James, 18 months older than Tony, had graduated from the European Business School of London. His two-week trip came just before graduation. James returned two years later to study Mandarin, but at the time he did not plan on staying for good.
“I thought studying Chinese would be a good way of increasing my skills and opportunities for a job, but my idea was always that I would go back to find a job in Europe,” he said.
A few years later, James went back to London to work at Mars Foods, a company that markets foods and drinks under major brands such as Snickers, M&M’s and Skittles.
James was in charge of sales adoption, which allowed him to travel to many parts of Europe, and part of his job was to convince the heads of branch offices to adopt similar sales strategies.
Prior to Subkarma, James had worked in big companies almost all his life, while both his parents and his brother owned their own businesses or worked for themselves.
“Only me, working for a company with 45,000 people. And when you work in a big company, it’s always about politics,” he said.
When Tony called him in 2004 to ask if he wanted to help him run Subkarma, James accepted.
James said that what he had learned helped him “get change in a company,” which he said was important to his role at Subkarma, now that he looks back on the experience.
“When you do branding, one of the biggest challenges in Taiwan is getting people internally in a company to change the way they work,” he said.
“[For companies] that don’t do branding, you have to think different, work different, use different tools. And in Taiwan, when you have 100 employees who’ve been there for 10, 20 years, it’s very difficult [to get them to change,]” he said. “[It may be even more difficult] to get the boss to change.”
When asked about the division of labor, Tony said “[James] runs the business and I run the design … He does the clever things, I do the fun things.”
“[Tony] has a lot of creative ideas, and I say, [can] we do it or not? I try to slow it down a little bit, and it works well,” James said.
The two brothers say they don’t get involved in politics, but that they “love Taiwan.”
“Everybody should love Taiwan, no matter green or blue,” James said.
Subkarma has received a lot of invitations to go to China for business, but the two brothers say they choose not to be in China because “it doesn’t make any sense to help our competitors in China,” Tony said.
He said a lot of companies in Taiwan want to compare themselves to companies in China, but “it’s not about being better than China, it’s about being as good as Japan or Italy or Germany.”
James hopes that one day, Taiwan will not be about “I’m better than …” but rather, “I’m different.”
“I think it’s time for people to wake up and discover what the Taiwan identity is. There’s too much infighting, too much politics. It’s distracting from the economic progress of Taiwan,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with linking stronger ties with China, for example. There’s great opportunity in the Chinese market. There’s nothing wrong with embracing preferential ties that are being developed now, and also nothing wrong with being proud of Taiwan.”
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