Derek Scruggs

Over the last couple days I read Mr. China: A Memoir (aff), by Tim Clissold. It’s kind of a Chinese version of Burn Rate (aff), which hilariously crystallized the the early days of the dot com mania. Except that, according to Clissold, China was much, much worse. Like the dot com era, there was insane optimism about China and rivers of cash poured in from private equity investors. The aggravating factor was lack of transparency.

In the US and the rest of the developed world, there is a clear legal environment for business, institutions that enforce them aggressively, and a culture that has assimilated the rules of the game into its ethics. Say what you will about the Bernie Ebbers of the world, but at least he ultimately paid the price. Contrast this with China, where the law is often no more than a guideline and the courts feeble.

According to Clissold, a lesson that he learned too late is, if you really want to get something done like, say, force your General Manager to stop embezzling your capital to a competitor where he plans to go to work in a few months (yes, that really happened), you have to wade into politics and put pressure on local party officials. The courts are usually a waste of time and can even make things harder on you because of the attention they attract. (Unlike in the US, full frontal negative PR is usually a losing strategy when you’re trying to influence an official of the CCP.)

And because of this, except for personal crimes like theft and assault, the whole idea of rule of law is alien to most Chinese employees. (In fairness, a lot of this has probably changed over the 15 years since Clissold started working in China.) And of course there are the corrosive effects of 40+ years of communism on basic incentives. Clissold tells amusing stories of his early days in China, when he had to practically force empty hotels to rent him a room, and when some restaurants intentionally closed during lunchtime to avoid the work.

I have special interest in this book because I’m trying to launch a business in China, but Mr China is fast-paced, witty and enjoyable regardless of your global ambitions.

In honor of the moon landing on July 20, 1969, Google has launched Google Moon, which applies their mapping technology to a little slice of the moon. Make sure you zoom in really close. The detail is amazing.

Lately I’ve been fascinated by North Korea. I guess because everything I hear about it is just so… creepy that it attracts me for the same reason I slow down when I drive by a traffic accidents.

Kim Jong Il is right out of central casting – inscrutable, weird looking, surrounded by sycophants and treated to daily reminders of his own brilliance via the state media. And he’s got the whole Nicolae Ceausescu-esque, eat-sirloin-while-the-people-starve act down as well. Here’s the Team America version of Dear Leader:

I think first started paying attention to North Korea when I saw the famous satellite photo of North Korea at night. The difference between the North and the South is shocking. Even the difference with China to the north is pretty amazing when you consider that region of China is quite rural and much poorer than the coastal economic juggernauts. (I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there are some doubts about the authenticity of this photo.)

A few weeks ago I came across this story about the the mega-huge, never-finished Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. They spent something like $750 million on a giant, scary looking hotel even though it would never fill up because they’re so paranoid about tourists. But they never finished it, either because they ran out of money, structural problems or something else. No one knows, and apparently no one talks about it. Imagine living in a city where such a structure dominates the skyline, and yet no one ever breathes a word about it.

They also seem to have a severe case of monument-itis that was so common to 20th century worker paradises. Check out all the super-sized memorials on this site. Speaking of monuments, check out the header graphic on NKZone, one of my favorite blogs about North Korea.

Part of me really wants to visit North Korea as a tourist, but according to Lonely Planet, as an American I can pretty much forget it.

But there’s still hope. I was 21 when the Berlin Wall fell in ‘89. During the Christmas holiday, I saw one of my uncles who was in the military and served in Germany for a while back in the 50s. He said it was almost unimaginable for him to see the images of people standing on top of the Wall, celebrating freedom. He had always assumed the Wall (not to mention the Soviet Union) would outlive him. I’d like to think that one day I’ll see North Korea set free, perhaps even re-unification with the South.

Re-unification would of course be quickly followed by Starbucks a la Beijing’s Forbidden City.

A few weeks ago Fred Wilson wrote about the (frankly brilliant) hijacking by Eric at Feedburner of his fred’spodcast tag to do an elevator pitch. So Fred set up a special fred’selevatorpitch tag just for this purpose.

