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Running the meetings
Emma Raz, now the commercial director at NumberEight, once managed hardware factories in Taiwan, where her company was the biggest client among its vendors. Her meetings included a chief executive more than twice her age. The first time she walked into the meeting room, she told them how she liked to do things and how they would be done.
It went well. She had lived in Asia before, and the people there gave her freedom and respect from day one.
Building relationships
She already knew how much relationships mattered, so she built them: the lunches, the dinners, and the weekends when colleagues took her traveling around. After a few months, the logistics manager told her to call him younger uncle.
Why do Taiwanese colleagues use family titles?
In Mandarin, shushu is the word for a father's younger brother, and speakers also use it for older men outside the family. Kinship terms like it signal warmth and place both people on a ladder of age and respect. Being offered one usually means the other person has decided to treat the relationship as personal. Similar address forms exist for aunts, older brothers, and older sisters.
How do shared meals build business trust there?
Chinese-speaking societies have a long-studied idea called guanxi, a network of personal obligations that business is expected to run on. Banquets and meals are the usual place where those obligations are made and repaid. The anthropologist Mayfair Yang examined this in her 1994 book Gifts, Favors, and Banquets, based on fieldwork in China. Scholars describe guanxi as something built up over years of repeated favors and hospitality.
Why did Taiwan become a hub for electronics factories?
Taiwan opened export processing zones in the 1960s, which drew foreign electronics assembly work to the island. The government founded Hsinchu Science Park in 1980 to cluster research and manufacturing near its universities. TSMC, the chip foundry that makes processors to other companies' designs, was founded in 1987 and grew inside that ecosystem. Taiwanese contract manufacturers now assemble a large share of the world's laptops and servers.
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