EuroWire January 2015

Transatlantic Cable

Corporate communications

Automotive

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s modest command of Mandarin raises the bar for Americans eager to do business in China “For ambitious executives, speaking Mandarin could soon be as important on the resume as the ubiquitous MBA.” Reporting on an 22 nd October visit to Beijing by Mark Zuckerberg, in the course of which he answered questions in Mandarin, Reuters columnist Katrina Hamlin noted that the young American CEO of Facebook is far from uent in that tongue. Even so, she wrote, his performance “surprised and delighted his hosts.” And pressure to follow his example is probably being felt by other US corporate chiefs. (“Zuckerberg’s Chinese Chat Leaves CEOs Tongue-Tied,” 24 th October) Right now, not many foreign multinationals have native Chinese speakers at the board level, and Western business leaders lucky or far-sighted enough to have studied Chinese at an early age are few in number. Roger Holterman, principal consultant with the Robert Walters executive search rm in Shanghai, told Ms Hamlin that a scant 15 per cent of the board-level executives he encounters at non-Chinese multinationals have a grasp of Mandarin. It remains to be seen how much Mr Zuckerberg’s linguistic air will help Facebook in the People’s Republic, where censorship has long blocked access to his social networking site. But he clearly has positioned himself among those business leaders willing to put extra e ort into making it in China. According to international recruitment rms, more senior executives all the time are working on their Mandarin. Reuters pointed out that, for companies with big operations in China, a bilingual work force promises such bene ts as a fuller understanding of the business environment and much stronger support from both local sta and clients. Wrote Ms Hamlin, “These people will graduate to the boardroom over time.” † While Mr Zuckerberg’s wife is from a family of Chinese speakers, the Facebook founder had to pick up his Chinese while running a $200 billion business. The message is plain. It may be no easy thing to squeeze language studies into a packed work schedule. But it can be done.

Safety-related vehicle recalls spiked last year in the US, but here’s the surprise: most were for bread-and-butter issues “Clearly we are entering into a di erent environment. The GM recalls [for faulty ignition switches] coming quickly on the heels of the Toyota unintended acceleration issues have amped things up. We are at this intersection of major shifts in technology.” Sean Kane, founder of Safety and Research Strategies, an engineering consulting rm in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, spoke the truth about the recalls. By November of last year, automakers in the US had recalled a record 56 million-plus vehicles – more than three times the number of new cars and trucks Americans would buy in all of 2014. As to the major shifts in technology mentioned by Mr Kane, today’s cars are indeed highly complex mechanisms. The software to run a new model will typically have more than a million lines of code. But Brent Snavely, auto editor of the Detroit Free Press , has discerned a curious pattern. A surprising number of recalls of these engineering marvels involved relatively fundamental equipment. (“Automakers Set Recall Record and Mostly for Basic Issues,” 20 th October). Mr Snavely cited these examples from the month which saw publication of his article: † On 15 th October, Toyota recalled 423,000 vehicles in the US and many more in Japan to x potential fuel leaks † On 16 th October, Chrysler recalled 470,000 vehicles for alternators that might fail and recalled 437,000 Jeep Wranglers because water might get into the electrically controlled side-view mirror † Earlier in October, GM said it would notify owners of about 89,000 Chevrolet Sparks from the previous three model years of a recall “because corrosion can cause the secondary hood latch striker to stick in the open position” † While recalls for relatively small equipment failures show no sign of abating, neither Mr Kane nor Jake Fisher, director of auto testing for Consumer Reports , takes this as a sign of an industry in a quality crisis. Both say that generally cars are far safer and more reliable today than ever before, an assessment in which Renee Stephens, vice president of US automotive at J D Power and Associates, the customer satisfaction researcher, concurs.

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

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January 2015