Stanford University Press Blog

A Personal Experience

The Frederick Chavalit Tsao Story

FREDERICK CHAVALIT TSAO

Free for commercial use via Pixabay.

 

We are proud to present an excerpt from Quantum Leadership: New Consciousness in Business by Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo.

IMC’s Origins

To fully understand my ideas of business sustainability and its stewardship of society, you have to look at the legacy I inherited. Each generation of my family evolved the business and shaped it to thrive in the particular era in which it found itself. But consistently applied across every era have been the three values of our founder, my great-grandfather: integrity, hard work, and prudence.

My great-grandfather Tsao Wa Chang was a sampan boatman in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century. One day, a drunken captain left a bag full of cash and documents in his boat. My great-grandfather could have kept it; it would have represented a fortune for such a poor boatman. Instead, he chose to seek out the captain, but his ship had already sailed. Months later, when the ship returned, my great-grandfather was waiting for the captain with the bag and its contents intact. It turned out that many of the documents were bills of lading and titles for cargo in a warehouse. The captain, a Westerner, was impressed with my great-grandfather’s integrity and gave him a large reward—a sum of money that would allow him to establish his own waterfront transport business. And so our family business was born.

With each succeeding generation, the business grew exponentially and often against all odds. Under my grandfather, Tsao Ying Yung, and my father, Frank W. K. Tsao, it expanded in shipping and real estate, through two world wars, and against the backdrop of China’s transition from empire to republic and thence to today’s more market-based socialist regime. As the Tsao family grew, members migrated from China across the globe—my grandfather died as a citizen of Brazil. By the time I was born, our business headquarters had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

A Look Inside Biomedical Growth in Asia

Martin Kenney interviews Beyond Technonationalism author Kathryn Ibata-Arens

KATHRYN C. IBATA-ARENS and MARTIN KENNEY

 

Free for commercial use via Pixabay.

 

Martin Kenney: What made you write this book?

Kathryn Ibata-Arens:  Before we get started, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation about my book Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia, and to be among the excellent books in your series Innovation and Technology in the World Economy. The path that led me to this book began in the mid-1990s starting as a Fulbright dissertation fellow at Tokyo University, followed by my first book on Japan’s high technology entrepreneurs. Since then, I have witnessed the struggles of entrepreneurs in Japan to obtain venture capital and invest in new product research and development. This is puzzling because Japan continues to lead the world in innovation, for example in patents and Nobel Prize worthy science and technology. Meanwhile, China, India, and even city-state Singapore have caught-up and in some cases leapfrogged over Japan in new technology entrepreneurship. The research started with the question: why is this?

 

MK: How would you define networked technonationalism for someone unfamiliar with the term?

KI: Thank you for asking. “Techno-nationalism” is the idea that a country’s national security depends on its ability to gain and maintain technology leadership in key sectors of the economy.

Taking stakeholders, rather than Milton Friedman, seriously

Beyond “shared value” approaches for corporate social responsibility

SARAH KAPLAN

Free for commercial use via Pixabay.

 

For decades, we have mythologized Milton Friedman’s 1970 dictate that corporations have a primary responsibility to deliver financial returns to their shareholders. But, the winds are shifting.

Former Unilever CEO Paul Polman is calling for “heroic chief executive officers” to achieve sustainable development goals such as more inclusive business practices and reduced carbon use. Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, an investment firm that manages over $1 trillion in assets wrote in his own Letter to CEOs: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”

There are almost too many reasons for urgency. Whether it is the risk of disruptions due to climate change; the Millennials who won’t work for companies that are only focused on the bottom line; workers using social media to fight sexual harassment and discriminatory work conditions; consumers boycotting products that don’t meet ethical standards; greater inequality is leading to political instability…Companies increasingly need to address the full set of stakeholders who surround them: all 360 degrees.

As I contend in The 360º Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation, the big problem is that meeting these stakeholder demands often requires action that could compromise profits. Improving worker conditions, investing in environmental advances, addressing the impacts of consumerism, creating talent pipelines for marginalized communities, or stopping polluting activities, are all costly. Costly in terms of cash, time and organizational disruption. Yet, just because they are costly doesn’t give organizations an excuse to go slow. In fact, the urgency for action in addressing these trade-offs could not be greater than it is today.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Borders

How the Soconusco became a space for migrants, political organizers, and economic opportunity.

CASEY MARINA LURTZ

Map of the republic of Guatemala (1895). Mueller, A. H. [Philadelphia: S.N] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress

 

Say “the border” and minds jump to the Rio Grande, Arizona’s desert, or lines of cars stretching for miles in Tijuana. Yet recent headlines remind us that Mexico also has the Suchiate River, the jungles of Chiapas, and Tapachula’s busy plazas to demarcate its boundaries. The Trump Administration’s efforts to stop migrants from Central America – and Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean – draw international attention and U.S. resources southward, expanding the U.S.-Mexico frontier to encompass two non-contiguous borderlands. The U.S.-Mexico border —Trump’s erstwhile wall, inhumane detention facilities — remains at the center of most reporting on migration. Yet with new policies like “remain in Mexico,” it becomes ever clearer that Mexico itself, from Ciudad Juárez to Tapachula, is now part of the U.S. borderlands. The Mexico-Guatemala border has seen blustering national politics confront messier, more porous local realities before. Today, migrants seeking asylum, stranded without funds, or rebuffed at the other border, use Tapachula as a base for planning next steps. Their experiences build on a long local history of refuge, one unlikely to be ended by current anti-immigration policy.

The Soconusco, of which Tapachula is the district seat, has been a transitional space for centuries. In the 1820s, the in-betweenness that marked the region’s Aztec and then Spanish colonial experience led to temporary autonomy. Local plebiscites to determine its future as part of either the new Mexican nation or the Central American Federation were inconclusive. National governments shrugged, and the region reverted to municipal governance. When Santa Anna rode south and claimed the Soconusco for Mexico in 1842, he drew no definitive line. The borderlands remained anybody’s country.

Across the 19th century this autonomy made the region a space of asylum and political organizing. Just as endemic violence and corruption drive Central Americans northward today, civil wars and political instability in the 1800s caused many to seek refuge beyond their nations. While the border was not yet fixed, it could still be crossed to reach safety. Some municipal governments interpreted autonomy as neutrality, leading to declarations of asylum for all or refuge for none. Others took sides and supported refugees as they organized resistance to the politicians who had driven them out. Multiple would-be presidents of Guatemala and governors of Chiapas staged their coups from the borderlands.