Seattle day: Expeditors & PMI

Today is our “Seattle” day – both company visits today are to businesses headquartered in Seattle. Expeditors is a logistics solutions company, and PMI is a beverage solutions company. I find that this “solutions” term has become ubiquitous in business parlance of the past decade or two. In any case, I think these visits were the most interesting for us this trip.

The answers at Expeditors were frustratingly vague on the big questions we asked, although they were perfectly happy to answer detail questions about their operations. We were wondering if perhaps they were trying to put a perfect face on their operations. Regardless, it was very frustrating to keep asking the same questions over and over again and getting the same non-answers from the regional manager.

PMI makes the cups you see at Starbucks, in addition to other private label items. The visit to PMI was brilliant, and really my favorite company visit. We were lucky to have Qin Chen at our lunch table prior to the visit, and had a detailed discussion about the employment of expatriates in Chinese firms. He said that the kind of problem solving and managerial skills they needed when they first went to Shanghai simply didn’t exist in China in the numbers that they needed to be able to find local hires, since every other foreign company was looking for a person with the same sort of experience. He said that they’ve been able to build up a number of their employees internally, and so they have those skills now, but that it is still worthwhile to hire expatriates. This could be very concerning for a company, because that’s a huge amount of time and invested effort into these Chinese employees just to make them the kind of employee that can do the necessary work. Replacing someone would be quite difficult in those circumstances.