In England, it’s back to school time.

Yesterday we dropped off my son at his new boarding school.  As we met his five new roommates, it occurred to me that a dorm room of teenagers is a kind of Petri dish for observing cultures other than bacteria.

Most fascinating to me was to observe the interplay between father-mother-son.  The various combinations and the milestone occasion made for a very interesting window into the family dynamic.

There was tension, there were tears … there were trembling stiff upper lips. 

And in the fullness of truth, most family members appeared to be genuinely excited about the next chapter in their lives – whether it was the son embarking on his next five years of study – or the mother and father coming to grips with it.  

The scene brought to mind a dinner conversation I had with one of our clients in Beijing last week.  The general topic was about the difficulty in hiring top management talent. 

After wringing his hands over the particular challenges in China, our client relayed to me a new element in his interview process.  He invites the family to dinner and looks for the subtleties in the inter-relationships between family members.  Once, he said, he did not make an offer to a highly respected candidate because he could tell the candidate’s son was afraid of his father.

“Trust comes from inside the heart,” our client said.  “And a kid’s eyes tell you what is in their heart.  If you can’t manage your own family, then you’d be a disaster trying to manage my business.”  Jon

The Beijing Olympic Games were a powerful spectacle, stunning in sight and sound.

But the moment that made the biggest impression on me came during an informal visit just before the Games to one of the new Chinese internet companies, and in conversation with some of the younger Chinese entrepreneurs.  

These people, men and women, were smart, sharp, forthright, unafraid to express their views about China and its future.  Above all, there was a confidence, an optimism, a lack of the cynical, and a presence of the spirit of get up and go, that reminded me greatly of the United States at its best and any country on its way forward.

These are the words of Tony Blair, taken from an op-ed he wrote for The Wall Street Journal shortly after the Games concluded two years ago (August 27, 2008).  Its headline:  “Help China Embrace the Future”

The former UK Prime Minister’s observations back then summarise perfectly the energy, the sense of commitment and ownership of the future that many of us felt in the presence of our Chinese colleagues last week. 

As you have seen elsewhere on myKGN, Ketchum Greater China marked its 30th anniversary with a major training programme – easily the biggest we’ve ever done there.  My fellow instructors – Peter Fleischer, Jonathan Kopp and Roy Edmondson – came away from the experience feeling that we, the teachers, may have learned more than the pupils.

Over the years and on more than one occasion I have heard Kenneth Chu, chairman of Ketchum Greater China, make the point that our agency will have to evolve and adjust to a global marketplace in which economic power soon will be shared with the Far East.  

I wonder if we quite understand what that means, we whose culture (not just our politics and economies) has dominated for so long.  It will be a rather strange, possibly unnerving experience.  Personally, I think it will be incredibly enriching.  New experiences; new ways of thinking liberate creative energy.

Tony Blair wrote those words, too.  

Today Blair’s memoirs, “A Journey” have been published and, perhaps predictably, he’s getting ripped.  “Reads less like a memoir, more like a long memo to his staff …”

But he got his op-ed on China and its future exactly write.  

Jon

PS Read the full piece click here

With apologies to Bogey, of all the motorbikes in all of Ho Chi Minh City (4.1 million and counting), this one had to run in to me.  

It wasn’t the impact. No, it was the speedy exit with my camera that really hurt.  

A Monday morning agency meeting this week meant that I spent Sunday, the Fourth of July – America’s birthday – in Vietnam.  

For 12 hours, as I wandered all over the city previously known as Saigon, I couldn’t help but reflect on my memories of the war as a kid growing up in the States during the 60′s. During the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite one night, I remember asking my Dad what a “casualty” was … I also especially remember my mother’s tears of spontaneous joy as we watched a live television report announcing that a friend’s son was, at that very moment, a newly-freed POW. 

On the other side of the world on Sunday, I came away from this most patriotic of American holidays with one distinct and surprising finding – Ho Chi Minh must be the most friendly city I have ever encountered.  

“Hey California!” came the happy shout all day long – from taxi drivers, market stalls, and yes, people whizzing by on motorbikes. Friendly waves, and big thumbs up … complete strangers with no agenda just saying “Hello” and “Where are you from?” simply to strike up a conversation and to practice their English. 

Not only were people willing to have their picture taken, many took extra time to smile and pose with their kids and Grandma – all balanced on the same two-wheeled scooter.  

