Talents are the Key to Success

Posted on by
2

This is a pretty dumb statement. Everyone knows it. Everyone says it. Every textbook have it. Every leadership session talks about it. Every…..

But common sense is not common, and some times it does not make sense. (Jian Shuo Wang’s invented the second part of this phrase).

I sat down with Quanzhan this noon to afternoon to talk about the talent. It is not surprising for a research organization of Tencent, talents are the No. 1 priority. The selection standard,  the talent, and the retention are something that makes a great workplace and a winning business.

Recently I spend well more than half my time on talent recruiting, and to get wisdom from people who are good at it. That is the No. 1 job of a CEO.

BTW, does any of my blog readers know anyone, or you think yourself is someone we are looking for, please let me know by sending me email to wangjianshuo at baixing.com. We are looking for people in the following area (most of the jobs are in technical field, with some other roles).

  1. Anti-fraud. How to fight again fraudsters on a classified site.
  2. Search. The in-site search, and the organization of hundreds of millions of posts generated by our users.
  3. Platform. The way to structure the site in a way to allow internal and external developers to be more productive.
  4. Payment and monetization products.
  5. Marketing and industry experts in one of our main categories.

If you have a feeling that you may be the right person, but not sure, just sent a note to hr at baixing.com. Feel free to put me on the CC line to make sure I read it.

 

Accumulation Calories Burning and More

Posted on by
3

Accumulation Calories Burning

Nike+ is a great product. It turned running into something interesting. I started to accumulate my calories burning history from March and that is the main driver for my running. Blog posts are the visible mileage of my writing, and the thinking behind it. It is said:

If you cannot messuare, you cannot improve

Either blog posting or Nike+ is a way to measure, and to improve, because numbers are the few things in this world to have a clear direction, while ideas, and wish are pointing to many directions.

Attending Microsoft Event

I attended a Microsoft event this morning by invitation. It was a good one – nice setting, nice logistic, and nice content. It brings me back to the Microsoft world – decent PPTs, very well prepared content – likely to be prepared by someone in the headquarter, and translated, and a group of CIOs and CTOs.

There is one thing wrong, though. It is a pure Microsoft environment. In this setting, you see very few Mac computer – the majority are black Dell or IBM running Windows, and the majority of phones people use around me is Windows Phones. I can imagine how powerful the environment influence to the people in it. From what I see, there are too many reasons to believe that Microsoft is still the center of the universe, which is no longer true if you put yourself into another non-Microsoft environment, like University Cafe at University Ave of Palo Alto.

I told myself to be open minded and be cautious of the environment, and fight for the freedom and independence of thoughts.

TEDxShanghai

There are some nice summary of the TEDxShanghai event. Here is the link. Enjoy.

TEDxShanghai 2012 见闻与感想

TED、上海和演讲

Thoughts on TEDxShanghai

Losing by Spending Money

Posted on by
3

When we spend money, we thought we bought something. But recently, I realized it may be losing, in many cases. Here are examples.

Buying a Car

Ever since I bought my car, I felt more and more disconnected with this city. I don’t talk with people on the way home, and I don’t see anything new. I don’t observe, and I don’t hear anything. I am losing many things.

Hiring a driver

I hired a driver to send me to work. I started to lose even more. If I want to, I can argue that my life is no difference from a prisoner commuting from one cell to another, with just void in between.

Hiring an Ayi

With an Ayi, you don’t need to do the household work. You don’t clean the house, and you don’t need to cook – the best time for the family to chat, and to exercise.

Buying An iPad

Great, right? But you lose much more time living in real world. The game on iPad seems more interesting in physical games, and the email, twitter message and pictures are much more interesting than the world around you.

Sometimes, buying just means losing. Consider twice before you buy.

TEDxShanghai 520 Event

Posted on by
1

I attended the TEDxShanghai event today (May 20, 2012) at the Shanghai Concert Hall.

TED means Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It was started in mid-1980s, and kept the vision of “Ideas worth spreading”. The famous TED main conference in California charges 7500 USD for each participants, and is sold out soon.

TEDx is independently organized TED event. It is brand licensing model, like franchise. It is non-profit – all profit needs to go back to the TED organizing itself. There are strict rules of each TED event – the rules makes the TEDx events pretty consistent with the main TED theme.

