Day 11 Thursday March 9th.

Patrick and I met for our daily run. Both of us were pretty stiff from the
Great Wall the day before so we made it slow and short. I have had a
scratchy throat since half way through Tokyu. I think it is due to the smog
as it has not turned in to a full blown cold yet, just a scratchy throat.

This morning we listened to a talk on Leadership development in China. The
woman is an independent consultant/headhunter working here in China. She has
been here for 10 years and is from France. She has some very interesting
things to say about HR issues in China, particularly what it takes to keep
an individual and how you should go about growing them.

Afterwards we boarded a bus for Nokia in the BDA (Beijing Development Area).
The manufacturing process at Nokia (well really an assembly process) was
really quite different then that of Lenovo. Lenovo was surprisingly manual
intensive where it appeared that Nokia was not. Nokia also owns its Xingwan
Industrial Park within the BDA. It has brought in its suppliers and had them
set up shop in the park so that Nokia is able to operate with zero
inventory. The order is placed the parts arrive, the phone is assembled and
shipped out all within 24 hours.

The BDA is a special zone in South West Beijing where companies get land for
free and income tax is 15% rather than 30%.

Mitch set up dinner at the Peking Duck restaurant for everyone. Evidently
this is a very famous restaurant in China and has been in operation since
late 1800s. It was quite good and amazingly cheap. I think the beer was 5
Yuan each (Much larger then ours at home) and dinner came out to be 23 Yuan
each.
Jeff, Jim, Patrick and I all came back to the hotel (while many others went
out for beer) and got 11 US dollar massages at a hair salon down the street.
It was fun to try to talk to the girls in Chinese. Our broken Chinese and
their broken English.

Halfway through the massage I called off the run for the following morning.