Heh, yeah, this is nothing new. There is more than one investment bank in London that hires professional actors to deliver presentations, then the real bankers take the stage at Q&A time. If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either... There are people employed full time to do just that.
We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.
If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either
Yeah ok that just plain isn't true. I worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and now at McKinsey and Co in New York as a consultant. While we do have a graphics department that we can call on to help spruce things up, as well as workers in India to help with tasks such as following simple instructions to translate spreadsheets into charts, 95% of the work is done by the bankers/consultants themselves (i.e., me).
In fact, the reason I left Goldman is because as an analyst 80% of your time is spent line editing charts, checking footnotes, and making sure everything is aligned. We even used MS Word with built in macros because Power Point wasn't precise enough. When you're working 110 hrs/week, that's not fun. McKinsey is better but not much different - which is why I'm moving back to SF in 4 weeks to be an entrepreneur.
Same goes for the "I'll hand you over to my colleague" statement. Often times an Engagement Manager who is well versed in the overall project presents for continuity sake (so the audience doesn't get confused by 5 people all chiming in), and questions are directed to the analyst in charge of the section.
Given the large number of banks, it's definitely possible that some adopt the "white guy in China" mode of operating. However, having worked in the industry and living on Wall Street, I do have close friends at virtually every bulge bracket bank and management consulting firm, so I can attest that my experience is not unique (at least when it comes to bulge brackets and large boutiques).
In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either...
There are people employed full time to do just that.
You mean associates and analysts? They at least fall under the category of "junior banker" and are on the right track to become deal closing bankers someday. Plus, the senior bankers make revision requests, so the junior bankers are like a high level programming language turning the comments. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Sure an analyst might slot the numbers in, maybe tweak the text. But what makes it a slick presentation is that the media assets, the layout, the overall structure, are done by a professional graphic designer who doesn't know a thing about banking per se, but knows all about creating compelling presentations. When I worked in consulting, another bit of the company did stuff like this. "Below the line" work it was called. Stuff that the client wouldn't acknowledge publicly had been done by a third party.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this. But once you know that this is how the game is played, you won't be wowed by the presentation anymore. And then you'll pay more attention to the content. And then, in supreme irony, they might as well have gone for the basic slides... But most people, most of the time, will conflate the presentation with the content.
Editing these documents for house graphic style and grammar was the very-well-paid temp job that covered my costs of being at college in London.
Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, BZW all had a 'graphics department' in the mid-90s and I worked briefly for all of them. Good job for them, too - you wouldn't believe the crap that some merchant bankers would want to give to clients.
(In fact, several of the banks had specific instructions to us about not permitting egregiously-misleading graphs get into the wild. X^2 graph axes, truncated axes designed to make a 1% price change look more significant... I remember seeing a couple of all of them every week.)
US securities laws in particular made getting in and out of the room a very complex affair. Depending on which banker's doc you were working on right now, you had to discuss things outside of the door at one end or the other of our office, but they weren't permitted to enter the room and their door passes wouldn't open our door. The little corner of Lehman's in London we were in was over ten minutes of card-waving away from the front entrance.
Japan has a tradition called "sakura" -- bringing in non-essential people for the sake of keeping up appearances. I've been a sakura, quite frequently. For example, at my ex-ex-job at the technology incubator, one of our incubated companies started selling their technology abroad. They were very happy and even got local press coverage -- a photo on page one. But what can you use as a photo?
Enter the sakura! The incubator told myself and our black Australian translator to suit up, and we took a few photos of us looking like we were in Serious Discussions with the CEO and general manager of the (two-man) company. They ran in the newspaper, next to a headline similar to "Startup X In Discussion With Y Firms; Exports Expected This Year".
(My dictionary reports that the usage is originally from the theater, where folks would be allowed to attend for free if they audibly demonstrated approval when required. That is the classic usage of sakura -- planted questions in an audience, etc -- but our little photo-op was referred to as sakura as well.)
My first job out of college (in Thailand) I got basically because the PR agency was required to have a Westerner on staff to interface with one particular British company (big, respectable brand, if a bit racist).
Unfortunately, the work was insanely hard (at 22 I would have gladly taken a high-paying appearances only job while I played music on weekends), especially being green and having to deal with the cultural/language barrier.
