Manufacturing Leadership Journal

change, and empowering others are crucial for aligning the workforce through the chaos of adding new models and technology.

Gap: Innovation. Chinese leaders are trying to move from imitation of technology to creating their own technology, which will be a critical component of China 2025.

One strategy is to buy companies in North America and learn more about technology (and culture) on site. No matter the strategy, our assessment findings reveal that Chinese leaders score lower on competencies relat-ing to innovation, such as the red circled competencies in Figure 1 below ( entrepre-neurialism, financial acumen, establishing strategic direction, and building organizational talent).

How Are U. S. Leaders So Creative?

Our conversations seemed to rein- force these findings. Often Chinese leaders would ask how U.S. lead-
ers are so creative. Or, astute Chinese leaders
would point out that Chinese students and
leaders, obsessed with success, will respond
to problems and questions as if they are tak-
ing a test; that is, they seem to think there is a
definite, clear cut, and correct answer to be
applied to the problem and have difficulty fig-
uring out a problem situation when there is
no readily emerging correct answer.

On the positive side, this tends to mean that Chinese leaders are very fast learners and can assimilate information quickly, which will be key strengths for the transformation. However, additional entrepreneurial, financial acumen, and creative problem solving skills and abilities, along with the western culture notion of failure, are not only accepted, but expected, keys to innovative problem solving that China often lacks.

By the end of our trip, we were impressed with the understanding and admired the plans connected to M4.0 that we saw, causing us to remember an analogy from Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping once equated China’s economic progress to crossing a river, stepping on each stone and feeling the way across to the other side, the other side being the world’s economic leader.

It appears not only is China well on its way to becoming the world’s top economic power with its China 2025 initiative (China’s economy is expected to be the largest economy in the next few years), it is crossing with unimaginable speed, skipping stones along the way that slow others down but may be vital to long-term sustainability. What has become clear to us is that the west cannot underestimate the power of the Chinese people.

Because the Chinese are clearly energized by M4.0, many are aggressively aligning their workforce to it. Are we? M

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