gregt590

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Japan isn't the only country where developing a startup culture is difficult. Many Asian countries have a much more heirarchical culture where simply following what your boss or political leader says to do without question is strongly ingrained. I was part of a team under John Roese at Huawei that was trying to help Huawei learn how to be innovative. Their executive leaders understood the need, but there turned out to be too big a cultural divide across the bulk of the company to get the support and engagement needed, so the effort collapsed after a couple of years and most of us moved on to more productive efforts. It was however a very insightful period in my career since I learned a lot about where China (in general) has advantages over the US and where the US (in particular Silicon Valley) has advantages over China. The willingness to openly share and "give before you get" is definitely some much more common in the US and leads to much more effective collective efforts here. On the other hand I have never seen more effective "manufacturing-like engineering" at scale than I saw at Huawei. In an ironic way we are often able to leverage the power of numbers (i.e crowd sourcing, open source, cross-collaboration, etc) more effectively than the country that has the numbers but not yet the understanding of how to best leverage them.