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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