The future of global business: the effects of pandemic on power, connection, supply

Max Morkovkin 00:08
Santa Maria, the founder of Meridian linguistics, an Asian based agency, providing speech text and translation data services to technology companies. Welcome. So let's see, do you know?

Sara Maria Hasbun 00:22
Where am I right now?

Max Morkovkin 00:23
Yes.

Sara Maria Hasbun 00:24
And Beijing

Max Morkovkin 00:25
in Beijing. Okay. Your

Sara Maria Hasbun 00:27
old stomping grounds, right.

Max Morkovkin 00:28
I'm

Sara Maria Hasbun 00:29
sorry. Your old stomping grounds. Did you ever live in Beijing? Yeah,

Max Morkovkin 00:35
of course. I've been several times. And well, as I, as I hear from my friends, their dissertation is getting better people start to go to offices working, getting back to their normal lives, right?

Sara Maria Hasbun 00:48
Yeah, it's we're definitely very optimistic now.

Max Morkovkin 00:51
Cool. Cool. So let me say a few words to our attendees. Folks. We're going to turn on the polls after every speech and every panel discussion, so you can share your opinion with us. Thank you very much for doing this. And just to remind you, we have this q&a tab on the bottom of the zoom window, where you can ask your questions to Sarah and all the other speakers. We have an event. So don't hesitate to ask the questions. Now. I think it's time to start. Are you ready? Sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. So now you can share your screen. I will turn off my video and I'm here in case you need me.

