The crowded auditorium began to take on the feel of a rock concert.
At the urging of the speaker, people suddenly stood up and, to the pulsing strains of a Barenaked Ladies song, thrust their fists in the air and shouted, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
PHOTO: NY TIMES
After the speaker finished, a middle-aged woman, who had been lucky enough to catch one of the souvenir furry carrots tossed into the crowd, dashed toward the podium like a wild teenager, seeking another one.
Then a larger throng of people scrambled toward the dais in search of autographs.
Elbows flew.
Something similar happened a few days earlier, at prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, when a group of students and faculty members pushed one another trying to reach the speaker: a tall, Western business icon.
Several students crashed to the floor in the melee.
Everyone wanted to meet Chester Elton.
Chester Who?
Elton, the 46-year-old author of a tidy, 105-page management handbook called The 24-Carrot Manager, is practically unknown in the US.
But in China, where Western business and management gurus are suddenly all the rage, he is a big celebrity.
"I just love coming to China," Elton says while signing one of his books and nearly being pushed over in the frenzy in Harbin. "I feel like a rock star here."
Elton is actually just one of many popular management gurus: Experts say the country has a severe shortage of skilled business managers and a growing cadre of people who want to be the next Bill Gates.
So Western management experts -- teaching everything from how to reward employees to how to foster innovation -- are flocking to China, trying to capitalize on this capitalist frenzy.
The big names are coming, like Jack Welch, Stephen Covey and Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School specialist on competition.
But so are the lesser known. They are conducting management-training seminars, hawking their books, making television appearances and soaking up the adoration.
Many of them, like Elton, have even been hired by Communist Party officials, who are eager to transform China's struggling, money-losing state-owned companies into lean, mean capitalist machines.
Huge Demand for Training
"There's a huge demand for management training in this country," says Juan Fernandez, a professor of management at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.
"There's a transformation going on, from the state-owned mentality, where the only objective was production, to a market-oriented mentality, where you have to care about employees and customers."
And profits.
Along with the management gurus and motivational speakers, America's leading universities are now offering high-priced executive MBA programs here.
Major consulting firms are rushing into China to help state-owned companies restructure their operations.
The management problems are particularly acute here in northeast China, the nation's Rust Belt, where large industrial companies struggle with bloated, inefficient operations.
Hoping to reinvent some of these companies, government officials are asking Western experts to unleash a new form of government-backed propaganda, one with decidedly noncommunist slogans, like "downsizing" and "performance-based pay."
The management craze is also being fed by the growth of private enterprises here.
Business newspapers, magazines and television shows are proliferating; bookstores are stocking management bestsellers translated from English.
Airports shops are regularly drawing crowds by showing motivational videos with titles like You Will Be Rich!
Reshaping China
Wang Renping, a 32-year-old Harbin entrepreneur, exemplifies the changes reshaping China.
He keeps a photograph of Mao on his office wall, and a picture of Peter Drucker, the management guru, on his desk.
"I started reading Peter Drucker's books four years ago," Wang, general manager of an online real estate company, said.
"He's my idol, and that's why I put his picture on my desk. It reminds me of his theories when I'm working."
In China's biggest cities, people like Wang are not just reading the works of their heroes.
They also want to get as close to them as they can.
In June, for instance, an overflow crowd paid US$1,000 a ticket -- a huge sum in a country where the average worker earns less than $3,000 a year -- to receive the gospel according to Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School with an international reputation for his works on competition between companies and across national borders.
Many of them, of course, probably had their way paid by their employers.
The money is making a small dent in the American trade deficit with China.
Covey, the best-selling author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, earned about $50,000 last year just by speaking via video to a group of Chinese businessmen.
Given the demand as China's economy continues to boom, it is no surprise that many lesser lights have sought to bask in the glow.
Robert Miles drew crowds by billing himself in promotions here as the "spokesman" for Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor.
Officials at Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's investment vehicle, said Miles was not a spokesman for Buffett. He is an author who has written about Buffett.
Elton began to focus on China about a year ago. His book, The 24-Carrot Manager, has sold more than 50,000 copies in China.
Earn Large Fees
So Elton, a motivational speaker, came to China with his Utah-based "rewards and recognition" company, O.C. Tanner, hoping to sell more books and earn large fees.
His message is quite simple, even elementary: treat your workers with respect, reward them with gifts -- carrots, in his metaphor -- and productivity and profits will soar.
"How do you motivate and engage your employees?" he asked his audience rhetorically. "You have to find out what's important to them. That's the power of carrots."
Western-educated MBA students might consider this baby talk.
But here in Harbin, an old industrial center that has little of the glitz of coastal China, more than 300 entrepreneurs and government officials seemed to find such talk enlightening.
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