Imagethief

Imagethief was interested to read in a VNUNet story last week how the China boss of data storage company EMC became embroiled in a scandal after an e-mail in which he rebuked a secretary and CC'd to several other people within the company went public. The aggrieved secretary wrote an angry reply which was apparently CC'd throughout the company. The mail went public and, in an eventuality every PR man fears, public scandal ensued. As VNUNet reports:

A minor dispute over a misplaced key which blew up into a public relations fiasco has reportedly ended with the resignation of the president of $10bn-a-year multinational tech company EMC's Chinese division.

The incident has underlined the dangers of private emails becoming public, and drawn attention to the cultural disconnect between foreign managers and local staff in China.

EMC declined to confirm or deny details of the case when contacted by vnunet.com.

According to Chinese media reports, the incident started when Loke Soon Choo, president of EMC China, returned to his office late one Friday evening in April to find himself locked out.

The Singaporean executive fired off a curt email to his secretary, who had already left the office.

"You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support," Loke wrote, according to copies of the emails seen by vnunet.com.

The secretary, Rebecca Hu, emailed a blistering reply. "I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I'm your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it's someone else's fault," she wrote.

Thus was "Secretary Gate" (秘书门), or, more colorfully, "the affair of history's toughest secretary" (史上最强女秘书事件) born. Shortly after the affair erupted, the Singaporean boss of EMC China left his post in a move positioned in a Sina article as "retirement". Nicely illustrating the PR nightmare which (ironically) I am contributing to, the original message and the original and translated response can be found on this China Daily forum.

As a flack I found this situation interesting because it pulls three different risks for companies operating here into a nifty little vortex of PR disaster. Those three risks are:

• E-mail communication
• Cross-cultural problems
• The ease and speed with which righteous Chinese outrage can be turned upon foreign people or entities

By all reasonable yardsticks, this is a Z-grade scandal that should never have penetrated beyond the walls of the company. Yet when these three things came together it blew up in EMC's face. Some thoughts:

The risks of e-mail are well documented (See Quattrone, Frank). In my office it has certainly replaced a face to face chat as the default communication medium. This means that there is a named, written record of every single conversation with in the company. As long as e-mail systems connect to the rest of the world that's a risk. People can cut and paste, forward, or whatever else. Most executives probably know not to put anything incriminating into an e-mail (and let's hope that this is a decision that most don't have to make) and to carefully consider when to send confidential information by e-mail. The more paranoid --especially in my business-- will double check "to", "CC" and "BCC" lines before sending to make sure we're not accidentally copying something sensitive to the wrong person. But I daresay most of us foreigners don't do a specifically cultural filtering of our mails before hitting the button. If you've been in China a while you might think you have an instinctive grasp of how to communicate with people here. But as I am reminded periodically, when I embarrass myself, we all still make mistakes. Especially when working the keys in a big hurry.

It's always a good rule of thumb to have an active imagination and ask yourself, "what's the worst thing that could happen if this goes public?" before sending an e-mail. Back when I used to work in broadcasting we had two rules: never say anything in a room with a microphone that you don't want the rest of the world to hear (even if you think you're clear), and never do anything in a room with a camera that you don't want the rest of the world to see (even if the tally light is off). A famous case study is here. It's worth considering a third rule for e-mail: never send anything via e-mail that you don't want the rest of the world to read. No one will follow this, but it's probably a good thought to keep in the back of the mind.

The boss' original mail is chiding in tone but to my (Western) eyes it's hardly scandalously demeaning or particularly unreasonable. It seems like the kind of thing that could have been greeted with a somewhat less, er, incandescent response. Yes, there are issues of face and, yes, people have suggested that it was an error to CC a direct rebuke --even a mild one-- of a Chinese employee to multiple people. Nevertheless, the response and reaction seem disproportionate. Of course, from outside the company it's impossible to know if there was a pattern of behavior that preceded this mail. Perhaps it was simply the proverbial straw too many.

The boss in question is a Singaporean. You might also think that Singaporeans, as Asians themselves, would be better attuned to this sort of situation than punks from San Francisco, like Imagethief. However, having spent many years in Singapore and now a couple in China, I can report that the relationship between the two peoples is not entirely smooth sailing. Ask most Chinese people what they think of Singapore and Singaporeans and they'll be pretty enthusiastic. A lot of Chinese genuinely admire Singapore. But poke and prod a bit and doesn't take long before you start hearing words like "arrogant" and "look down on...". When I first arrived in Singapore in 1995 we interviewed some mainland Chinese engineers for the company we were forming. Many of the Singaporeans I was acquainted with treated mainland Chinese like country bumpkins. (We were also warned by our financiers not to hire Indians who "cause trouble". Needless to say, many of the best engineers I worked with over the years were Chinese and Indian.) I daresay ten years of raging Chinese growth and growing Singaporean infatuation with China has attenuated this disdain, but it wouldn't surprise me of some of the old attitudes still linger and emerge at inopportune times. Certainly the current wave of Chinese tourists into Singapore is raising some hackles, including those of my Singaporean mother in law, who runs a boutique on Orchard road.

Finally, there's that angry nationalism thing. Face aside, the Chinese are quite capable of abusing each other without foreign help. But it certainly doesn't take much for any situation involving foreigners to become a national-pride situation. I was interested in one of the comments in reported in the VNUNet article:

"Foreigners come to China to lord it over others, not to help China's economic development," said one forum participant. "They want to keep down our wages and give the profits to foreign executives and their headquarters."

Well, maybe. Last I checked Chinese people were lining up to work for foreign companies, including the one I work for. If it makes the angry author of that comment feel any better, Imagethief sometimes feels that his own wages are being kept down to benefit nameless, overseas shareholders as well, so I empathize.

Nevertheless, looking at the China Daily forum this is hardly a universal sentiment. In fact, it appears that plenty of Chinese respondents are chiding the secretary for her response. I haven't combed Chinese language forums because my poor Chinese reading skills make it desperately tedious, but I'd be curious in the ratios of support vs. repudiation. But the fact remains that we foreigners need to be wary of handing the more inflammable elements of Chinese society hammers with which to beat us. The odd angry youth railing about foreigners is probably inevitable, but in a competitive situation where you are selling to Chinese customers and trying to attract talented Chinese employees, appearing arrogant toward either your customers or your employees can put a deep crater into your brand.

So it's a tempest in a teapot, but an interesting case study. All from a four line e-mail.