Sara Maria Hasbun 01:36
Okay, let's get this sharing. Okay, are you guys seeing my main screen? Not my notes? Sorry, let me just chit chat up. Good. Okay, good. Okay, it's so good to see so many names that I that I recognize, like I'm back at a conference with everyone. Okay, so yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be back in the conference world. Even though you've been stuck here in Beijing, my wings had been a bit clipped, not able to travel anywhere. So very, very happy to be here. So I think I know a lot of you already. But I'll go ahead and tell you a bit more about myself and why I'm so interested in the topic of globalization, and what my credentials are in that respect. So I founded radian linguistics six years ago while I was living in South Korea. But for the last two years, I pretty much lived on the road. So we are a fully remote team, our project managers live in the US in France, in Malaysia. And until recently, I worked wherever I needed to be. So I was what they call a digital nomad. I traveled from conference to conference, I met with a lot of you, I met with clients. And I was just working remotely from whichever country was convenient at the time, I was incredibly lucky to have that experience. And obviously, I'm not traveling very much now. But those last two years have given me an incredible opportunity to do business in a variety of cultural settings. And for that reason, I've also started consulting on global business. So I've been doing a lot of speaking about cross cultural communication, and global trends. And now because of COVID, I'm pretty much settled down in Beijing. And I'm not gonna lie, that was a scary place to be in January, because we didn't know what we were dealing with. But ironically, it now feels like one of the safest places to be because not only has China been fighting this virus for the longest, but it we know what we're up against. And it has had, China has had incredible success and fending off the virus so far. So with that success, we hope it will last can they prevent major resurgences we're very hopeful, but there's still a lot that's unknown. This picture is from a few weeks ago when businesses started to reopen in Beijing and we could finally go out very carefully with you know, wearing face masks and order some jam being so that was a very, very exciting day Hold on, let me just check the chat here. Make sure everything is good. I lost the chat. Okay. Yes, good. Okay. So for those of you that want to know what life is like after lockdown after extended isolation, it's not completely over. So restrictions have relaxed in some ways they have tightened and others and they've tightened the borders of China so China's currently not allowing any foreigners to enter the country. And so if you're inside already, like me, that's fine, but you can't come in from outside. And that's one of their methods for being able to take some of the pressure off of those of us who are already inside the country. So with less risk of imported cases, and with domestic cases very low, we can finally start relaxing some measures in day to day life. So it is a pretty extreme measure restricting borders like this. But without it, I don't know how the populace and the economy would ever have the chance to recover. We have seen border closures like this in a lot of other countries now. And it may be a situation that lasts for a while, which I know is not good news to many of you who'd like to travel as much as I do. But businesses are reopening now in Beijing, and we have beautiful weather, the pollution is still really low. So it's really hard not to feel optimistic. But unfortunately, I don't think that this necessarily means that six months from now, we can see the same kind of reopening in Americas and in Europe and in Africa. So let's dig into what that means. So I want to give you a prediction, with respect to globalization, excuse me. And that is that globalization is not dead. But that in the COVID world and the post COVID world, if we can even get there, globalization will look very different. It's going to be led by new powers, new national powers, so countries in the world, and on the micro level by different businesses. It's going to be characterized by different kinds of connection, different ways of connecting to our fellow human beings. And it's going to be powered by a different kind of supply. So it's time to get used to a new normal, the rate of infectious disease events more than doubled from the 1940s to the 1960s. And has further surged since since the 1980s. And that's according to a nonprofit that tracks disease events. I've been living in Asia for the last seven years now in countries that were all hit pretty hard by epidemics, these ones in the last 10 years. So in a way Coronavirus, wasn't that much of a shock to us, you could say in the same way that San Franciscans are all ready for the big one. So I'm originally from San Francisco, and people talk about the big one all the time, the big earthquake that may be coming. So people in Asia knew that infectious