With yesterday’s meetings successfully completed and a flight to New Zealand later today, I decided to make use of the down time and hired a hotel car for an early morning photo safari at the Mekong Delta.  

As we were leaving the City with a glorious sunrise to another scorcher of a day, the bright colours of a street market caught my eye and the driver stopped for me to take a quick shot.  

I was outside of the car for all of 15 seconds. Before I had a chance to put the camera strap around my neck, it was snatched from my hand by a guy on the back of the motorbike. I yelled, ran, but my Nikon and a loaded memory card whipped around the corner and out of sight.  

It was 6:10am.  

Bummed? Sick? Feeling stupid? Yep, yep, yep.  

Yet, I also stand by my earlier assertion that this city is world-class friendly. A half dozen people immediately came up, each looking as nearly crestfallen as I, shaking their heads sadly and making comforting conversation. The driver looked particularly stricken – he had suggested we stop.  

We then proceeded to the police station where a barefooted Captain was sound asleep in front of the TV (an American film with subtitles on HBO). A cleaning woman poked him awake, and for the next two hours we revisited the scene of the crime and with the contributions of helpful street vendors, we collaborated on a four-page handwritten report in two languages.  

As we worked away together on the crime report, an older generation of neighbourhood police station groupies asked excitedly to hear the dramatic story again and again, each time wishing me good luck and good fortune at the end. If their kindness also included Vietnamese for “moron,” they did so with smiles and gentleness.  

I know I’ll never see the camera again, nor the 300 images of smiling, happy Vietnamese that I took on the Fourth of July. But I do leave with my mental memory card pleasantly full, intact and newly-updated.

Jon 

I’m probably not the first to declare the world is divided into two camps – coffee drinkers and the tea sippers.

My wife is the latter. I am the former.

Coffee, to me, isn’t about taste – it is purely a functional duty. Bracing, bolted down, badda boom and bang – out the door, on with the day, day, day! 

I often observe my wife with her tea cup in the morning – she’s not drinking from it, she’s caressing it.

Tea looks to be all about lingering, savouring, easing … smoothly, gracefully … into the daaaaaaay … Tea, it seems to me, is more about meeting the day and negotiating a proper start to it, versus charging in and confronting it.

Check this out for yourself this summer:

I maintain that tea drinkers step carefully, gingerly into life’s swimming pool. Coffee drinkers? Hell, they cannonball straight into the deep end.

Even the afternoon tea break – a fine English tradition – is a discrete way of slipping out of the moment and then quietly back into it, whereas a coffee break is about refueling, recharging and gearing up for the day’s final grind.

But on an Air China flight to Beijing this morning, I was handed an 8-page Tea Menu that has caused me to rethink everything. Its introduction jolted me like a rich mug of black Colombian, and at the same time, it also gave me pause:

“The tea emits a sweet scent and a degree of warmth, displaying its posture of calmness, reservation, introversion and modesty, providing us with a share of ease and peace of mind in the noise of the city, ( deep breath here) allowing us to enjoy a portion of quietness and comfort in the surge of lives, the change of seasons and the convergence of time and space.”

Dang. Who knew? (And to think my wife has been harbouring this truth from me for all these years.)

Purely as an aid to public health, allow me to now quote from a few of the selections Air China has on offer :

Green Tea

Suitable for busy young people who often use computers with refreshing, cooling digesting, clearing throat, brightening eyes functions

Black Tea

Suitable for weak people with refreshing and enriching the saliva, diuresis, diminish inflammation and anti-bacterium, detoxification functions

Blue Brown Tea

Suitable for the crowd to lose weight and feel irritable, with the functions to prevent occurrence of reactive oxygen and tooth decay, elimination of damage to beauty and health

Preventing an “occurrence of reactive oxygen” seemed like a good idea (chicken sausages for breakfast) but instead, I went for the Jasmine – “full fragrance and stored in a cool place.” 

Supply your own punch line here: _________ 

Jon

Been to Trafalgar Square lately? 

In the northwest corner, on the infamous “empty” fourth plinth, there’s now a stunning work of art called “Ship in a Bottle.”   It’s a replica of “HMS Victory” – the ship in which Admiral Lord Nelson’s scored his decisive naval victory in 1805.  

Trafalgar Square itself stands as something of a civic victory, too. The square was created back in 1840 and ever since it has served as London’s central gathering point. A £25 million redevelopment programme in 2007 put new wind in the sails of a city that cherishes, if not overtly celebrates, freedom of expression.  

