Employee Morale as a Response to Challenging Times

Early on in this book we asked you if you knew how your Beijing employees were doing. Perhaps it is fitting therefore that we come full circle to China to begin our closing comments. More than the structure of this book drives this, however, the twenty-first century will be, there is no doubt, the Chinese century. How we compete and cooperate with this emerging giant will shape all our economies, and the world stage. As we were researching the possibility of using the famous Chinese word “wēijī”, or crisis (see above), we were chastened and amused by an article written by a China expert, Victor H. Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.1 As Professor Mair tells us, the widely disseminated idea that this word means both “crisis” and “opportunity” is completely misguided: instead it holds the meaning of “danger with uncertain outcome”, nothing as optimistic as some Western interpretations. Professor Mair’s advice is timely: as we write this book, the largest economy in the world is in crisis and at a crossroads and other major economies are teetering. “Danger with uncertain outcome” is everywhere and optimism might even be seen as foolhardy. The fear level is palpable.