Today was a little special day because I got another chance to compare China with India, on a much smaller scale, though. We went to the Advertising Agency who designs most of the ads for our company. As it is a global ad agency, we are a global client of it and hence both in India and in China, it is the same agency. I have had a chance to meet the Indian partners over a training in Mumbai and today I was meeting their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai.
The office here, like the Indian one, was quite creatively designed and the atmosphere of the place loudly spoke that it is an advertising agency. I was happy to see that contrary to my interpretation a few days ago, Chinese have turned out be as creative and innovative as anyone else. We were then introduced to the Creative team of the agency and I was a little sceptical to see that the main people of the team were a European man and a Malaysian girl. I was about to make an interpretation that Chinese really can't be creative. But then I paused. I went through the entire presentation, which was dominated mostly by non-chinese people and the only comments that our Chinese friends made were on the process rather than the creativity.
Somehow, China is brilliant in executing an idea to the last tee but to think of them to come up with a completely weird idea still seems improbable to me. Their strength is an organized and systematic way of working, and that is the reason that they are giants in the field of manufacturing, but creativity is not seen as a strength here and probably that reflects in the poorly developed media and entertainment industry.
Maybe, I am passing sweeping statements on something which is big enough to be analyed and understood in greater depth before commenting, but then, these are my primary thoughts and with the acceptance of the fact, they can be completely be wrong, I will keep posting them.
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