Saturday May 11, 2013
Collaboration works better than war?
Reviewed by NICK WALKER
balticmedia@ymail.com
Zheng He’s Art of Collaboration: Understanding the Legendary Chinese Admiral from a Management Perspective
Author: Hum Sin Hoon
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Singapore
THE history and business of publishing throws up some intriguing anomalies.
For the last 15 years, more copies of the IKEA catalogue have been printed annually than copies of the Holy Bible. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has yet to outsell Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, which came out in 1881. And more business leaders than military leaders have purchased Sun Zi’s The Art Of War, which emerged in book form 27 centuries ago. In recent decades, the latter has become a revered business text, in addition to being the all-time best-selling guide to winning on the battlefield.
“Know your enemies, know yourself,” extolled Sun Zi in this world-famous military treatise. In contrast, the legendary Admiral Zheng He might have countered: “Know your collaborators, know yourself.”
Prof Hum Sin Hoon, vice-dean of Undergraduate Studies Program at the National University of Singapore Business School, has penned this work from the mindset of the admiral, which he has been able to do thanks to apparently superhuman research undertaken on the subject. In a nutshell, if the admiral had written a leadership treatise, large parts of it would read like this.
What the book delivers is the story of Zheng and his approach to taking charge. Zheng’s mellower – and presumably more productive – approach to leadership, contrasts with that of Sun Zi’s more antagonistic Art of War.
With his attachment to the collaborative paradigm, the admiral sometimes seems a much more contemporary boardroom player than a 15th century warrior – and this is one of the central themes of the book. Zheng is a win-win guy, not a zero-sum dueller.
The admiral is a truly towering figure in Chinese history. He was a mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who commanded voyages from China to South-East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and the Horn of Africa, from 1405 to 1433.
Zheng was appointed by the Song imperial court as the admiral in control of a huge fleet, and his first voyage, which departed from Suzhou, consisted of a fleet of 317 ships and over 27,000 crewmen. Hum dovetails the maritime yarns and lessons on the leadership approach of China’s most-famous-ever admiral into applicable theory, with lucid rationales, and by means of a mind that is good at joining up the dots.
Divided into two parts comprising four chapters each, “Zheng He and his message” and “Zheng He and his management”, the text manages to avoid being too dry and scholarly.
The opening chapter asks “Why pay attention to this 15th-century Chinese eunuch?” and then answers the questions from a variety of angles. Much of the rest of Part 1 compares and contrasts Zheng He’s Art of Collaboration with Sun Zi’s Art of War.
Hum balances this nicely before coming down in favour of the subject of his book, but the professor is evidently an authority on both influential military theorists, and the wealth of historical detail in Part I provides tremendous value.
The four chapters of Part II – Zheng He and his management – quite brilliantly illuminate Zheng He’s leadership magic and how it can be applied today in four specific areas (each of which gets a chapter to itself): leadership itself, human resource management, logistics and supply-chain management, and “implications”. The latter dwells on the supporting role of religious faith in leadership, a thought-provoking twist in a thoroughly original work.
The Muslim Zheng held a highly inclusive view of faiths, respecting them all. (His men even helped to build temples in distant South-East Asian locales.) Zheng He’s brand of multiculturalism meant that he was a man centuries ahead of his time, especially when compared to the Western explorers of his day, who saw the forced imposition of their own faiths on overseas societies as a key goal, unless slavery was a greater priority.
Can this book be flawed? Slightly. It takes rather a long time to get to the meat and potatoes of Parts I and II.
First one has to leaf through no less than nine pages of testimonials from such luminaries as Dr Steven Choo (CEO, Real Estate Developer’s Association of Singapore; gee whizz) and Ricky Sim (CEO Suntec Investment). This is followed by a page devoted to describing the publisher, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and also the International Zheng He Society.
Then there’s a foreword by the president of the Zheng He fan club, followed by a four-page message from the chairman of Ultraco Green Tech, followed by a preface from the book’s author, followed by three pages of acknowledgements. A tad too much packaging in this reviewer’s opinion. The work stands perfectly well on its own commendable merits.
Many books have been written on Admiral Zheng He. But this one approaches the iconic mariner from a fresh angle, and with the verve of a best-selling author of popular history; a writer with the popular touch of Stalingrad author Antony Beevor, perhaps. Or Jonathan Chamberlain, who penned the 2010 best-seller, King Hui: The Man Who Owned All the Opium in Hong Kong.
Both sides of this study – the history and the business theory – are as captivating as each other. Zheng He’s Art of Collaboration is Hum’s first book, and he has set the bar high for his second.
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