless ways to learn a language, my personal favorites being Byki and Pimsleur.  Try an iPhone based system to give you something to do on your long transpacific or transatlantic flights.

Understand the culture: As with language, a little effort goes a very, very long way.  There are many tools available online and at your local library (or university library);  Cultural Navigator and CultureGPS are two great tools, CultureGPS even has an iPhone app that you can use to quickly look up cultural information.

Reach out to Colleagues: you’re probably not the first person to embark on this particular sourcing adventure, so reach out to those that may have done it before.  LinkedIn groups are a great resource, as is the ARE website.  You may even find someone on the ground that can help you out, as I have done on a few occasions.

Eliminate pre-conceived notions: When all of the information that we have about a foreign culture comes from news outlets or other media, we end up with a skewed view of reality.  Almost everyone asks me what it is like to work in China, and I always start with, “It’s probably not at all like what you think it is”. One of my colleagues summed it up well, that the answer to the question “How long is a piece of string” inevitably is answered only through our cultural outlook, not some absolute truth.  Overseas you will find this applicable to countless situations, that our individual cultural viewpoints may give two people a completely different answer to the same, seemingly obvious question.

And lastly, beware the China hand: This was a piece of advice given to me by one of my professors during my Thunderbird studies in Beijing, and it’s one that I have found to be particularly valuable.  I’ve been to China more times than I can count, and yet I know that in terms of culture and understanding, I’ve barely scratched the surface.  My value comes in knowing enough to know that I don’t always have the answer, but that I can ask the right questions.  The China hand is that person who has been to China twice and is now a self-declared expert on China business.  Be aware of anyone that can give you an immediate, absolute answer to any question that comes up in international business dealings.  As with all situations in business, if it feels wrong, it probably is.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions, dig deeper, understand the situation fully before you accept the answer.

Original published to The Association For Retail Environments

Personal

If last year was the year that revolutionized my thinking and my world outlook, this year was the year that refined it.  At south by southwest 2010, I was arrived in Austin Texas feeling lost.  I had recently graduated with my MBA in International Business, and for the previous two years I had been working at an interactive agency serving the SMB enterprise market.  It was time for a change, I just didn’t know what that change was.  Yet.

I went to all of the panels, I stayed out late, I met as many people as I could, because I was searching for the opening words of the next chapter of my career.  I met some of the most amazing people, and got to attend an amazingly diverse group of presentations.  I can honestly say I never wanted it to end.

More surprising was the amount of people that reached out to me after the conference to tell me what an impact that had on their own experience at South by Southwest.  At first I was confused, I hadn’t been a presenter, how did I have an impact?  So I asked them what it was that I had said that had inspired them. People were able to relate back to me something that I spoke about when I met them in the hallway or out at a bar.  It was an amazing experience to suddenly feel like I had an impact on something outside of my usual sphere of influence.   I wanted more of that feeling.

I decided that instead of looking at what I wanted to do right now, I would be better to look at where I wanted to be in a few years.  I knew I wanted to go back into retail design and shopper marketing, I wanted to leverage my new international business degree, and I needed to start speaking at conferences, like, for example, South by Southwest.

The Proposal

Leading up to South by Southwest in 2010, I made a few proposals to speak, but never having been to the conference, I had a hard time building a proposal that resonated with an unfamiliar audience.  Hugh Forrest, the founder of South By Southwest did like one of my proposals, and gave me a great review and some great feedback, but in the end my panel did not get picked.  In hindsight, I’m really glad it didn’t.

The following year, determined to present, I worked with several South by Southwest Alumni to build a compelling proposal.  Within a few weeks of the speaking proposal voting opening, I received a message from David Scott, an author that was hosting a session on social business.  He had seen my proposal, and wanted to know if I wanted to speak, solo, in one of the time slots.

I practiced my speech for hours at a time, editing, reading it out loud, and editing some more.  I was nervous, and could not wait until my time slot was up.

