One Billion Customers - James McGregor [88]
When Chang left, Hitt faced a job that was beyond daunting. His mission would be to produce flawless parts and components at several rusting Chinese airplane factories controlled by indecisive bureaucrats who had just been cut loose from the military. He had to teach the precise ballet of component delivery and systems integration to people for whom coordination and cooperation were an alien concept. These people took orders from above and passed them down to someone else. To work with other factory bosses as equals was unthinkable. How, for example, could the managers at Xi’an, the largest and most capable factory, even think about listening to requests from the arrogant and self-important Shanghainese?
But Bob Hitt had the fortitude and temperament for the job. What’s more, he loved China and the Chinese loved him. At six foot four, with thick glasses and an obvious paunch, he stood out sharply against his Chinese colleagues. But he had traits the Chinese admired: a fierce chain-smoking habit, a constant stream of good-natured profanity, and the ability to guzzle beer and trade shots of mao-tai late into the night with any banquet companion foolish enough to challenge him. He was a real leader who had the real knowledge that his Chinese counterparts craved. As he rode in cars and buses on country roads going to and from isolated airplane factories, he was endlessly amused by the sights and sounds of China. Watching a bicyclist wobble down the road with a live hog on the handlebars and a dozen squawking chickens bound to the back, he would laugh out loud. “Every day in China you see something you don’t see every day” was one of his favorite remarks.
Hitt had studied Chinese Negotiating Style, a classic study of Chinese official behavior and negotiating techniques originally written for the U.S. military by MIT Sinologist and political psychologist Lucian Pye. Hitt took great delight in identifying various behaviors while negotiating with Chinese executives or government officials. Late at night after punishing rounds of mao-tai toasting, a Chinese counterpart might begin pressing Hitt for more details.
“Ahhh, the creative use of fatigue,” he would announce.
Chinese negotiators might use flattery to get Hitt to reveal technical information they needed.
“Okay, this looks like the ‘enlighten the uninitiated’ ploy.”
And when the Chinese would inevitably launch into an impassioned recitation of China’s problems and how they were all the West’s fault, he would chuckle. “Oh, not the imperialist guilt thing again.”
The never-ending banquets that are a fixture of China business were like an amusement park to Hitt. Many of the Chinese aviation executives spoke English and Hitt constantly entertained them with stories or jokes, often laced with profanity. He was willing to eat anything, so the Chinese put more and more exotic dishes in front of him. One of his favorite banquet dishes was “surprise soup.” The first time he ate it, he flipped open the silver lid on the bowl and said: “Fuck, wheels up, there’s a bird in the surprise soup!”
One of his Chinese companions giggled. “No, that’s not the surprise. The surprise is that there is a date and a nut inside the bird.”
Hitt loved that kind of stuff.
The Fifth Factory
McDonnell Douglas’s direct counterpart in the Trunkliner agreement was the China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation (CATIC), the export-import arm of the Aviation Industry of China (AVIC). CATIC would help McDonnell Douglas coordinate the work of the four factories involved in the Trunkliner project. With the factories gearing up for Trunkliner production, CATIC was in the market for equipment. And it just so happened that a McDonnell Douglas screwup could be useful to CATIC. In its quest to cut costs, McDonnell