Sun Yat-sen University Lingnan IMBA program recently held a guest lecture series in Corporate Ethics or more specifically, “Leadership, Humanity, and Corporate Citizenship”. The seminar series was led by renowned lecturer and MIT professor, Leigh Hafrey. A few biographical notes about Dr. Hafrey:
International ethics expert, Hafrey graduated from Harvard & holds a Ph.D. from Yale. After receiving his Doctorate, he started his teaching career at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Having held the most prestigious post of Staff Editor (Sunday review section), The New York Times, Hafrey has been a visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies & a Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Since 1995, Hafrey has been distinguished faculty at Sloan School of Management.
Dr. Hafrey led the class through a lively discussion of American and Chinese ethics in the workplace using films and written selections as a central media throughout his teaching. We watched and discussed Tom Cruise’s transformation from a self-serving sports management agent to a client-focused, values-based entrepreneur in Jerry McGuire. We examined traditional Chinese roles and those that challenge them in The Long Road Home. We laughed and reflected on Danny Devito’s aggressive corporate take-over tactics and philosophy in Other Peoples’ Money. Dr. Hafrey spurred an interesting discussion among my Chinese classmates on many interesting topics that may later serve us well in the business world.
At one point in the course, Dr. Hafrey asked us to write a bit about the values that guide our behavior as we think about our future private and professional life. Not quite too sure what to write about, I picked a recent brief conversation I had with a fellow classmate in one of Dr. Hafrey’s previous sessions.
I learned something about Chinese thinking that appears to differ quite significantly from western assumptions about universal values. We were asked to watch the movie, Hotel Rwanda, in preparation for class. The movie is about the genocide that occurred in the mid-90s and a particular Rwandan hotel manager who saved the lives of hundreds of people with his quick-reacting pragmatism in a time of intense national crisis. At a particular point in the movie, the main character, Paul Rusesabagina, secures a spot for his family and himself on an evacuation aircraft. He helps his wife and children onto the truck that will take them to the airstrip. In a moment of guilt, he glances back at all the people he is leaving behind as refugees at the hotel (and will likely die very soon). As the manager of the hotel, he feels it is his responsibility to stay back with those people and do what he can to help them to hopefully live. He leaves his family to follow what could be called a duty to his countrymen and his customers at the hotel who desperately need his help avoiding almost certain slaughter in the next few days/hours.
At this point in the movie, I lean over to my Chinese classmate and say, “What would you do? Would you leave your family like that?” (we learn later that his family drives into a rebel ambush that almost kills them, and actually prevents their extraction from the country) My classmate, almost without thinking about it, says “Of course!” At this point I realized, there may be an underlying difference between US and Chinese culture in way we value our families.
Going back to the brief essay we all wrote for Dr. Hafrey’s lecture – after the lecture a classmate asked me what I wrote about. Turns out this same classmate wrote about the same topic – the difference in the way we think about our families in our two countries. He wrote about a conversation he and I had several months ago. He and I both were members of a business plan team that won a school competition last semester. He recalled my apprehension about initially joining the team because of the additional time (for a required business plan class) needed on the weekend. I expressed to him that in the US, I was used to spending weekends with my family and was unsure about the extra time I would have away from home (in addition to the full-time weekday MBA courses). He didn’t say at the time but he remembers thinking that my comment was such a strange reaction.
Incidentally, I ended up joining the team and not missing too much time at home. In fact, I had a wonderful experience being a part of a winning team and learned a great deal about working so close with the Chinese and designing a competitive business. Anyway, I thought this was interesting and since realizing all this have started to really admire the Chinese loyalty and commitment to company, country, and society. Perhaps this is something else the West could stand to learn from our Chinese friends.