For those of you that have not made a speech at a conference, there is a lot of prep that goes into keeping things moving smoothly.  Hours before I was due on stage, I checked into the green room.  I got assigned a handler, had some food, drinks, even a back massage.  I sat down at my table, pulled out my computer, and continued reviewing my speech and PowerPoint slides.  It just so happened that the person sitting next to me was a famous author, and before I can say anything to him, he comments, “That’s a good idea, I wish I had some printed note cards, I get so nervous before I go on stage” and all I could think was, ok, if this person gets nervous before getting on stage, then it’s ok that I’m nervous.  Normal even.  The green room fellowship calmed me down.

The rest of it is a bit of a blur, before I knew what was happening, I was standing up on stage, in front of a big crowd, giving the speech that I had given hundreds of times before, at least, hundreds of times before while I was alone in my apartment.

All in all, it was an amazing experience, and true to the advice of “never let them see you sweat”, I kept my nerves hidden well; even friends that knew I had some jitters commented that they never would have guessed I was anything but confident and engaging.

I’m glad that I presented on Sunday, so that I could have 2 days of panels and presentations afterwards where I could focus on enjoying the mental stimulation without worrying about my impending presentation.

I’d like to do it again.  Will I submit a proposal for next year? Probably

For those of you interested, I posted a video of one of my rehearsals below.

In the light of Best Buy’s recent decision to pull out of China and Turkey, one is led to conclude that there is still a lot of opportunity for the retailers of today to learn from the lessons of the past. It is doubly frustrating when you believe, as I do, that the very behaviors that led to the success of Best Buy in the United States would have been helpful to duplicate in their entry to china.

The wall of history features prominently in the main foyer of the Best Buy corporate campus in Richfield Minnesota. Walking it’s length you can read about the history of the company that was once called “Sound of Music”, and of particular note is an event that happened on June 14th 1981. On that date, a tornado ripped through their Roseville store location, damaging and destroying a significant amount of inventory. In the days following the storm, the team at Sound of Music set about liquidating this inventory in preparation of rebuilding the store, through a tent sale format that claimed all sales would be “best buys”. Response to the “best buy” sale was fantastic and within 2 years of the tornado, the first Best Buy branded store was open for business in a new superstore, deep discount format.  In product development circles we call this pivoting, changing direction in response to customer demands. Quite by accident, a regional hi-fi shop in Minneapolis had discovered the pent up demand for the superstore format that had been brewing in the American consumer.

When I look at Best Buy’s decision to refocus their international aspirations, I believe that they failed to capitalize on an opportunity to find their unique differentiation in the Chinese market, and have repeated mistakes of retailers before them.

I remember being on site at Best Buy Shanghai during the grand opening. The Shanghai Best Buy was nothing short of spectacular. From its prominent location on the Shanghai skyway to the immensity of it’s interior (4 floors), it was, all in all, fairly awe inspiring. Once we got past the immensity, the second thing that struck my colleagues and I was how “American” it felt. From the store fixtures to the floor finishes to the signage and employee uniforms, you would swear that they had simply packed a standard Best Buy into a few shipping containers and reassembled it in China. I still remember how all of the HDTV content in the video department was playing their standard American content.  It was absolutely surreal.  What was also striking was how different it felt from all of the other major retailers in China. Most other electronics chains, like Suning and Gome, as well as the electronics departments of general merchandise retailers like Metro and RT-Mart, all offer a similar shopping experience.

Best Buy argued, indeed correctly, that they offered a differentiated shopping experience in the otherwise homogenous selection of electronics retail outlets.

The problem is, it is not whether you are differentiated, what matters is whether you are advantageously differentiated within the market.

Best Buy succeeded in the United States market because it turned out that most consumers viewed buying electronics as only marginally less frustrating than purchasing an automobile.  Best Buy’s superstore format made it easy, stress free, and mostly self-service.  By addressing the needs of the market, they quickly rose to the number one spot.

