Happy New Year from APCA!

We trust you had a fun, prosperous and productive 2016, and wish and want to enable you to have an even healthier more prosperous and more productive 2017.

There were so many issues, events and trends that occurred, were surfaced or observed throughout an amazing and seemingly endless 2016, and you can be certain that these same issues, events and trends will only accelerate as we enter 2017. 

Issues, trends and observations ranged from major shifts in political leadership and voting sentiments, the global tectonic shifting of capital and manufacturing bases, the wider introduction and diffusion of game changing technologies (robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI, FA, bitcoin, cryptocurriences, blockchain and gene editing among others) and the accelerating realignment and skilling up of people across regions, industries and functional areas. This was especially evident in areas such as human resources as talent again becomes the biggest competitive differentiator ahead of technology.

Some major events seen during 2016 include:

1. The surprise demonetization campaign in India which appears to have severely crimped productivity and consumer sentiment in the last quarter as well as the continuing Make In India campaign.
   
2. China's renewed efforts regarding capital controls (of outbound capital / capital flight).
   
3. China's full embrace of factory automation and mechanization even at the risk of displacing large numbers of workers and stifling the establishment of a wider based middle class.
   
4. China's need to improve or even introduce professional management and leadership skills as well as control and guidance of her increasing shared of overseas operations from both organic growth as well as acquistions.
   
5. Japan's anemic economy, still pinched through oil imports (as the nuclear power generation stalls from almost criminal mismanagement) as well as increasing taxes, regulations and compliance. The key for Japan will be to foster an environment for fresh-blood startups, improve outbound exports and expand ROI-positive M&A activities (Japan has a terrible track record on M&A activities) but whether it has the political will to do so remains to be seen.
   
6. The rise of awareness and acceptance of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as well as the diffusion of knowledge about BlockChain and other applications built on it.
   
7. The acceleration of HR departments into not just Business Partners but also Talent Acquisition, Development and Management professionals, coaches and subject matter experts.
   

From APCA's perspective, all of these provide incredible excitement, challenges and most of all opportunities for coaches to demonstrate and market their value through the solutions they provide.

Happy New Year!

APCA Co-Founder & Director and Expert Career Coach, Hank Chin, was interviewed by Business Today magazine (今周刊) about Building Business & Career Relationships With LinkedIn.

63% of CEOs polled by the Harris Interactive Service Bureau experienced feelings of loneliness in their role.

For seasoned APCA & HICA Executive Coaches, this should really come as no surprise as this is found the world over although it often is more acute in many Asian countries where there may be additional cultural considerations or prohibitions against showing or sharing emotions or problems.

In other cases, we find the severity of loneliness among CEOs increases where the business is not run by a wide-range of public professional management but instead relies on a close-knit  family structure or is a closely held venture. That in turn amplifies the former situation.

This also is one of the biggest opportunities for experienced coaches to address and it is exactly why we explore this in our advanced training materials and workshops.

APCA Co-Founder and Executive Director, Hank Chin, will be delivering a Personal Branding Workshop in Taiwan on October 12th. 

This is just one of many information-packed workshops he has organized and delivered on behalf of IPIB. Check out the video below and follow the links for more details and register today!

Written by APCA Staff

Depending on your viewpoint, the recent turbulence in the Chinese stock market was either a simple correction or the beginning of a full-blown financial meltdown. This turbulence has since spread to Japan and the US among other countries.

While it's difficult to predict both the severity and length of this stock drop as well as floor for and impact of the devaluation of the Chinese Yuan, it is a perfect opportunity and a critical opportunity to understand where China is in its economic development stage.

China has witnessed and experienced unprecedented growth. More importantly, the duration of this growth as well as the sheer scope of it has created numerous imbalances and downright poor or dangerous practices in the process.

While this is going to cause some pain for China, it's going to be a massive business boon for Coaches and Consultants in both China and the Asia-Pacific region to add value.

Why?

Well, leading up to every crash there are numerous stressors placed throughout and inefficiencies plaguing the economy (any economy for that matter) -- many of which will have reached a bursting point, just as the economy itself has burst. However, as the economy slowly corrects and improves, these stressors hit an inflection point and something either mitigates them or eliminates them completely.

This is often intertwined with the adoption of key technologies.

In the case of China in particular and Asia-Pacific at large, we see huge opportunities in helping China modernize its companies to be Global in nature. This requires major work ranging from branding, to talent acquisition, talent deployment as well as the deployment and utilization of FRO Automation solutions.

While there will surely be some heavy immediate and mid-term pain, the long term prospects for China and Asia-Pacific are Golden indeed.

But to monetize these opportunities, one must position themselves now, to reap the coming harvest.

