Thomas D. Gorman: So, the idea of creating your personal board of directors of the age of 25 is a remarkably savvy thing to do. I guess what I'd like to do is try to turn the five attributes of the right people around, because I've been asked by young people in China what qualities do I need to develop to become an attractive and successful employee and begin my career? It's a very interesting question and of course, there may be some differences from country to country, but I think really the five attributes that you have identified are pretty fundamental and pretty universal. So, the question is, how would you counsel young people if they're in the age group of 20 to 25, I think what you're saying is there's still time to think about, if you take your quote regarding age 30 as the deadline. Still time to think about character traits and values. Again, I think one of the phenomena we talked about earlier; China in the past 20-30 years has undergone phenomenal socio-economic change in a way that...
In levels that I think, I know as an American I can't comprehend, just the fundamentals that have changed.
Correct. So, you have a whole younger generation now coming into the society coming into the work force looking for anchors and looking for guidelines and it's confusing. I think it's very confusing and the Chinese media is full of discussion and debate about that. Added to which, you have a generation of single children who are doted upon, not only by mom and dad, but grandpa and grandma, and so on. There's a widespread awareness and concern about these little emperors and empresses as they're called. That has a formative influence on how somebody thinks about themselves in the context of society. But, I think what you're saying, and the example you use about your personal board of directors is, there's still time, and one of the things we're seeing, we're seeing this in editing the magazine and we're seeing it in attitudes. There's a tremendous resurgence of interest in traditional Chinese values, philosophy, whether it be Confucianism or Taoism or even the Yi Jing . Which when I first went to China, were not exactly popular, to say the least. But, that's coming back now, and I think we're seeing that, it probably started maybe 10-15 years ago, with the renewed interest in books like "The Art of War" as a management treatise. But, now it's much broader than that, it's people trying to balance work-life issues and trying to come up with perhaps a return to traditional values and adaptation to the current situation and the current challenges.
Jim Collins: I can only speak through the lens of our research and my own experience and I'm hesitant to extend it to a culture that I know that I don't know. So, what I'll do, is try not to over extend and just share what I've seen here.
If I look at the people, the exceptional people that we've studied, one of things that's really interesting if you look back as they developed, their own trajectory. They have two signature behaviors I think that jump out as they develop.
One is, they actively try to seek being in the orbit of folks that they considered to be high quality people. So, they don't necessarily think in terms of what job would be the best job. They might think, who would I want to be associated with, so if there are certain kinds of companies, or certain types of enterprises where they just seem to have a lot of outstanding people, you begin associating with outstanding people, you're more likely to have good things happen, just because you're around outstanding people.