Location

The location of the TEDxShanghai this year is a great one: the Shanghai Concert Hall – one of the best reserved old Shanghai time architect. The hall may have been destroyed when the Yan’an Elevated High Way was built. Some creative guys thought about the idea to move the building. They lifted the whole architect up, and moved 66 meters southward, and even lifted it 3.3 meters higher. It was an amazing project. The current Shanghai Concert Hall is just as new as a century go.

This is the outside facade of the building.

The inner roof of the building – magnificent.

TED

As the TED style, the VI was consistent (good). This is a ticketed event. People need to hold tickets, but I believe the tickets are free. Among the audience, the key sponsor Kraft held many seats.

This is the stage of the TEDxShanghai. A big screen with TED-red backdrop. The logo implies the theme of the event – an international gathering which happens to be in a city in China. During the event, English and Chinese are alternatively used.

It was a surprise how many people attend it. 950 seats were sold out, and there are people sitting on the stairs of the aisle.

During the event, it is pretty “TEDDY”. A good speaker with some simple slides.

There are even interactive events outside – on the square before the Concert Hall. The Taoism Taichi master taught participants to play Taichi.

In this event, the most presented topic is art, and music – the E in TED. There are some D elements, but I didn’t see too much T. Below is Jasmine Chen, Jazz artiest was singing Chinese folk songs with Jazz music.

The highlight of the event was Jimmy Choo’s presentation: The First Step of Making Shoes in Penang. Jimmy Choo was a famous shoe designer (known as Princess Diana’s shoemaker), and he was surprisingly supper humorous.  He demonstrated the steps to make a shoe on the stage with some funny flavor in it. I run upon him during the break and took a photo with him.  (P.S. I actually not feeling good to take a photo with celebrity like this. I would love to be introduce with someone by a mutual friends, and had some deep conversation, and we know each other for what we do and what we are good at, not just a wax-statue type of posture picture. I will take less of this kind of photo).

The biggest inspiration from Jimmy Choo’s presentation for me was, if you want to be good at something, you need to be really passionate about it. Jimmy Choo is famous, but he is so good at making shoes, and he still enjoy making shoes in public! Again and again!

The Speakers

The life line of an event like this is the quality of the speakers. I would say about 1/3 of the speakers are well above my expectation, and many aren’t. I am not saying they are not delivering good speech. They all did, but based on my knowledge of TED standard, they shy a little bit from that line. There are many things the organizing team can do to help. For example, the Taoism Taichi presentation – if the presentation was structured with a Taichi show, that is much more powerful than speech. A pity that they didn’t show their best. Looking forward to the next time.

TED Rules and Its Enforcement

 The surprising part of this TEDxShangahi event was its violation of TEDx rules (Lawrence knows I will write about it). There are three sessions directly related to sponsorship at least. One is the KRAFT’s session, the second from Shanghai NYU, and the third is the Peneng Philharmonic Performance, because KRAFT, Shanghai NYU, and Peneng Tourism Bureau are both sponsors of the event. It was clear stated in the TEDx rules that no sponsors can speak during the event, and more interestingly, no speakers can later spouse the event. The rule is well understandable to keep the distinct line between sponsorship and editorial, and to keep the integrity of the event. This is an obvious flaw of the event, but I am sure the TEDxChina, and TEDxShanghai team were aware of it and will fix it.

Good Event

In conclusion, it is still a fantastic event, and it offers great value to the audience. I’d like to thank the speakers to take the time to speak in the event, to share, and to inspire people like me. I am definitely interested to be involved in future events like this.

 

Baixing Office Pictures in May 2012

Posted on by
16

At weekend, I am staying in the office of Baixing.com and took some photos of the empty workspace. After moving to this building (Haoran High-Tech Building on the campus of Shanghai Jiaotong University) for 5 years and move to the 2nd floor for half years, the office is finally fully opened. We occupied the first half and expanded to the second half recently.  People often ask me what the office look like. Now, let me give you a tour.

This is the new logo wall:

The hall way with few meetings rooms.

Looking from north to south, the main office area.

The drawing of the wall – it is the work of one night.

The photo of the whole company in Vietnam, an putting in the winter of the last year.

The free drinks, wines, and beers. I don’t really understand the tradition that people don’t drink beer or wine during working time. Why not?

iMac! There are plenty of them in the office.

Another one, and the big earphone! We hope the find the right balance between communication (open space, and sitting near each other), and privacy (the right to be quiet and not interrupted often).

The sofa near the window.

A corner in the office.