When entering new markets, it is dangerous to assume that the market demand of your current customers exists in your foreign customers, and in fact it is far better to take the opposite approach, and take your time to perform market research due diligence.  Wal-Mart learned a similar lesson during their entry into the German market, where their Americanized stores failed to capture the hearts of the German consumer, and led them to pull out just a few years later.  Learning from the strategic mis-steps that prevented their entry into the German market, Wal-Mart has done quite a good job making their Chinese stores feel much more localized.  I can’t say that they offer an advantageously differentiated experience compared to similar retail outlets, however given their plans for growth in the market, things seem to be going well.

As Andreas Knorr and Andreas Arndt remarked in their study of Wal-Mart’s retreat from the German market:

“Wal-Mart’s attempt to apply the company’s proven US success formula in an unmodified manner to the German market turned out to be nothing short of a fiasco.”

In a post-withdrawl interview with Wal-Mart German Division CEO David Wild, he remarked,

“If you want to be successful in a foreign market, you have to know what your customers want. That’s the most important lesson…..It does no good to force a business model onto another country’s market just because it works well somewhere else.”

As more and more retailers begin eying up an entry into Chinese, and other global markets, they would be well advised to study those that have come before them.  Learn your history, for failure to do so can cost you dearly.

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You know, On the first day of my first year attending South By Southwest, I had the good fortune to go out to lunch with some of the awesome folks from Brazen Careerist. During lunch, over a few pints of Guinness a very wise woman in that group (I’m looking at you, Sydney) gave us first timers some great advice.  Specifically she told us about how it would feel to leave south by southwest and go back to the <airquotes> real world </airquotes>.  As she described the depression that we feel during the re-entry process, My first thought was, “so, about how many of those Guinness’s have you had so far?”.  but a few weeks later I knew exactly what she meant.

And so my advice to you is this:

Stay. Inspired.

You have to work at it, inspiration doesn’t always come easy out there in the real world.

It’s easy to be inspired here.  South By Southwest is inspiring wholly because of all of the amazing, inspiring people that attend every year.  Once you leave, it’s easy to get bogged down in the demands of your job, your classes, your wife, kids…all of the above.  But if you persevere, if you work hard to stay inspired, you can do anything.  If you take only one thing away from this conference, take with you the inspiration that you feel here, that knowledge deep down inside that together we can do anything.  Don’t lose that.

Stay. inspired.

Great things happen when we give our ideas an environment in which to flourish.  Over the past few years, lots of firms have released new products in a category they are calling “Innovation Management”;  and what they are creating is simply a virtualization of what we have right here, South By Southwest is an environment that fosters the growth of great ideas.

I have had the same job for almost my entire career.  I’m a visual merchandising designer; I design and build retail stores.  Now normally, visual merchandising and store design is not the type of thing that gets my audience to the edges of their seats.  But when I returned from south by south west last year, I found my self searching for inspiration. It was then that I realized that so many of the issues that I had been facing in my workplace were being faced by other people in a diverse array of backgrounds and industries.  The issues that I chose to focus on related to how my co-workers and I are able to collaborate across language, time zone and cultural barriers.

To help me recover from PSXSWDD (Post South By Southwest Depression Disorder), I started writing this presentation in April of last year. I shared it with a few people, and one of them liked it, and before I knew it, here I am speaking to you at South By Southwest.

And so today I would like to talk to you about the trials, tribulations and lessons learned in managing virtual teams in my small yet multinational company…..

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So think of that as a teaser…you get the rest when you attend my session, in the Future 15 section, 11AM on Sunday the 13th of March. (I take the stage at noon). See you there.

time reading materials are technology oriented.

Yet some of my best inspiration has come from outside of the technology sphere, from immersing myself in stimuli that are outside of those things that I would normally be drawn to, and this is a theme reinforced by several of the mentors in my life.  Time and again I find that solving complex problems requires experience that is more broad than it is deep, and I thankful that the past few years have helped me broaden my knowledge far outside of my previous education and career experience.

When I decided to go back to school in 2008, I enrolled in an executive MBA program, fully prepared to stay at my current employer and give up all of my free time to pursue my MBA in International Business.