Then Brad Feld pointed people to his for:bradfeld tag

Both of these guys probably get 1,000 unsolicited business plans per year thrown over the transom, the vast majority of which they never see because associates filter them out. Now that they’ve developed big online profiles via blogging, I’m sure they now get a blizzard of emails from aspiring entrepreneurs pitching them on the Next Big Thing. [Full disclosure: I’ve done that to Brad, but not Fred (yet).]

So how long before they start getting thousands of “interesting” links and podcasts that are basically just pitches. Hmmm… An evil person might post these on an MLM forum.

Yesterday my wife and I went to Estes Park for the afternoon and did a little canoeing on the reservoir (satellite picture here). It was a beautiful day and we had a great time.

One thing I noticed, though, was there were a lot of Latinos there, well more than the 14% that the last census says makes up the country as a whole.

Note: I’m not complaining about that, just making an observation. My wife is from China, and I lived in a predominantly (as in 90%) Mexican neighborhood in Chicago for 6 years. So I’m hardly anti-immigration.

The funny thing is, I noticed that everyone, like people on July 4 everywhere else, was eating hotdogs, hamburgers, potato chips etc. No tacos, churros, tortas or any other traditional Mexican dishes. But my wife and I ate chips and homemade salsa, as well as some watermelon. The point? Maybe the US really is a melting pot.

Next year we’ll probably get a room at the lodge and stay for the fireworks, but this time we came home in the late afternoon to avoid the sure-to-be-brutal mountain traffic. Later in the evening we went to see the fireworks at the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field. In a word, awesome. A perfect Independence Day.

An now back to work…

As some of you may know, I’m very interested in doing business in China. Earlier this year my wife (who is Chinese) and I set up Escalan Beijing, an online marketing company that helps Chinese companies with pay per click marketing.

This company is run by my wife’s cousin, but we are now considering moving to China and making this our full-time focus. We are planning to go there for a month in mid-August and, if we find a specific opportunity we can leverage, will seriously consider moving there. To that end, I’m doing everything I can to talk with Americans doing business in China and/or to schedule meetings with Chinese companies while I’m there.

Just to give you a sense of what we’re doing to maximize opportunities there, here’s a partial list of what I’ve been doing just in the past few days.

• Planning a seminar about marketing with Google – we want to do it in Beijing, Shanghai and possibly Hong Kong
• Last week I contacted the author of this insightful article about SMEs in China.He responded with an offer to help. People are usually nice if you approach them nicely.
• I’m also scheduled to talk with Laurel Delaney, who runs the Global Small Business Blog where that article was published.
• On Sunday, while surfing LinkedIn, I discovered that Jad Duwaik, an old networking contact of mine, has moved to China. What a surprise!
• The LinkedIn connection motivated me to try other services. I looked on Ryze and, lo & behold, they have a couple networks geared toward China. So I joined several of them – Shang Hai Tan, Lao Wai in China (moderated by the aforementioned Jad Duwaik),  International Network in China and Cross-Strait Relations: Taiwan and China
• While doing the above, I got sidetracked and read Jad’s email about what his first 12 hours in China was like. Priceless!
• Anyhoo, I got back to browsing LinkedIn and found that many of my 2nd degree contacts in China came through Christian Mayaud, so I sent him an email asking if we can talk sometime by phone. (I don’t know him well enough to feel comfortable asking for a connection by email, and I assumed he would reject it.)

Of course, this is only scratching the surface and I’m going to keep plugging away at it. If you have interests and/or contacts in China, I’d love to talk with you, so please contact me.

Joel Comm, a friend of mine who’s been making a living online for many years, has released the second edition of his Google Adsense Secrets e-book(aff.). If you are using or considering using Adsense, I urge you to check this out. Success at AdSense is more than just slapping ads up on a page. Interestingly, as with traditional direct marketing, AdSense is something you can measure, test and optimize. I remember when Joel was only making a few dollars per day from Google. Now he’s up to over $500 per day from Adsense. Seriously. This is not marketing hype. I’ve seen the the reports from Google. Check out Google Adsense Secrets here.(aff.)