Again, the other angel, from deep inside the office and looking to the door.

What to have a tour yourself, feel free to let me know, and let’s have coffee together!

P.S. This is the first post after I completely migrated the blog to WordPress system.

My 3 Words for 2012

Posted on by
Reply

It is almost the middle of the year, when I read Elliot’s blog entry: My 3 Words for 2012, where he got inspiration from Chris Brogan. For an ENFP, to-do-list is not my style. I would rather have a theme and put everything around that Guiding Pillars. With a theme, it is more like a pull not a push, and that is the mode of life I enjoy.

Here are my three themes: Talent, Do, (  ). I am leaving the third to later time.

Talent

I believe I have entered into a new era of management. I started to understand that a company is just like a LEGO brick game itself.

In a technical world, people seldom write code from grand up. They choose a language, and they choose an open source software, and they chose the right server, and they put codes to glue them together and build the right system.

To find the right type of person (the right personality, the right skill set, and right motivation) and put them into the right environment, working toward the right goal, and vision, is as important as what I mastered in the technical world.

So the right talent is the key, and the management skills and systems are the glue to put them together.

In this theme, I will put more effort in putting serious effort to learn people, to find the right person, and to get them aboard. I will systematically get to know them, find the right fit, and try everything I can to bring them on board.

Do

This is a simple word. I believe I will move toward more action-driven style. The life of a journalist is good, but to apply the observation and learning to action is as important. I am going to take a more action-biased approach.

Do means to take actions after thinking. Do means to think about next steps, and get there. Do means focusing on the path to get where you to get.

Yifan Loves Taking Photos

Posted on by
4

When Yifang got a chance to take photos with iPhone, he will carefully point to any object that got his attention and take photos of it. Everyday, he generate a lot of “garbage pictures” on my iPhone.

However, I decided not to delete them. I am going to keep them forever, at least to safely transfer the photos to Yifan when he grows up, and he can make the decisions later. I created a folder called “Yifan’s World” in my laptop, and drag all the pictures he took there. Here are some samples of what he took.

Spam Enters China

Posted on by
Reply

I am not talking about email spam, or comment spam. I am talking about Spam from Hormel – the lunch meat.

I am not sure if it has been in China market for a while or not. I just saw it on the table of my dining room few days ago.

I am happy that people are rich enough not to have to each spam every day.

Migrating MovableType to WordPress

Posted on by
3

This is a migration guide I wrote solely for the benefit of myself. Although I don’t think I need it the second time, to have a detailed reproduce steps written and modify to reflect the actual steps are the basic skills of a support engineer (by training).

The Problems

The basic export/import stuff works for MovableType to WordPress – pretty straight forward. There are only three minor issues that prevent the smooth transition.

Problems 1: URL change.

My MovableType uses a naming system I created, not the default. The Individual Entry Archive page URL was:

<$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y%m%d”$>_<$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>.htm

After exporting, the URL is renamed by the base name of the MovableType, not the full name. For example, URL:

https://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives /20060127_long_vacation_of_spring_festival_comes.htm

becomes

https://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/ 20060127_long_vacation.htm

The solution:

Unlike most of the solutions found on Internet, I am going to change the base_name in the Export file itself. I will change the MTOS-4.38-en/lib/MT/ImportExport.pm file. I am going to change the line

BASENAME:<$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>

to

BASENAME: <$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y%m%d”$>_<$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>

This should solve the problem to let WordPress know the right way to preserve the URLs.

Dash Problem

This solve the old post problem that was imported from MovableType. For the new post, the problem is with the “-“. WordPress uses dash instead of underscore to replace non-alphabetic characters. I just need to go to wp-includes/formatting.phpfile and change all the dash, to underscore in the function sanitize_title_with_dash. This solve the future post problem to make it consistent with the older posts.

Update July 25, 2012

Be sure to comment out the following line:

preg_replace(‘|-+|’, ‘_’, $title);

Because WordPress just leave – as it is, and replace it to underscore causes many previous articles broken.

Problem 2: Encoding difference

The default encoding of MovableType was ISO 8859-1, and WordPress uses “UTF-8” (right choice). The steps in the migration plan solved the problem. Otherwise, the problem I met was, the content after the special character, like ASCII code 92 was cut off, which is a necessary replacement of a single quote ‘.

WordPress uses UTF-8 as the default encoding. So if your MT blog uses ISO 8859-1 or Latin – 1 to encode posts, convert the posts to UTF-8 before importing, to ensure that all characters display properly.