diseases were becoming a way of life. And thankfully, they've started preparing for it, which is one of the reason that reasons that Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan have fared so well. So I do think it's important to address the fact that many of these epidemics did originate in Asia, because I want to make it clear, I feel like I have a responsibility to make it clear since I'm here, that it is not because of cultural practices. It's not because Asians eat more wildlife than Westerners do. But because in much of Asia, and according to both Western and Eastern epidemiologists, it's because urbanization is happening at just incredible rates that are still unthinkable in the rest of the world. And this is putting humans in close contact with a lot of nature, a lot of pathogens that we hadn't yet encountered. In Africa, we're seeing a lot of destruction of wildlife, which means fewer predators, which means rodents and other similar animals are overpopulating and spreading disease. So both of the both of these situations are situations that can and will occur in other parts of the world, this will not always be an Asia problem or an Africa problem. So I just want to address that so that we can feel a bit of solidarity here. And also because I feel like it's my responsibility to try to counter some of the subconscious, ill will and you know, racism that some people might be feeling these days, although I'm sure none of you are harboring these kinds of ideas. But one of the really pervasive effects of pandemic I think is this one's really important to point out before addressing anything else, is that fear makes us a logical, so fear leads to illogical actions and to inefficient generalizations, such as racism. And I was going to put a picture up there, it was going to be a picture of a racist sign that's been going around the US. But I decided we just don't need that kind of negativity. Right now. I'm sure you've all seen the reports. You know what's going on? And don't worry, I'm not going to make this talk about racism. I'm actually just trying to give you a really stark example of how fear leads to a logical actions. Before I move on to examples for the language services industry, I promise I will talk about the language services industry. And as we make our predictions for the language services industry and for global business, we can't make them based necessarily on what makes the most sense for a COVID or post COVID world, we need to consider how people will actually react which is not always going to be logically. So just to highlight how illogical these thoughts can be. Here in China, we're having the reverse problem. So Chinese people are actually afraid of foreign nors because for the last few months, a large percentage of Chinese Coronavirus cases have been imported by foreigners, or by Chinese returning from abroad. So I've been wearing sunglasses in order to be able to move around the city more easily without scaring anyone, even though I haven't been to the US for the last year. But I'm really lucky that in China, it's really more fear and not anger that people are feeling I've still have never had anyone behave towards me, with any kind of ill will, I just want to stress that. And by the way, just in case you didn't know, Beijing is a very international and cosmopolitan place, just like New York City, just like London. So this kind of generalized fear happens everywhere. It's no one is immune. It's something that happens all over the world. So like I said, Fear leads to illogical actions. And as we make our predictions for the language services industry, we need to take into account that people are going to be acting sometimes based on fear and are not necessarily going to make logical decisions 100% of the time. And racism is just one way that that fear manifests, it also manifests in selling stocks when you should be holding on to them. It manifests in panic, buying panic buying toilet paper, which the Chinese thought was hilarious by the way, hoarding cash, pulling back from innovation, making choices that were safe before but maybe aren't actually that safe and a new world order. So I just want to hammer that first point home, before we launch into the rest, don't assume that people and businesses around you are making the right choices for a post COVID world, Think for yourself and do your research. But let's launch into the meat of my talk now, which is on shifting power connection and supply. And I'm gonna get started with power. So we already know power dynamics are bound to shift drastically. So both in terms of the global order the power that's held by individual nations, and also at a smaller level, so businesses within their industry or in terms of the amount of market share, they have the power of their brand, etc, that is all bound to shift. And I'm seeing a comment that someone says the screen is not fully visible, I hope are you guys seeing my main slide and not my notes? I see a yes. Is that a yes? You see my main slide? Okay, good. Good. Sorry. I'm a little bit paranoid there.

