true colors

I finally finished my report and got some time to write something for my blog.

People in America, I suppose people all over the world, are talking about the presidential election in this country and who's gonna be in the white house next year to ran the country. I am not American but have found it pretty interesting to follow up a little bit the campaigns and debates. The whole process looks like a long job interview that goes up for almost one year.  The American people are the judges while the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates need to talk through, in front of the judges, their beliefs, their strategies and their plans to cope with the country’s major issues if s/he is elected as the president of the United States. They are in a race to best prove their qualifications and capabilities in public and to finally get the job offer.

To tell the truth, I can hardly imagine this kind of presidential election take place in China. Not only because that we have totally different political system which makes it impossible to elect our political leaders that way (No more discussion on politics. Believe it or not I am not interested in it). Put aside the political concerns, Chinese people’s way of thinking and acting in a competition, their mentality and behavīor will just make it impossible.

I was a big fan of American reality show “the Apprentice”. Young and talented people of different backgrounds, high degree holders and street smarts, compete to become the apprentice of Donald Trump. Each candidate needs to prove that s/he is the best by showing his/her intelligence, critical thinking ability, creativity, leadership etc through working with other candidates on the assignments given by Donald Trump to them, real business to deal with. What’s more, s/he must know how to defend him/herself in the boardroom, if it happens that in certain week the team s/he longs to looses. If somebody screw up and even s/he is aware of that, the person will not give up very easily in the boardroom where Donald Trump and his two assistants will question all the team members who is responsible for them to be defeated by the other team.  Everyone will do his best to defend himself for it’s clear for them that the reason why they are in this interview is to get the job. And that’s what competition is all about: show the best of you and when time comes defend yourself the best you can. I think in the business world, it’s very important for one to know how to protect oneself. You may have made some mistakes that are part of the reasons why the project failed. But it can’t be all your fault. If you let others to take advantage of the situation, I believe, that’s a sign of you being weak.

Last year when I went back to China, I found that CCTV had cloned this American TV show and the Chinese version is called “Win in China”. It pretty much copied the whole structure of “the Apprentice”. The reward, of course, is not to become Donald Trump’s apprentice. Rather, the top three that stand out from the competition will get investments of RMB 5 million, each of them (maybe I got the number wrong, really don’t remember). What called my special attention was Chinese candidates’ performance in the boardroom. Each time when a team was called in to the boardroom for they were defeated, you knew that to the question from the judges:”who is responsible for this failure?”, they would give unanimous answer. It seems that they are so comfortable to take the chance to talk about how wonderful job the other team members have done and how s/he is sure that him/herself is the sole reason for the failure. No exception. I was totally confused for I could not understand what’s their purpose to be there? Just to show what a loser they are in front of the judges and the nationwide TV audience? I don’t think so for they really looked very comfortable when giving the answer, sometimes even with a smile on their faces. So maybe that’s one hypocritical side of our culture which keeps us from showing our true colors, our true personality in front of others.

Why it is so difficult for us to say in public: “I think I am much better than them in…for the reasons that…”?  Why in front of others, we’d like to hide ourselves behind a hypocritical modest? Why we are sometimes afraid of fighting toe to toe with our competitors for something that we really want or believe in? (what’s sad is that in our culture it is common that things people dare not say in front of you, they say it at your back).

In one Democratic presidential debate, Senator Obama said: “I was friends with Hillary Clinton before we started this campaign; I will be friends with Hillary Clinton after this campaign is over.” That’s the attitude for competition.

Show your true colors, are you up for this?