It sounds like they weren't hiring white guys because the Chinese have an 'inferiority complex', but because the Chinese economy is export driven and successful companies sell stuff to Americans and they wanted to imply to potential investors and officials that they were already working on deals with American companies.
In short, they were committing fraud, but because their lie involved fictitious American customers, they needed some white faces to pull it off.
Wouldn't the investors be able to see through the smoke, though? I mean, if a phony starts getting peppered with technical questions, and he balks, shouldn't that be a giveaway?
It's hard enough to tell the phonies from the real thing, for a domain expert. Investors are usually not experts at their domain, and only have limited time to assert the person.
These jobs are more prevalent and easier to snag than you think. I lived in Beijing when I was 21 and after 2 months and with the Chinese proficiency of a 2 year-old, I was working directly with the president of what is now a publicly-traded (NASDAQ) company as a "consultant". Paid my rent for a year.
A Malaysian coworker of mine told me about this sort of phenomenon years ago. (Something like 2002?) He was working for Compaq in the Asia-Pacific region, and noted that his group would often send in someone with asian features someplace with a proposal, which would get rejected. They'd later send a white American to give the same presentation, and it would win.
In Providence Rhode Island, the city paper submitted dozens of résumé pairs to jobs, differing only by obviously-classed name (like William Strathmore vs Tyrone Jackson), no cover letters. The Tyrone Jackson ones got no calls back, whereas the Thomas Strathmore ones got about a 50% callback rate.
Were, I'd expect. I don't know when you were 21, but a lot has happened in hires, IT supply, outsourcing, and China in the past years.
Such jobs might still be widely available, but I've heard several stories about early-2000 consulting jobs for young people that, to me, mostly speak about early 2000s.
edit: was the downvote because the article suggests this is still commonplace? if so, I'd like to clarify that my point was that I perceive the field to be in quite some flux, and as such experience doesn't age well. It's still a valuable anecdote.
In Japan there is a similar phenomenon for couples about to get married; it's called "Rent a White Minister." Japanese couples who want a fancy wedding often rent a white guy to perform the ceremony. Very often, probably most of the time, said white guy isn't even an ordained minister in any Church.
Someone tried to recruit me for this at the church I used to attend in Kyoto. (Not anybody we knew -- they just walked in after Mass and came up to speak to me.)
My priest responded on my behalf with all the moneychangers-in-the-temple enthusiasm you would expect.
Very often, probably most of the time, said white guy isn't even an ordained minister in any Church.
It's not really an issue, though, because doing a "Christian" wedding is more of a fashion statement than a religious one; there are very few practicing Christians among the native Japanese population.
Quite. There's a lucrative industry in Japan of providing gorgeous purpose-built western-style chapels, or rather, their imagined vision of what a wedding chapel should look like. No one is getting scammed because they are only doing it because they want the movie-like glamour of the fashion of a western wedding.
This is also a country where many buddhist and shinto temples are for-profit family businesses, so the whole concept of authenticity is a bit lost...
I live in Japan now and just heard about that this past weekend. It's not as lucrative as some of the other gigs that have been mentioned but you basically get paid to hang out at a wedding and read some scripted stuff. I'm trying to get into it now.
There was an article in [can't remember] (something good like the NYT) recently that talked about the phenomenon of black guys being hired as security guards in Arabic countries under similar intentions. The choice wasn't for negative reasons (e.g. cheaper labor or to "scare" criminals), but because they were seen to be exotic (a good trait for the high end boutiques being guarded). I seem to recall the black guys who were interviewed were bemused by the idea but appreciated the work nonetheless.
In 2002 a good friend of mine moved to Shanghai after graduating from college to do an internship for a chinese carpet company.
In his first month there he'd given a speech - in English - to 500 of China's most influential carpet executives, all of whom clearly knew more about the carpet business than he did. His boss played translator.
I thought it was ridiculous, but clearly there's a worthwhile return on investment or the practice wouldn't still be happening.
Ha! Read up the history of the start of Kingston memory, a little RAM manufacturer that I am pretty sure you've heard of, given its massive visibility in US retail.
