Taking the middle road here, this invitation was about investing in a foreign market. It's might raise enough eyebrows to the Chinese leadership that they have an openly gay man speaking to them about opening their protectionist economy to outside investment.
Besides which, the speeches they give will have to be reviewed beforehand, so as to avoid any unwanted topics and to prep the translation team.
Ive been living here for a while and for variously deep cultural and historic reasons I've increasingly found that you can't shift Chinese viewpoints by embarrassing them into changing their behaviour. It always needs to be a soft approach here.
I'm sure globalization has benefited Tim Cook quite well. Too bad the rest of society doesn't benefit quite like the top 1%.
Yes, shareholders want two faced CEOs keeping those stock prices high.
A country is more than its economy, as environmentalists are so fond of saying. And as some economists are saying now, cheap goods don't matter if nobody has a job and thus can't buy them.
It's very simple to understand. Apple is a brand that makes a personal connection. Steve Jobs helped solidify that connection and maintain the relationship with the customer during his presentations. We bought the products because we were excited about them. We were excited about them because Steve was excited about them. Steve made a personal connection with the customer and made them feel valued. There was a very big physiological connection to Jobs. Steve became the face of Apple and the two could not be separated.
Tim is as stated above...soggy cardboard. The personal connection with Apple and the customer is deteriorating and the loyal customer base eroding. Apple today is no different than the Motorola of the early 00's. Once the iPhone isn't cool....the whole company falls apart. There is as much of a customer loyalty to the iPhone as there was to the Razr. It's a time bomb waiting to go off. Tims disconnect with the customer won't help. Sure the LGBT folks see him as a hero....but that's not enough to keep them going. In fact I think his stance on political issues just helps erode and sour the customer base. Steve kept politics out of Apple and focused on the products. That clearly isn't a thing for Cook.
I'm not the one confused about what kind of politics we are talking about.
I'm not confused about the fact that politics are always complex. Binary thinking is convenient but it's not even right half the time.
On China: The soft pitch works better most places. Why would we want to be berated by someone to open our markets to them? Same goes for dealing with China when we are talking about our competitive partnerships there.
China understands this in its own dealings with say South America, where it trades infrastructure investment for either natural resources or for agricultural products. They sometimes insist on bringing their own workers to the projects but they do not attempt to influence the culture of the host countries. They may keep to themselves and they may not particularly respect personally the cultures or governmental systems of those countries; they just find a way to come to a transactional arrangement that pleases them and provides enough incentive for the host country in turn to welcome the deal.
It's not that different for any country that actually wants to do business on someone else's turf. Your turf, your rules... within limits, e.g., if both are WTO members for instance.
On the other hand the host country wants the deal too, so there's a middle ground which affords that deal, and it doesn't always have to be sketched out like a map pegged to GPS coordinates. When there are cultural differences, they can often be elided as irrelevant to the factory floor. When there are human rights issues --worker safety, for instance-- then ignoring them can mean disaster. For an American company this percolates into media headlines that shareholders will not tolerate.
But, sometimes that middle ground does have to be pegged precisely. Local customs or law may dictate that foreign nationals have to live in gated compounds in order to avoid major culture clashes, for one example. For another, our disagreements with China over what's permissible regarding internet access are already legendary and get resolved or kicked down the road one snag at a time.
As far as the business end goes, it still comes down to do we want the deal, or not. It's not a binary consideration but there's a yes or no at the end of the day.
Sometimes we probably should say no, we don't want the deal. But we are a capitalist society. So, we don't often say that. We try to bargain down the levels of catering to oppressive government instead, with mixed results and sometimes a well-deserved sullied reputation for putting a dollar of profit above the intrinsic value of human rights.
People complaining about how human rights are not respected or how globalism mistreats human beings should perhaps look these days a little closer to home than China, and I don’t mean Silicon Valley. It’s not like Mr. Trump has embraced the cause of human rights in general, nor has he made exemplary moves on behalf of the 99% in constructing either his cabinet or his first budget proposal. Singling out Tim Cook or Apple itself as some sort of perpetrator of oppression is a real stretch if you want to drill down into those draconian budget cuts offered by the White House in 2017. The rural areas whose citizens voted for Trump in droves take some of the worst hits in that budget. Whatever they may think of Tim Cook or Apple for whatever Cook says in China will pale compared to what they’ll think of the Republican Party if it elects to jam that budget through Congress.
I used to think of my own companies, my own bosses as oppressive once in awhile. On the other hand it was I who chose to live and work in NYC during my career, and I knew that it was an extremely competitive arena where there were others willing to work those hours and make that level of effort. The companies for which I worked had their own choices to make in that arena. Where we did not meet eye to eye, we parted company. That’s life. I managed to take my grandfather’s advice 99% of the time: it’s easier to find a new job if you already have one while you’re looking.
The job market is not some sort of giveaway scheme. There are always hard choices to make when one earns a paycheck or as a company struggles to put up a bottom line that meets shareholder expectations. Is it cruel? Yeah. It can be and often is. But half this board considers the various social safety net programs of the US government to be “socialism”. Half this board also celebrates when union-busting efforts produce yet another right to work state here in the USA. So I say to those who buy those lines and yet still argue that the US needs to back out of globalism and put jobs into the USA are deluded: if those jobs come back as they are now, they will not pay what they paid in the 1950s, nor persist unchanged for long, and we will need to tailor our social safety nets to include more education and job retraining efforts to meed evolving industry needs.
We are no longer living in the age when union scale paychecks and benefits pervade economic arenas in the USA. That pendulum swings back and forth, of course: very few alive now remember labor conditions in the USA in the early 20th century. Even though there has been some backlash and renewed efforts to unionize in recent years, union-busting efforts continue unabated. Nonetheless, if our manufacturing jobs come back as modern jobs, most of them will within decades go to robots. It’s already happening with manufacturing jobs that have remained here. The right to work comes with a price tag: you need the skills demanded by that job. How that job gets done may require different skills depending on where and how it's done, at what price. How it gets done the old fashioned way is probably abroad, not here. For now.
That leaves the 99% and its Congressional representatives facing the conundrum it does right now: how to prepare for the world on its own terms going forward. One answer is to ensure that what we manufacture --wherever we manufacture it-- has the broadest of potential markets. China, India, Latin America, the African continent. Where there is a market demand for a product, there is a need for those consumers to have the wherewithal to buy those products. Hence the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Yes, it’s too slow a process. But, it is building a middle class in societies that never had one before. Wage pressures have already been felt in China. Unionization pressures are having effect on pay scales and working conditions. Jobs are being automated and skilled labor competition is setting in there just as it is here. It’s ironic to me that people arguing to “make America great again” don’t seem to realize that America’s greatness has never been about pulling up our drawbridges and closing off access to and from the rest of the world. How we became great is by being open to change.
What we don’t seem to understand anymore is that change doesn’t mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It means negotiating from strength at the center, here and around the world. "The center" is not the same place at home as it is abroad. It's not even the same depending on who the domestic audience is. Tim Cook is aware of that. So are most Americans, in the sense that we tailor the scope and mode of our discussions differently depending on whether we're in a staff meeting at work, at the dinner table with Grandma, or down the end of the bar on a Friday night.
I say let each of us including Tim Cook figure out how best to structure our own end of the conversation for the situation and in light of our responsibilities. It doesn't mean having to succumb to situational ethics. It means we're aware of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and so deal to advantage as best we can in that scenario. In the best of outcomes we come away with some benefit to self or to the organizations we represent, without compromising our personal integrity. Certainly our mileage can and does vary on that score. No one's anything but human here so we're not likely to find perfection any time soon.