Written by APCA Staff

Each and every month, we receive many inquiries from both members focused on the Asian markets and prospective members investigating the potential of Asian markets as to what opportunities exist for both Coaches and Consultants (sometimes they are one and the same) .

Well, to understand what opportunities exist, it would behoove us to first understand what pain points exist now and what pain points are expected to exist in the mid-term and long-term future.

It goes without saying that Asia is a huge and diverse market not only culturally and often linguistically but also in terms of the stage of economic development and political stability.

We have modern economics like Singapore, Japan and Korea juxtaposed to developing nations like India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

And yet, within China and India, there are extremely modern cities. This hints at the fact that there are many, many layers of nuanced reality take in and to understand.

Generally speaking, however, there are pain points which we have either worked to solve directly or our members have or which we are aware exist. Obviously this is not intended to serve as an exhaustive -- take this list for what it is; a starting point to help you understand how to think through opportunities which exist now or that will exist in the mid-term and long-term future.

China
If we look at China, we see a huge population with tens of millions still working in agriculture or living in squalid conditions while in major hubs like Shanghai and Beijing and even Dalian, modern conveniences prevail. 

China is also struggling with rising wages, an aging population, various ethnic conflicts or potential ethnic conflicts, a major pollution problem and the need to shift from family run or parochially-run businesses to modern, global ventures.

There is also a China Brand issue. 

Some firms have taken on this challenge like LeNovo in computers (acquiring IBM's Thinkpad Division, NEC's PC business and Motorola Mobility from Google), Haier in appliances (acquiring Sanyo's White Goods business) and Hisense in the television business (acquiring Sharp America's TV Division).

India
If we look at a country like India, we see shining beams of light with some movement to deregulation and others like the Make In India program. Yet there are also dark clouds on the horizon with the massive pressure to facilitize those factories with robots and other factory automation solutions, thus, precluding, the employment of unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled labor.

Japan
If we look at a country like Japan, what we see is a falling population and an aging population. At the same time, we see Japan has some fantastic world brands -- Toyota, Sony, Toshiba and many, many more.

Yet at the same time, Japan has hundreds of fantastic second tier and even first tier brands which are unknown outside of Japan. 

On top of this Japan is also in the midst of so-called deflation but at some point it has begun to become inflationary.

Further Analysis
This analysis can easily be performed for each country in the region and from it, we can also see that some nation's have surplus labor while others have labor shortfalls, inflationary or deflationary environments to contend with and so on.

Overall though, the coaching and consulting services needed in the Asian region will and do range from the following:

• Branding
  
• Corporate governance education and reform
  
• Labor deployment
  
• Communication & skills training
  
• HR & organizational transformations
  

...and among many, many others. 


In the future, we'll take a look at Thailand, Korean, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Written by APCA Staff

Increasingly, the deployment of FRO Automation (Factory, Restaurant and Office) around the world has been accelerating as both automation capabilities increase and prices drop.

Recently, this trend of utilizing FRO Automation has been identified as a major threat to India's "Make in India" program. 

The Make in India program is a national program designed to transform India into a global manufacturing hub but as a further benefit to India, the program is designed to put unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled Indians to work in these factories and in the process to bring potentially millions of Indians out of poverty .

The usage of such technology in these Indian factories will preclude the usage of such unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled labor and nixes Indian's plans to use the Make In India as a major employment program for Indians.

From the foreign company's viewpoint, this usage of FRO Automation is a non-issue -- as long as quality, productivity, yield and confidentiality/secrecy objectives are met, the foreign company most likely has no preference if the work is done by hand or robot.

We've discussed this many times in the past, where the challenges for the large population countries like China and India is how to deploy such modern and necessary technologies in mass while still employing massive populations of unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled labor.

Juxtaposed to this, is a case like Japan, where such advanced technology is the embraced as the solution to a falling population.  While India and China to some extent will find these FRO automation solutions troubling, a country like Japan will find and does find such solutions to be an economic asset and a boon.

China's economic & human workforce transformations continue to accelerate, this time with the facilitization and provisioning of China's first fully operational unmanned factory.


Located in Dongguan city, all of the factory's processes are operated by robots and have had a tremendous impact on a workforce reduction (reducing employees from 650 before automation down to 60, workers now with a target of just 20 in the future) while at the same time slashing the product defect rate from over 25% down to 5% and at the same time boosting production capacity from more than 8,000 pieces per person per month to 21,000 pieces per person per month. 

While on the surface this is positive news for China's industrial competitiveness there will also be business and process challenges in having robots work side by side and integrate with human works and also the social cost of dislocated and displaced former factory workers, many unskilled or lower skilled.