Many many very successful and "respected" companies start out with a big gamble that is used to fund the creation of a legitimate business. This is a huge gamble, but the market market calls the losers of these gambles "scam artists" and the winners "captains of industry".
How many startups have given presentations about their amazing technology, using demos that mislead the potential investors about how far along the tech really is, only to turn around and use the investment money to actually pay for the real hard part?
Personally I prefer the complete lack of stress associated with just being honest: you never have to care who learns any particular details about your behavior, because there's nothing to worry about defending.
2040 is likely a safer bet. By 2020, America would more likely be resentful than awed. Give us time for a generation to come up with China in the lead.
Good article, but it never addressed the question I had: who is this posturing for?
If this is for people external to the company -- the press, potential customers, or fake-it-till-you-make-it, then that's great. If this is for investors -- people who have put money in the company -- then that would be fraud, at least over here.
One of these can be really cool and show a lot of chutzpah. The other can be a sign that the investment-structuring process has serious flaws.
You know, if we would prefer that people not judge presentations/companies/etc. according to the race of the person they see (or anything else in the category of "outward appearances easily faked by bringing someone in"), then this sort of thing is really good. It confounds people who do make judgments based on outward appearances; it fools them out of their money, punishes them for their prejudices and induces them to change.
This has been down voted. But there is a grain of truth. I have worked in several american companies and often the directors were tall, white, gray hair, and good looking. In one case the director was like that and he had a guy (brasilian born japanese) who was really sharp and handled all the operations. When they moved to other positions they moved together. Clearly they were a team. One was the PR guy and the other one was the one making sure everything ran smoothly.
Edit: added a coma
friend of mine went to china on vacation and after a dinner with some acquaintances was asked by someone he met there to serve as an expert on an alternative energy panel at a conference.
he's the sort of person who find that amusing, so with no experience, he was a wind energy expert for a night.
I'm reminded of the Republican Party's recent chairman Michael Steele. One of the microscopically few black men, percentage-wise, in a party of almost entirely white people, and he suddenly becomes Chairman, and the timing happened to be just before or just after (I forget which) the election of Obama, a black man, to the Presidency. Coincidence? I think not.
Where I live (in America), the party with lots of minorities is the Democratic party.
I'm pretty sure the functional head of the Democratic party is black. If something happens to him, the second and fourth people in line to replace him are women. Oh, and there's another black guy at number seven. And three asian guys in the list. And a half-Lebanese guy. And a few more women. And a couple Latinos. Huh. The Democrats seem to have a fair number of women and minorities at the top...
What country and party were you talking about?
P.S. At least one of the asian guys is a huge nerd, which is another under-represented minority, IMO.
I know a number of Indian, primary out-sourcing, tech companies who employ folks I know as "token white guys". They are technically knowledgeable for sure, but magically there's always one token white guy presented as the project architect or tech lead during client meetings, who ends up shifting to the next project in the sales cycle without actually fulfilling the tech lead role.
Not all companies do this, but enough do that it's more the norm than the exception.
Why is it that everytime China is mentioned, some Indians are going to jump in and say how Indians are better in such and such way? Do Indians just envy?
Educated Indians look at China and wonder what the hell is going on. Indians have similar corruption and population problems, but a much more savvy segment of English-speaking, technologically brilliant, Western educated elites, for generations even.
And yet, India gets fill-in-the-blanks Java outsourcing contracts while China makes the frigging iPhone. It drives Indian people INSANE.
Source: I'm one-half Indian with relatives involved in outsourcing.
One big advantage that China has over India is reliable physical infrastructure (e.g., power, roads, ports). In China when you turn the lights on, they stay on. In India, not so much, unless you're in a private industrial park with its own power source. Although the flip side is that the Chinese have been able to develop their infrastructure at a much faster pace because, unlike India which is democratic, their citizens have much less say about large-scale developments which impact them (e.g., Three Gorges dam).
That's another proof that China is on on the rise.
I'm sure pretty soon "Rent a White Guy" practice would cease to exist, because being a Chinese businessmen would be as reputable as being an American.
You're only saying that because we all know that China is on the rise. If it was 2000 you would say it proves that they're poor and trying to build infrastructure.
Besides, we all know that China is on the rise and that they do a lot of exports.
We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.