Rundown of the past week

Book

If you have ever read the books The World Is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, The World Is Flat - Lexus and Olive Tree, Saving Capitalism from Capitalist, and Freakonomics, I believe you must, after finishing reading, find your understanding about the world has snowballed, just like me. I finished them within a month, by reading bit by bit in parallel. Some people might argue this is too slow. I, however, has been able to connect different interesting points to one another, which almost enables me to write another book -- One guide for all.

The World Is Flat explains to me the importance of Capitalism system to the world's economy development. Mr. Thomas Friedman, the author and winner of 3 Pulitzer Prizes, believes that the globalization is able to promote a higher level of transparency of political and economic systems in countries expecting to thrive. And that relates unsurprisingly to Saving Capitalism from Capitalist that called for a free financial system which should not be controlled and misused by capitalist politician and protesters that are experiencing life hardship.

If you want, you can easily link theories in a book to another to come out myriad interesting points that belong to yourself. And that, I believe, is very helpful to structure your own mental capability and knowledge.

The shortlist of best business books in 2006 is done and I am ready to grab some of them. I can't wait!


Things that happen to China

China International Business discussed the China's new corporate bankruptcy law that will take effect from June 2007 onwards. The law
"applies to all legal persons for the first time, including not only SOEs, but also private companies, foriegn companies, limited liability companies and companies limited by shares. Creditors' interests will be better protected, which will reassure investors, domestic or foreign."

The pass of the law is a good signal to effectively re-allocate social resources, including both financial and human assets, as creditors are able to get what they have lended back, though not exactly the same as what they lended, to look for something else profitable to invest, while those who bankrupted are set free to muse on the odds to start another business, to become scrappy and tenacious, and to compete in another industries with their own experiences. This is a good way to set the social resources free to make sure they can be timely delivered to the place where they are much coveted. Another thing the law offers to the economy is that the transparency of commercial entites.

But it seems pretty common that business doers, both domestic and foreign, believe paying a lip service is what Chinese government always does. Hope it is not this time.


Innovation

There is a shortage of innovative mindsets in China. If you take a look at the education system and the top-down innovation machanism, you will find this true. Chinese students are taught to follow and obey, rather than fight and argue for truth. Chinese ex-founder of Ctrip, fair-price inn runner and Angel Investor, Ji Qi, said that 互联网已没有机会. I don't think Qi is still a man easy to obey now, but maybe Chinese businessmen are easy to give up at all?! I doubt if this was really from his mouth--as a very experienced entreprenuer, Qi should have faith and demand in innovation. One possible reason that he said so was the businesses he used to run and is running are all traditional ones and he was/is nearly always a mover in these industries. Which means, with good resources and talented partners, those money is easy to make without rivals. But as an immature business model, 互联网, the industry requiring time to demonstrate its gold mine truth and consuming large amount of investment, is less attractive to Qi. As something that emcompasses the power of people, money, media and information, the Internet does solicit innovation. If someone said there was no chance at all, it means he/she doesn’t want to innovate at all. Wanna prove it true? See Google, Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube.

As a virtual space, the Internet businesses should have intricate links with the real physical world. By doing this, it is able to generate values by taking advantages of the virtual world for the real one. If one day Qi connects his inn with the Internet to provide value-added services, he will show his gratitute.