Yes, I am a proud subscriber to this fine publication

When I spoke to my father about my plans, he took me aside and told me that I was crazy to do it that way.  Not just because of the workload, but because studying that way would not give me any new perspectives.

I had been working in the same industry since I graduated from college, first designing visual merchandising solutions for Circuit City, and then later for one of our vendors as their first US employee, designing and selling visual merchandising solutions to Best Buy and Target. In short, I had been doing the same thing for almost a decade, and while I had continued to move steadily from the technology side of the business to the management side, my father was right, it was time for some new perspectives.  At least, I was pretty sure.  Turns out he was right indeed.

So we quit our jobs and my wife and I moved our lives from Phoenix, AZ to San Diego, CA.  I immersed myself in classes, and I ended up working at a software startup (imagine that, a software startup in SoCal).  Talk about a change!

I highly recommend working at a startup while studying for an MBA;  it is akin to having a lab in which to practice your newly learned business skills.  I had a great time, and a supportive team that was patient with me as I honed my new business skills. I am forever in their debt for the support that they gave me, the perspectives that they helped me gain, and their understanding as I had to consult my textbook as we took the company through their first SWOT analysis.

My two years of startup experience also helped me hone my oration and presentation skills;  Rarely a week went by that I didn’t find myself presenting a powerpoint or software demo either live or on a web conference.  I still remember the first time I had to give a presentation;  one of our directors came to me in a panic, powerpoint in hand, and said “here, you need to present this. You’ve got 30 minutes before the audience shows up. Don’t worry, you’ll do fine”. Talk about trial by fire!  I’m not sure I did all that well, but as time went on I refined my skills considerably.  I started practicing my speeches a lot more, got comfortable listening to myself present.  It’s tough at first, seems like nobody likes hearing themselves speak or watching themselves on video, but once you get past the initial weirdness, it sure helps refine your abilities.

I graduated a year ago and I was approached by some former co-workers to come on board with a new company they had founded.  I would be heading up their operations in China, putting my new business and international perspectives to work.  Once again, I am back in the world of interactive visual merchandising, overseeing all of our design and manufacturing operations out of our new Asian design center of excellence.  My new colleagues highlighted a lot of my new perspectives as reasons for wanting me to come back to work together, having watched me evolve during my studies.  I owe a lot to the decision to make a change, to the support of my parents, my wife, and my amazing friends.

Thank you all for broadening my horizons.

(my family just recently realized that I have nearly reached the point where I have not lived in New York for as long as I lived in New York, and they took this opportunity to remind me of this newly discovered fact several times. Thanks mom!)

We had a chance to have dinner with some friends, who asked my wife what quintessential “New York Things” had I taken her to see.  She quickly responded by recounting our first trip to New York, which we spent riding the subway and visiting every Best Buy in Manhattan, along with a few other smaller retailers. In hindsight, probably not the best first impression that I could have provided, however, it serves as a great metaphor for the motivations that drive me as a retail design thinker.  I am passionate about what I do.  A little too much at times.

I started my career in manufacturing, designing and building merchandising solutions, specifically interactive solutions for brand-new consumer electronics categories like video cameras, VCRs, and car stereos.  Later on, I moved into the sales and marketing side of our business, which was an eye opening experience.

It’s one thing to build some metal shelves and add in some interactivity, it is quite another to understand how to build a solution that is “retail ready”, catering to the needs of deployment, service, and support over a nationwide network of retailers.

Having the experience of knowing not only what we need to build to support the customer, but also the manufacturing background to understand how we can build that solution helped me drive sales and earn a reputation for industry leading solutions.

Now I’ve come full circle, having just taken a position as the general manager of a new fixture manufacturing company in China.  Armed with the dual experience of manufacturing and retail display sales, I am re-entering manufacturing management as a more well rounded professional.  Add to that my recently conferred MBA degree from Thunderbird, and I am feeling pretty enthusiastic to be in a position that makes use of all of my skills and passions.