Shanghaied Weblog

Climbing Mount Fuji

For the past couple of years Gary and I have tried to do at least one physical challenge per year. Over the past years that led us to ride a mountain bike through the Himalaya and to the top of Kilimanjaro. Because we are both too busy these days to train a lot the physical challenge for this year was a relatively easy one: climb Japan's highest mountain, Mount Fuji. To make things a bit more difficult we decided to climb outside the main season (that starts next week), when it's still a...

Meeting a former Daimler colleague in Shanghai

In 1996 I spent 12 months as an international management trainee in the Mercedes-Benz "Nachwuchsgruppe". We were a group of 12 ambitious young men and women who during the course of one year were allowed to do 3-4 months projects at Mercedes-Benz/Daimler plants and offices all over the world. Even though we did not see each other much (most were not at headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany) we became pretty good friends during the year. We used a predecessor to regular email to keep in touch...

Elaine is very popular!

Yesterday my parents picked me up from the office together with Scott and Elaine. We then took the kids for a stroll along the Bund. Scott loved it, he pointed out all the different boats to me and he was happily running and jumping on the newly opened river promenade. Many people took pictures of him, but Elaine was even more popular: because of the Expo there were a lot of local tourists who have likely never seen a blonde baby girl before. So quite a few tried to take a picture with...

World Cup sand art on Tudou

With the football World Cup kicking off tonight in South Africa lots of World Cup related films are being uploaded to Tudou. One of them is especially good and is made by a sand artist. Sand art is a pioneering performance art among the Chinese internet video population. Tudou is one of the biggest platforms for sand art performances as renowned artists regularly show their projects here. The video begins under the drum beat with animals lying on the South African horizon. Then all of...

BarCamp Shanghai 2010 takes place tomorrow

Tomorrow another edition of BarCamp will take place in Shanghai, at the NetCircle offices starting at 9:30 AM. I don't know why they chose this date, because this weekend will be a working weekend in China, but it seems many people will attend anyway (97 registrations so far on Friday afternoon). If you don't know BarCamp, it is an unconference where everybody can give short talks on certain topics and where everybody participates. You have to show up in the morning to get your name on the...

Running on the Great Wall with Arnold Schwarzenegger

Not only did I have a company outing this weekend, but we also moved to a new house. While going through boxes of old papers in my study I found two newspaper pictures from May 2000 in which I appeared next to Arnold Schwarzenegger. At that time he was still the Terminator instead of the Governator, and I was still just a mid-level manager at Daimler. The story behind the pictures (The top one appeared in the Beijing Youth Daily, the one at the end of the article in the China Daily) is...

How do you evaluate a CEO?

I am not a big fan of management books, I believe more in following my gut feeling when running a company than in reading and implementing all kinds of theories. Does that make me a good CEO? Difficult to say, because how do you evaluate a CEO? Based on his behavior? Or based on his results? Probably more the latter than the former, but then the next question is against what to measure the results: what were the objectives and were they the correct objectives? Today I saw a link on Twitter...