Take on-the-ground HR practitioners in China and bring them to the US for a conference. Then ask American HR practitioners with an interest in China to attend the conference in San Francisco. Add in strong implementation from XMEI founders Xiaoli Mei and Liz Menkes, excellent support for visiting speakers and Hey Presto!, you have a success on your hands.

As of writing I am watching Dr. Irv Beiman supply the details how the strategy process in China works, and how you can use the Balanced Scorecard to effectively implement that process.

Dr. Beiman works largely with local Chinese companies and that’s the surprise for me. It’s not mulitnational companies (MNCs) that are adopting the Balanced Scorecard, unless it has been driven by the corporate HQ back in the home country.

According to Dr. Beiman, this can be attributed to the fact that local Chinese conglomerates have little in the way of legacy systems to hold them back. MNCs meanwhile have to abandon their existing systems to take on the new ones. This is something that many are not willing to do so the final winners in the strategy game may not be the expected ones.

Todd Raphael has already posted on the subject of Rednecks & Turtles so I don’t want to repeat this here. It doesn’t sound very Politically Correct (PC) but that’s another limitation that we don’t suffer from in China. No legacy of PC here.

Also speaking was Roberto Siu, the HR Director of DSM in China. His focus was on the subject of Compensation & Benefit trends in China, a subject that continues to worry us all here. Roberto took a lot of his analysis from the Hay Group and Hewitt Associates.