Max Morkovkin 12:34
It's just the left side of the presentation is a bit. But we can still, you know, read this Oh, no.

Sara Maria Hasbun 12:44
Okay, well, it's mostly pretty pictures. There's nothing, nothing too crucial from the slides. So I'll try to talk slowly and make sure that you can understand. So okay, so back to power. And I'm going to talk about nations first. So I'm going to talk about the US which is my native country. So love us or hate us the last 100 years, the United States was a huge driving force behind globalization. We promoted global trade as a way to reduce future conflict after World War Two. And in addition to promoting global business, we invested heavily in soft power, exporting our media, our peacekeepers, our humanitarian aid. And if that didn't do the trick, then we sent our military into pretty much every corner of the earth. Another driving force of globalization has been the European Union. So it sped up Europe trade, European trade, it made it easier to do cross border business with other nations, it led to a lot of other international business that was very easy to conduct. So with that kind of business, one of the only last barriers within the European Union was language. So meaning that a lot of business was given to translation companies like yours that are in in Europe, for those of you that have LSPs in Europe. But what's happening now, these are just a few headlines that I gathered to illustrate a growing trend away from globalization in the West. So we have Brexit. We have right wing governments in Europe opposing migration and promoting xenophobic policies. We have the US abruptly withdrawing the Peace Corps from all missions around the world. And we have a lot of people saying that globalization is dead. But is it though? Let's look at Asia, China, Japan and Korea are investing heavily in Africa in Southeast Asia in Latin America. China has an initiative called the Belt and Road Initiative, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. It includes infrastructure projects in over 70 countries. So as the US is pulling out the Peace Corps for the first time in its history and struggling to take to get a handle on its own crisis. China's sending in medical teams to Italy and Iran. And I'm not sure if you can see both sides of the slide. But just to drive it home. On the left, we have a picture of Chinese flags in an African country. On the right, we have a sign being held by Chinese health care workers who had traveled to Italy to help with the virus response there. So even though the virus started in China, even though China didn't get very much of a heads up about it, now we see them sending their teams throughout the world, spreading their aid and spreading their soft power. And now that the virus has hit, many countries in Asia have demonstrated incredible prowess in handling the crisis, which shouldn't be unexpected since they've encountered similar viruses before. So we have South Korea, if you can see this picture, it's a picture of the booths that they created that they invented, to protect healthcare workers who were testing for COVID so that they don't have to use as many different changes of PPE of protective gear. So South South Korea has been very innovative throughout this whole time. Taiwan also has been incredibly successful, they didn't even need to lock down their businesses. They just required facemasks from the start, they tested everyone extensively. They knew what they were dealing with. And they acted quickly. And they've done a really incredible job with holding back this, this, this crisis. And Hong Kong as well has been incredibly efficient. And even China, given the fact that it started in China, and that the Chinese didn't have very much of a heads up. It has done an incredible job at holding this holding this off. So even though for the last 50 years, globalization has undisputedly been promoted and led by Western powers, I think it's time for us to imagine a world in which globalization is being led by the east. And as language service providers, if you want to stay ahead of global trends. If you want to be ready for the next high volume language pairs, I think you're going to want to be ready for Asia. So let's switch now to businesses. What happens to businesses during pandemics or during the inevitable recession or depression that comes along with pandemics? The language services industry has been through an incredible amount of m&a in these last few years. As you all know, in some cases, consolidation is going to make you stronger, especially if it lets you diversify your services into industries that are more or less pandemic proof. But in other cases growing too big or too unwieldy is going to create a lot of overhead. Create disorganization lead to businesses making critical mistakes with their Coronavirus response. And I'll highlight one of those mistakes in just a bit. But when larger businesses falter, it creates very exciting opportunities for new businesses to step in, or for existing businesses to gobble up their market share and their vendors. So can anyone guess what these companies have in common? I'm going to open up the chat so I can see your responses. And I hope you can see the four pictures here. Can anyone guess what they have in common? Wow, that was fast. Navneet during Ganya? Yeah, 2008 crisis. Very good. Wow, I'm impressed. So they all launched shortly after the 2008 financial crisis. So if you're just getting started, don't see the pandemic as a sign that your business is over before it has begun. The use of your business means that you're agile, you can pivot to serving industries or observing languages that are going to be in high demand in a COVID and post COVID world. So now let's talk about the effects of pandemic on supply. We are very lucky to work in an industry where the majority of our supply our work product is easily transmissible over the internet. So we work mostly with texts with voice files with phone calls, with the obvious exception of in person interpreting. Now we will in some cases, depending on your niche industry be affected by our clients supply chain issues, as we've talked about in the last panel. We know that companies like transperfect Phil Shaw was quoted in Slater talking, he's the CEO of transperfect was talking about how they were seeing a shift away from tourism. But they were seeing shifts away from retail into E commerce, which is an exciting new opportunity for translation as well. So how hard this hits you will really depend on the industry that you're in. However, even though our work product is transmissible by Internet, we as language service companies really, really are nothing without our freelance in our in house linguists and I can't stress that enough. So one recent trend that we've noticed at Meridian linguistics is that a lot of veteran translation and language specialists, a lot of the very elite linguists are jumping ship from the bigger agencies and they're coming to us after years of us trying to recruit them. They're finally coming to us and they're citing unilateral rate cuts payment delays at those larger companies. Now they want to work for a smaller company. He's like hours who can commit to quicker and higher payments, since we don't have as much overhead being wasted during the pandemic. So for bigger companies, if you're not doing everything you can to hold on to your best translators, if you're not protecting them as much as possible from your economic woes, then we're kind of eating your lunch right now. So when the crisis ends, and your volumes go back to normal, who's going to be left to do your translations, you have to treat your linguists and your staff like gold right now, you have to support them through this tough time, especially because as freelancers sometimes without health care benefits, they have a lot more exposure. So if you're watching this, and you work at a large company, I hope you're motivated to advocate for the working conditions for your freelancers. And employees, now is definitely the time to double down on supporting your employees. Because as Mark Cuban says, your brand will be remembered for this for a long time. And if you work for a small company, well, you should get excited because as long as you have the resources to weather this downturn, there will be a lot of opportunities for you. As the dinosaurs die off, as advertising becomes cheaper, as highly talented sales and marketing professionals are getting laid off left and right and go on the market. Now is the time for you to double down on your growth efforts.

