Ranked #1 in the World
Opportunities abound in China, but not for entrepreneurs who enter the country unprepared. Timothy Lamb, a 2002 Thunderbird graduate, has seen plenty of Western companies fall flat in the emerging market. As director of foreign direct investment services for The JLJ Group in Shanghai, his job is to help clients succeed.
But Lamb says this won’t happen if companies try to enter China without having their executives fully on board. He said companies also need knowledgeable project managers on the ground, ample resources and reasonable timelines for success.
“Companies missing any of those elements tend to fail,” says Lamb, a U.S. citizen who discovered a passion for China in 1994 when he first came to visit his sister, who was teaching English at a Chinese university.
Lamb says many small and medium-sized companies hear the buzz about China and decide they need to come simply to keep up with everybody else. Then they lack the stamina to persevere when roadblocks appear.
“They often think everything is going to happen tomorrow,” Lamb says. “But in developing countries, particularly China, timelines need to be more flexible.”
Part of the reason is the Chinese government, which is specific about the foreign direct investment it wants to attract. Lamb says the economy relies on state-owned enterprises and favors market growth from within.
“China has a tendency of attracting a lot of entrepreneurs,” Lamb says. “The problem is, China doesn’t always want foreign entrepreneurs.”
Lamb says many companies try to circumvent the government by entering the market illegally or ignoring regulations, but people who look for the right opportunities can succeed without cutting corners.
“There were a lot of opportunities in 2009 that companies missed,” he says, referring to the global economic crisis that slowed foreign direct investment.
Lamb says he found his own opportunity in China in 1997, when he returned as an English teacher at Qingdao Chemical University. “I realized when I visited my sister that this was a place I wanted to come back to,” he says. “It was an entirely new world.”
Lamb followed his first assignment in Qingdao with a second teaching job at Sichuan University. Then a friend told him about Thunderbird, and he made plans to enroll in January 2001. “I only applied at one school,” he says.
After finishing his MBA, Lamb interned at the U.S. Department of Commerce and then took a job with a test preparation company in Shanghai. After a short stint, he moved to his current position at the JLJ Group.
Lamb says his office in downtown Shanghai puts him in the middle of the action as China emerges as a global powerhouse. “I’m living in the center of it all,” he says. “I not only get to see it happen, but I’m involved in it.”
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