Whilst a great deal of management thinking still derives from the West, and in particular the United States, there have been a number of considerable contributions from further afield.

Perhaps the earliest of these was the quality movement originating in Japan that saw companies such as Toyota come to lead the way in the automobile market as a result of their lean manufacturing systems.  Where they led, eventually the rest of the industry followed.

Likewise, there has been tremendous growth in so called frugal innovation since its origins in India.  What began with the late CK Prahalad has since spread throughout the world, with many multinationals now hunting for that fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

The Chinese are coming

Might a similar management revolution be about to emerge out of China?  It’s a question that I can’t help but ponder as I flick through the pages of a corporate biography of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei by Tian Tao and David de Cremer.

A couple of things stand out from the tale.  Firstly, with operations in 170 countries around the world, there is a degree of intellectual humility that allows them to pick various innovations from around the world and hone to their liking.  For instance, some 30 years after Ricardo Semler proposed the virtues of rotating leadership, Huawei are one of the few major companies to actually practice this.

Despite this however, it’s hard to really determine a clearly defined style or characteristic that marks them out in the same way that things such as lean and frugal innovation have done before them.

Instead, it could be argued that their success is down to their appetite for a scrap.  The story of the company exudes a sense of the underdog that has to fight for every inch and out work more established Western rivals.  The tale of early employees being given mattresses to sleep on during marathon shifts has entered into company legend.

Whilst on the one hand this is eminently admirable, and I suspect there are few startups that have flourished without this desire and work-ethic, it does nonetheless have an uglier side to it.

How much is too much?

Nowhere is this dichotomy more evident than in the South Korean education system, which regularly appears high in the PISA rankings, yet whose hogwan after school clubs are often so intense that students are sleeping at their desks.

This level of intensity contributes to the highest suicide rates in the OECD, but such pressures are not confined to South Korea.

Indeed, so common is death by overwork in Japan that they have a distinct word for it (karoshi).  A recent government report in the country found that around 25% of respondents reported putting in over 80 hours of overtime per month, and there is a sense that this under-reports the scale of the problem.

In an Economist article on the topic, they report the guilt involved in staying at the office to do your bit.  “The company is like a big team. If I leave work early, someone else has to shoulder my work and that makes me feel terribly guilty,” one anonymous IT worker said.

This kind of tale frequently emerges in the Huawei story, and a number of suicides by workers at the company are almost glossed over as a necessary consequence of an otherwise admirable quality at the company.

There is much to suggest it is not restricted to Huawei, with the Gallup State of the Global Workplace report that prompted so much navel gazing in the West revealing that engagement levels in China were just 6%.

Finding your mission

Of course, if you are fulfilling your purpose in life, then work seldom really seems like work, and I’ve written a number of times on the power of purpose in our lives, and on some ways that we can go about developing this purpose.

Whilst this does seem to be a regular feature of the culture at Huawei, but leaders readily admit that it is not realistic to expect all employees to buy into the mission of the company.  Instead, they promote a culture whereby senior leaders are bought into the mission, middle managers experience a ‘sense of crisis’, and entry level staff have a sense of hunger instilled in them.

It isn’t entirely clear how effective this is however, as productivity in Japan, South Korea and China is considerably lower than in western economies.  As research suggests that these kind of extreme hours have an adverse effect on both our physical and mental health, the long-hours culture seems especially tragic.

What makes this interesting however is that Chinese companies are becoming increasingly adventurous.  Data from Thomson Reuters reveals that they completed $121.1bn in cross-border deals in the first six months of 2016, with 17 such investments in the UK alone.

There have been numerous studies conducted on regional characteristics, with perhaps those undertaken by Geert Hofstede leading the way.  His power-distance index scores China around 80 compared to around 35 for most western nations, which suggests that what works in China might not work in the west (and vice versa).

Perhaps more interesting however is the work of Professor Dave Bartram.  He did a similar analysis to Hofstede, but instead focused on 90,000 employees from 490 different companies spread across 35 different nations.  His analysis found that as much of the variance in our personality was likely to come from our employer as it was our nationality.

In other words, the culture of our employer is likely to attract people of similar characteristics.  So maybe Huawei will be able to attract the aggressive workaholics overseas that they entice in their Chinese offices.

Battling workaholism

Is this a good thing though?  Studies estimate that burnout costs the global economy over £250 billion per year.  Indeed, the World Health Organization suggest that the problem will reach pandemic levels within a decade.

Of course, there are many things that contribute towards stress and burnout, whether it’s ones commute to the office or the politics at play once you get there, but common to all studies of workplace stress are high workloads and long hours.

Whilst there are undoubtedly personality based factors that allow some to cope better with stress than others, this can easily result in employers passing the buck and not taking any responsibility for the environments they create.

Accepting that burnout is an issue and not pursuing a heroic ideal of a worker that needs no rest is perhaps the first step organizations can take, before then looking at individual ways to help employees manage stress as best as possible.  This may be in promoting work-life balance, providing agile working conditions, or even providing introverts with refuge from open plan offices.

So in answer to my original question, whilst there are no doubt many positive things that leading Chinese companies can offer to us in the West, but I hope the apparently blasé attitude towards stress and burnout is not one of them.