On *nix and OSX you can use the iconv program to convert your import.txt file: $ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 import.txt > import_new.txt

After I did the conversation, I went on for the extra mile to use the following command in vim to change all the annoying encoding x92, x93, x95 to its proper format:

:%s/[|]/’/g (119, and 1623 replaced)

:%s/[|]/”/g (979 and 897 replaced)

:%s//o /g (334 replaced)

:%s/[|]/-/g (323 and 264 replaced)

If the original MT uses UTF-8, it won’t be a problem, although the exported file is not directly readable in editor in Mac.

Problem 3: Convert Line Breaks

By default, when I use two lines to separate a paragraph, but in WordPress, it becomes a single line and the two paragraphs are put together with only one line break.

It turned out the bug 16147 is exactly talking about the problem and fixed the problem. Just go to the importer.php file and remove the following line.

 (if( !empty($line) ))

Something to note is, since WordPress load plugins automatically, /wp-content/plugins/movabletype-importer/movabletype-importer.php does not exist in the downloaded package.

Problem 4: The Chinese Title

Using the sanitised title as part of URL is good to keep it unique, but the Chinese title causes problems. You cannot just use the Chinese encoded names as WordPress, resulting huge number of % and numbers in the URL. The original less of consideration of MovableType actual worked very well by just taking some a or e out of the encoded title, but need some research.

Configuration

After migration, there are some configuration work. Basically by looking at the admin tab one by one, we can get some idea. Here are some outline:

1. Configure the upload file folder.

2. The URL slug – use %year%%monthnum%%day%_%post_name%.htm

3. Open XML-RPC

4. Change display name for default user.

Done

That should be all I have to do. Did some quick research and quickly fixed the problem. I am going to do the actual migration the next weekend. Then you will see a brand new blog.

Thinking about Switching to WordPress

Posted on by
3

I am a one with emotions. I have been using MovableType for almost 10 years – daily. There are many great memories with MovableType. I know their founders (well, met briefly during my first Silicon Valley trip), and I know many of their people (well, early employees, not sure if they are still there). They even hosted a 6 year blogging anniversary for me in their office. I am using MovableType daily for so long. To be short, I loved MovableType, and the team.

However, recently I really got pissed off by the slowness of MovableType and its almost stopping on development. There are still bug fixes, but it is not interesting. In a Saturday morning, I started to think, shall I still stay on MovableType?

My whole 10 years of daily blogging started with a post named: MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP. I didn’t expect the 10 year journey started there. Today, I had the idea to install WordPress, and give it a try (with a little bit sense of guilty deep in my heart). It turned out that the installation went well, and it did complete in 5 minutes.

I am going to test run on this blog for a while, and decide whether I want to migrate the site to WordPress. That may be another journey. I’d like to take the chance to thank MovableType team, for allowing me to use the software for so long and to spend thousands of hours on it, to create something I am proud of after many years.

P.S. This post was posted on WordPress first, and copied here.

Over Optimistic and Over Pessimistic

Posted on by
Reply

Based on my observation on the International companies in China, which failed, or failing, they are swinging from the over optimistic mode to over pessimistic mode. eBay is an example, and Google is another.

They start with big ambition to get the whole country in few months, or 1 year, but it quickly find out that it is mission impossible and then they quickly switch to the over pessimistic mode and claim the failure. They are actually not.

What they need is neither of the two – they just need to be realistic.

New Traditional Industry Leaders Meetup

Posted on by
Reply

This is an interesting gathering – a group of CEOs of Internet companies in Shanghai agreed to meet quarterly. We joked the industry has become a new “traditional industry”, because it has been labor intensive, unlike the traditional internet business model.

Here is the final photo:

From the left to right are:

Afu, CEO of JJDD.com

Zhang Tao, CEO of Dianping.com

Bill Yao, CEO of PPTV.com

Mike Liang, CEO of Anjuke.com

Jian Shuo Wang, CEO of Baixing.com

It is good to catch up, always.

Drawing

As expected, people don’t come promptly, so I used the time to draw the corner of the room.

IMG_9001

The Question to Ask on Dinner Party

Posted on by
Reply

Check out Auren Hoffman’s blog post: TPQ – Thought Provoking Questions. This answered the question about “The Awkwardness of Meeting Someone in Person” I mentioned yesterday in this post. It is the lack of a good question.