“Ship” is truly incredible. The Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare created all 37 sails from African-style textiles and it is, as branded, indeed encased in a giant glass bottle.  

But for me, nothing tops the fourth plinth quite like last summer’s artwork. 

As Londoners will easily recall, the July 2009 “installation” marked the start of a total of 2,400 individuals who climbed to the top of the plinth to take turns becoming a living work of art.  

The idea was the brainchild of artist Antony Gormley – his work saw one person appear on the Square’s plinth every hour for 100 days. Art specimens ranged from the existentialist humanitarian who did absolutely nothing to the one who dressed as human excrement in a plea for clean drinking water. 

Is it art? That was the question of the day.  

A columnist (Frank Skinner) from The Times then called it “a living portrait of modern Britain” and endorsed it with a quote I love and all cranky cynics will hate: “One of the worst things that can strike down a human being is the slam-dunk closing of the mind – the idea that one’s opinion of something has been finally formulated and now set in stone. I think opinions should be like Plasticine – always open to reshaping, always having the potential to become something new.”   

In the closing ceremonies, Mayor Johnson said “Over the past 100 days we have witnessed the bold, the beautiful and the bizarre. In the age of X Factor and Guitar Hero, Gormley’s plinthers have quite literally stood alone.” 

I loved the idea of the exhibit and have thought our agency would be for the better if we all took on board and exercised more rigorously the symbol of freedom it represented.    

For nearly a year now, Skinner’s column has been crumpled in a corner of my backpack, but yesterday, on the taxi ride from the airport to my Singapore hotel, I saw a billboard for the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School that neatly captured the essence of the Plinth People: 

“SCGS Talent Programme. From a face in the crowd to the one the crowd faces.”

Jon   

I must have half a dozen friends who have told me they learned English by watching the American TV sitcom, “Friends.” 

My buddy Akmal from Uzbekistan even has the accent from his favourite character, Joey. (I have to say it was a little odd to hear him say “Hey! Fuggetaboutit!” — perfectly in character, in a street market in downtown Tashkent … but I digress.)

This occurred to me while reading the reviews of what I believe will be the first book I download on my spiffy new Father’s Day present. The book is called “Globish,” by Robert McCrum. Its premise is that English has now become the world’s default language, birthed by non-native English speakers who found they could communicate through an exchange of a basic vocabulary of English words. 

“Globish” (so named by a French former IBM executive) is “overwhelmingly an economic phenomenon,” according to a recent piece in the New Yorker – ”(It’s) the language of Singaporean businessmen closing deals with the help of a small arsenal of English words, and of European officials calming financial markets by uttering stock phrases on television.” A review in the International Herald Tribune called Globish ‘”the worldwide dialect of the third millennium” sustained by, McCrum asserts, “the Internet, global marketing, mass consumerism, instant communications, international soccer, and texting and (Mr. McCrum is English) cricket and the legacy of Winston Churchill.”

At dinner in Dubai last week, the new client prospect I was meeting stopped herself in mid-sentence, laughing, no doubt, at the giant question mark hanging over my head. She paused to explain two Arabic words she had been sprinkling liberally into our conversation. She’s an Egyptian and has lived in seven different cities, picking up phrases and languages at every stop. 

I would argue she is also fluent in Globish. ”Yanni” means “it means” and “massalan” means “for example,” she explained. 

My friend Hania (MD of Ketchum Raad Middle East) then added, “When you text “yanni” one does so by typing ya3ni. Using certain numbers such as 3 is the new Arabic way to express letters that not do not have an equivalent in English … such as 7 for the heavy Arabic ‘h’ in words like 7abibi [my love] — a very common word in Levant that we use for all! Also 2 for the ‘a’ in the middle of words sounding like ‘a’ in ‘at’.  For example, “Ya 2allah” = “Oh God”, another common phrase used when frustrated or sad. A third word commonly used among Arabs while speaking in English:  “Yalla” for “Come on” or “Let’s go.” This applies mostly to the new generation – it’s like the SMS lingo of LOL, cul8r.

“So — Ya 2allah! 2 hot for pool 2day.  Yalla … I have 2 go 3abibi!”

Confused? Well, take heart. There’s still plenty of room for retro language with the next generation, apparently.  

Yesterday, while watching the World Cup with my England-born daughter, we were whooping it up after a cracker of a goal by Brazil. She turned to me and asked “Hey Dada, what’s the word that Americans use when they’re excited about something?”

“Awesome?” I ventured.

“Yes – that’s it! Awesome!”