Max Morkovkin 21:17
Sorry, sorry for interrupting you. We just have two minutes left.

Sara Maria Hasbun 21:20
Okay. All right, I will, I will speed it up. Okay, and talk quickly about connection. And this, this elbow bump thing, it's actually becoming very common now in Asia. So here in Asia, people have never really shook hands. But the foreigners here in Asia, we're used to shaking hands or kissing if they're European. But now everyone's shifting to elbow bumps, which is, you know, it started as a kind of fun cutesy thing. And it's now becoming very normal. So I'd love to see later in the chat, if, if this is happening in your countries, if other people are adopting the elbow bump. So while of course the Coronavirus situation is terrible, and I cannot wait for it to be over. I actually really like this kind of new reality where everyone else is working from home as well. I love that I can travel to a business meeting, it's just feels very efficient to me, you can see that here on one of these meetings that I had with my team My dog is joining in. So that's great. But not everyone sees it that way. And we need to keep that in mind. And I'm just going to talk really quickly about culture theory, which I have to warn you make some very broad and very sweeping generalizations, and has also been dominated by Caucasian male scientists for the last two decades. But I still think that there's some really interesting and useful strategies to take away from this framework. So we have task oriented cultures, I'm Americans, I come from supposedly a task oriented culture. We also have relationship oriented cultures, which is pretty much the rest of the world besides America, UK, Germany, and Scandinavia. And if you're from a relationship based culture, you have to keep in mind that there is no point in getting tasks done. If you haven't first tried to build a relationship, relationships are seen as much more important in those cultures. So if you're, if you're diving into remote work, and you're just having a lot of zoom meetings, and you're diving right into the tasks at hand, you may find that you're actually struggling to do business, you may find that your employees are struggling, if they come from relationship based cultures, you may find that it's harder to close deals with your clients if they come from relationship based cultures. Because perhaps before what you would have done was sit down to lunch and had some chat. Maybe you had an Aperol Spritz with your Italian client, and you had that time to build the relationship. So now that we're switching to zoom, it's really important that we keep that we keep in mind that we need to maintain the social part of our relationships, especially for people that are coming from relation, relationship based cultures. So yeah, I recommend meeting on Zoom, having a drink with your colleague, maybe a quarantining. So actually, in this last slide, we were doing what the Koreans call a mock Bong, or an eating room, we were just eating our lunch together. So not talking about work, not not doing anything work related, just checking in with each other and just eating our lunch. Something like this really does wonders for maintaining the relationships and keeping up team morale. I definitely recommend you try it, you know, with your clients, with your employees with anyone that you're working with right now. And there's one more big change that will come out of this pandemic that is positive, and I'll let you read this tweet. So when I was in graduate school, I worked with a deaf postdoc and a Deaf undergrad. And it really highlighted to me the issues that that people have with accessibility in our country and many other countries around the world. And I think that now now that so many of our clients and so many of our colleagues are being forced to switch to convenient communication solutions like zoom. We're actually going to see a lot of people ready to try something new. And we're gonna make our, our education and our products accessible to a lot of people, including disabled people, but also just people that have, you know, to speak different languages, or haven't been able to travel for some reason. So this is a really exciting a really great example of that this conference is a great example of that. As much as I love meeting you all in person. I know I've met with them, I saw Anne Marie in the chat we met in Kuala Lumpur, I think we're not just going to be here we met in San Francisco, it's so exciting that more and more events like this one are being held online. So more people have access, we have global access. So now is the time to definitely take advantage of that. So to start wrapping this up, I will leave you with my predictions. First of all, okay to be a downer for a little bit. COVID-19 is not the last nor the worst pandemic we're going to see in the next 100 years, especially because with all the epidemics we've seen in the last 10 years, it seems like frankly, we might have gotten lucky with this one that we didn't have a worse mortality rate. So I think what we have to do now is we just learn as much as we can from this one, and we get ready to fight back next time even harder. So that's a bit of a bummer. But it's something to keep in mind, we need to gird ourselves for the long run, international travel is going to become a lot more complex. And I have a lot that I can say about this, you can ask about it later. But I know we're running out of time. So I'll just move on to the next. companies that invest in their staff and their vendors are going to thrive. Companies that keep an Asian an eye on Asia are going to thrive. And my last piece of advice is, of course, stay informed. Don't assume that people are making logical decisions. Because right now a lot of our decisions are governed by fear. Do as much as much reading as you can of the global news. So don't stick to the news in just one country. We're very lucky that we're already globally minded. Many of us speak other languages. Keep your eyes on the countries that are handling this pandemic well, and see as much see what you can learn from them and try to learn as much as you possibly can from them. So that's it. Thank you so much for having me, I hope that everyone's staying safe. I hope that everyone's staying busy. Because in my experience, that's the best way to stay sane. In these crazy times. If you have any questions about how China's coping about how our business is coping? I'm not sure if we have time now we'll see. But if not, you can always reach out to me on social media. All my information is up there. Thanks, everyone.

Max Morkovkin 27:33
Yeah, we have a few minutes for the questions. So thank you very much for this motivating presentation. And I really like this current teeny thing.

Sara Maria Hasbun 27:45
I can't claim credit for it. But um, yeah, I think it's brilliant.

