Rent a White Guy
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.
In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either...
There are people employed full time to do just that.
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.
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.
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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.
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.)
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.
In short, they were committing fraud, but because their lie involved fictitious American customers, they needed some white faces to pull it off.
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...
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.
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.
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...
My priest responded on my behalf with all the moneychangers-in-the-temple enthusiasm you would expect.
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.
Even when everything is documented, there are still gaps in communication, and trust fills them.
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.
Well, then again, Chinese girls are (IMHO) a lot more pretty than Western girls.
You also know Chinese characters (which is a massive accomplishment in my book).
The current stereotype is also that Asian people are good at math. So it is not all that bad ;)
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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.
Kind of a key question.
he's the sort of person who find that amusing, so with no experience, he was a wind energy expert for a night.
One of the biggest is Thomas Sowell (I used to read his stuff without knowing that he was black).
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.
All it shows, is that China thinks the west is better. A point in time of china's opinion, not even a view of a changing opinion.
Besides, we all know that China is on the rise and that they do a lot of exports.