Dr. Andreas Weigend’s TPQ was, “What was your biggest surprise in the last year?”

I got another one, it is asked by Adams Lashinsky: “How you can make big money in the next 20 years?”

The Top of Paul Graham’s List

Posted on by
6

A short quote from Paul Graham’s to do list in this article The Top of My Todo List:

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

Paul continued to be the most amazing writers that I read – he have some genuine thoughts, and guide him and many of his startups. I would highly recommend you to read his blog.

The Awkwardness of Meeting Someone in Person

In one book, Alan De Botton mentioned that reading is better than talking because it allows pause, and deep thoughts, and more well structured thoughts. You cannot fall into deep thoughts when you are at the conversation with your favorite author. Just as echoed in this article: Writing and Speaking, talking is not the best way for intelligent and thoughtful people to exchange ideas. I can imagine I have not too many things to talk about if I meet with Alan de Botton, or Paul Graham one day.

I had a conversation with Yu Ying, the famous doctor in Beijing who write micro-blog – a weibo with 800,000 followers. Her Weibo is interesting, and her talk on TnDao was great. But to when to bar with and chat, it is hard to calm down and really talk. That is the awkwardness to meet someone in person.

World Financial Center

The most interesting in Shanghai is maybe the 52th floor of the World Financial Center in Pudong. I visited the tower today because I had too meetings in the same building. People need to transfer to another elevator at the 52 and 53th floor. If you are someone who likes to climb to tall buildings, you can get to the 52th floor lobby without having to making any appointment with people working there. Below is the photo of the lobby.

IMG_8998

Over the window, you can see the new Shanghai Tower is in good shape already.

IMG_8997

TnDao, Shanghai’s TED

Posted on by
Reply

I attended the TnDao forum. It was great.

TnDao forum was inspired by TED, and was initiated by Mr. Dai Jianbiao and many other great people like Miss Jian Fang, and Mr. Jian Changjian. It is a monthly talk of great people and offers an opportunity for few hundreds people to escape from their busy lives to get inspired by new ideas, especially from different industries.

You can get more information and the past video from http://tndao.com.

It is free to attend, but you have to register on the website when it opens to registration. The next time should be around the early of June. I am invited to talk on the forum but I don’t have any idea what to talk yet, so likely to skip.

Longjing is My Favorite Village

Posted on by
Reply

“40-year-old is the time to form one’s value system”, He Ying meant it when we had coffee tonight, after I am back from Hangzhou (the fourth consecutive weekend).

The mountain area of Hangzhou is very good place for exercise, to drink, eat, to stay and to think. Among the villages, I love Longjing 龙井, Manjuelong 满觉陇 and Yangmeiling 杨梅岭 most. I climbed the mountains, and drinker the tea, and rate it as my favorite village in China. (Well, this is a very biased view, since I only visited very few of them. But anyone has the right to do the rating anyway, right?)

Here are some photos from the trip:

Above is the picture I drew at Longjing.

The Jiuxi (Nine Creeks) area:

Going to Hangzhou Again

Posted on by
Reply

After being in Hangzhou for three consecutive weekend, I decided to go to Hangzhou again, today, with Wendy and Yifan.

This is an action to break the laziness and make some difference in the normal life.

IF, I mean everyone can imagine the IF part, we set our home in Hangzhou, and we will commute to Hangzhou every weekend. I know many people, at least 10 of them, have their home in a different city and they have to do the same thing as we do today, for years. Many of them have homes in Shanghai but work in Beijing or Shenzhen, or Hangzhou.

IF, we can sometimes understand others life, some strange behavior started to be normal. Thinking is the process to make those abnormal to normal.

Shanghai Real Estates Still Under Control

Posted on by
Reply

The Chinese government always have more methods to control whatever they want to control. They can control how many child you are allowed to have, and it is not surprising to see how many houses you can buy.

According to the House Purchase Restriction order:

  1. For local residents who already have one apartment, and non-local residents who have been paying tax for two years, they can only purchase another one.
  2. For local residents with two or more apartments, or non-local residents with one or more apartments, they are not allowed to buy any houses/apartments.
  3. For anyone who buy second apartment, the down payment have to be as high as 60%, and the interest rate has to be 10% higher than average.
  4. Tax for transfer of houses purchased less than 5 years are significantly higher.

There are many other restrictions. These are the powerful rules to keep buyers out of the market, and the house market kept flat and down ever since.