Max Morkovkin 27:48
Yeah, it's a great idea. So I have picked up a couple of good questions for you. So let me read it now. You have shared a lot of predictions of yours. So it's just another question about the predictions. So the prediction for the future, way of remote work? What are your predictions for that? So now, so much of the world is getting the chance to try it out? And you and I we know, like we were familiar with Chinese culture, you know that previously, it was something like you can hardly imagine that Chinese people will work from home, they get used to working in the office. This habit is kind of more famous in a western part of the world. So how is it changing? Now? What do you see what what are your predictions for that?

Sara Maria Hasbun 28:41
Yeah, that's been really interesting to see here in China, because when everyone suddenly had to switch to working from home, I think a lot of companies realized, oh, this actually isn't so bad. And once Beijing started lightening up a lot of the restrictions once they were allowing us to go back, a lot of the companies actually decided to just keep having us work remotely, because it just wasn't worth the risk of sending us back out there. So yeah, a lot of the people, a lot of people that I know are still working from home, even though they now have the option to go into the office. So I think it's really exciting that now companies that maybe just had never tried to do this because of inertia, now are going to consider creating more flexible work solutions, maybe not all the time. But maybe for you know, people that want to stay home with their kids for part of their career for a year or two years, or anything that that needs to be done to make a flexible living situation or working situation so that their employees can be more productive. I think that's really exciting.

Max Morkovkin 29:41
Cool. So the next question is so Maria, what is slide on culture? How has business changed for Meridian and your supply chain? As you've noticed, more work, less work, different types of work? Question from Jeff.

Sara Maria Hasbun 29:56
Yeah, different types of work for sure. We still have like a Really a lot of our loyal, ongoing clients coming to us. So we focus mostly on technology businesses, probably the biggest hit that we've seen is that companies are now really scared to work on new, innovative, exciting things, which I think, you know, is a big mistake, frankly, because and I see why they're making these decisions. Like I said, a lot of decisions are being made at a fear. But if we're going to come out ahead of this crisis, and if we're going to be able to think futuristically, about what the world is going to look like, after that crisis, we need to be doubling down on innovation. And we do have a few clients that are doing that and have some really exciting projects planned, that I think are really, really innovative and really exciting. But another another thing that we did see was, well, I'll be honest, we had one huge project that we were very excited about that we had been very close to closing and then fell through because the company was a large Asian financial institution that's now struggling and they didn't, they just didn't want to allocate cash to anything too innovative. And now I just kind of lost my train of thought, oh, but if we had gone through with that project, I realized it would have been a huge risk for us, it would have been a huge cash outlay right as the pandemic was striking. And we then could have ended up on the hook with for force majeure. So it's another thing to keep in mind as LSPs. Force Majeure is going to be invoked more and more. So it is something to keep in mind, walk into contracts with your eyes wide open. Be very careful about that.

Max Morkovkin 31:32
Okay, and the last one. So you mentioned that for people from relationship based cultures, we should make sure that our zoom meetings are no business. What are some examples of how you can make a Zoom meeting more about the relationship? So this currently I think of the first one, and maybe you have some other ideas?

Sara Maria Hasbun 31:50
Yeah, I've had so many really creative meetings lately. I'm so impressed by everyone. I was just on a on a Zoom meeting yesterday where we played some kind of version of Pictionary, which is a very simple game, and it's very easy to play on zoom using the whiteboard. That's just a great way to kind of get your thoughts off of everything that's going on around you. Like I said, the mukbang just sitting in having your meal with someone having a drink whether, you know, sometimes, if I'm meeting with people in the US, and I'm here in Asia, that means one of us has to have coffee, one of us has the quarantining but even just, you know, trying to talk about something other than work, and ideally something other than Coronavirus can be really healing for the relationship and just for the soul.

Max Morkovkin 32:34
Okay, just to share with the attendees, some colleagues of mine and myself as well, we organized the group and playing quiz from time to time, four rounds with 15 questions and we also open in zoom and you know, talking with each other, what will be the best answer for that? Taking some wine, coffee or whatever. So yeah, guys, feel free quiz as well. Cool. So we have to move forward. Once again, thank you very much for motivating us. Put everybody on positive side and yeah, we will become even stronger I believe, after all these things will finally end up and we will be more prepared for the next challenges. Right. So

Sara Maria Hasbun 33:22
that's the hope that's the hope as the Korean say fighting