Hong Kong life

When I came to Hong Kong, I had a couple of major curiosities, among other things I wondered how the work environment going to be like as well as how I’m going to fare outside work (i.e. finding friends and in general people to hang out with) and how I’m going to adapt to the local climate.

Being five months into my rotation I’m happy to report that I find people to be very positive and respectful at work. Thing that one notices is that people are in general are a bit quieter and a lot of things get decided after the meetings, face to face, especially true with respect to a larger meetings.

“Face” is in general a very important concept in Asia. The last thing people want to do is to challenge their superior openly which could lead to the loss of face. So one finds majority of Asian people are rather quiet in meetings vs. North Americans who are used to the style of meetings in which if you didn’t speak, your ideas would not likely to be taken into the consideration. As the result, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in a different environment and people might perceive me as being overly aggressive if I continue with the style that I was used to in Canada.

Hong Kong office composition is roughly 90% Asian and 10% European/North American. Naturally, one of my initial concerns was the fact that I don’t speak either Cantonese or Mandarin and I won’t be able to effectively communicate in the office. Thankfully, it turned out that even though the conversation language for majority of Hong Kongers is Cantonese, everybody in the office is fluent in English. The only problem that I occasionally run into is when I travel somewhere, majority of taxi cab drivers don’t speak a word of English, so you are stuck with either going to the major tourist destination spots and walking from there, or keeping handy a phone number of a person who can translate to Cantonese. The one other downside or upside, depending on how you look at it, is the fact that the office gossip is in Cantonese so it all sounds like gibberish.

Finding friends and people to hang out with didn’t turn out to be a challenge neither. Majority of expats are here are on a 2-3 year secondments so none have an established circle of friends and are quite open to meeting new people. I found the easiest was to meet people in the office or through common interests/activities. I quite enjoy hiking and dancing salsa, so I’ve met a group of people through both of those activities.

Hong Kong is great, like Vegas it’s the city that never sleeps. Any time of day you will find people on the streets of Central. Some bars have people partying till 8am the next morning and a lot of food places stay open through the night. Everything in the city is really close and convenient (i.e. 20 min is considered to be a long commute). The coldest it got so far has been +8C, and people were complaining how cold it was and wearing fur coats and parkas. I mean I can definitely get used to this, after the -30C winters in both Canada and Russia.
As with anything there is couple of negatives to offset some of the positives. The summers here are quite hot and humid, which I hear makes for a moist walk to the office. Pollution is bad and is due to the heavy industry across the border. And finally the city is way too crowded, which could simply mean that I’m not the only one who likes this city.
Cheers,
George

Hello brave new world!

I moved to Hong Kong in mid-October ’08. It was quite a welcome move for a number of reasons not the least of them being the fact that October was the month that one had to start scrapping ice of the car in Canadian icy mornings. While Hong Kong welcomed me with the +31C degree weather and all of ice contained in the fridges where it truly belongs as far as I’m concerned, and not on your car.. brrr

Having visited Hong Kong for the first time in December ’07 as part of the MBA school trip, I was really looking forward to the chance to experience living in it. The impressions that I carried from the ’07 trip were the vibrant city which people defined by three simple words: work, eat and shop, and just shrugged their shoulders when I asked about another one that they’ve seemingly forgot to add to the list: sleep. As I know now, being here for three months, they weren’t that far off, after all.

My friends in Canada were shell shocked when they’ve heard that I’m moving to Hong Kong to start a job with Prudential UK. They were wondering if I was crazy and what made me accept the job half a way across the world. I’ve been warned multiple times that it’s not only going to be really different culturally wise, but everything else is going to be difficult as well. The question that kept on popping up was why I didn’t just get a job in Toronto instead. I think though, they were secretly jealous of my upcoming adventure.

One of my life passions is travel. But what I was dreaming of was actually a get a chance to experience a new culture on a deeper level than what you get on a two-three day tourist visit. So when Prudential offered me the opportunity in Hong Kong I jumped on it. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting opportunity to start with, but the location was a big bonus for me.

Now a little bit more about the actual opportunity. Through the interview process Prudential matched me to the Business Analyst role in the New Markets development group. We are part of the Prudential Corporation Asia regional office. My role focuses on providing analytical support for the Prudential’s expansion in Asia and beyond, helping to identify and execute expansion into new areas within our current markets as well as brand new markets. We are basically the team which is on the bleeding edge of Prudential UK.

It was October 9th Thursday when I touched down at my newly found HK home. It honestly didn’t feel real for the first little while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that the whole process happened so smoothly, for that I have to praise to our HR department, they helped to make it go off without a single glitch considering all the little details that needed to be taken care off before it could all happen. There were all the employment contracts that had to be UPSed back and forth between HK and Toronto, the HK employment visa that luckily took only two weeks to process, and then all the other nitty-gritty stuff that had to be taken care off before I could start.

I was to start the job on Friday, the day after my arrival. The 13 hour time difference and the 16 hour flight didn’t help, what did help was the fact I was full of excitement and quite busy right from the start. Well that and couple of double espressos that I might have accidentally grabbed from Starbucks ;)

Before starting at Pru, I have been familiarizing myself with insurance industry, the company and our product specifics. However the first couple of days were a deep dive for me, getting a full overview of our product set and our presence across the region. That was followed by the overview of framework for new country analysis and examples of the countries that we considered before.

I was a bit of an early starter at Momentum as our official start was supposed to happen in London on November 9th. We were to spend a week in UK building our understanding of the group, meeting with managers from various members of Prudential family and getting to know other participants in the Momentum program to help build us a support network in whatever we decide to tackle later on.

Till next time,
George

The other side of the pacific

Sitting at Starbucks and sipping on a caramel late I glance outside at a beautiful harbor. It could be just like any other Starbucks in Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, but it is not. This Starbucks is actually in another part of the world, far far away from Toronto. I’m actually sitting at Starbucks in Hong Kong, the city which I’ve been calling my new home for the past three and a half months.

Before I jump into telling you more about my life in Hong Kong, let me share with you a bit of my background. I was born in Moscow Russia, where I lived until the age of 16, at which point both me and my dad moved to Canada. After a year of Canadian high school I enrolled into a Computer Engineering degree at University of Manitoba. That in turn led to a relatively uneventful four years of school and put me squarely on track for a career in IT. Fortunately, at that point I was brave enough to admit that IT wasn’t the right field for me, and after taking number of Project Management courses I decided to pursue graduate business education to help me switch into Finance. So long story short, after working couple of years in IT sales and then in Product Management I decided to take a plunge and go get an MBA.

As a bit of a side note, I find it really funny that my pursuit of education is perfectly aligned and correlated with the global recessions. Well, to be more precise it actually precedes them by about one year. Let me elaborate: I started my Computer Engineering degree at the peak of the tech hype in 2000 and saw the whole bubble burst a year after, same deal with the MBA which I started in early 2007. Fortunately the second time around I’ve learned my lesson and chose to do a more intensive one year MBA instead, finishing couple short months by before the market collapsed in September ’08. Moreover, it seems the more serious my education gets the more severe the associated recessions, so watch out the world economy if I ever decide to do a Ph.D., cause by the time I’d be done that the world would not be the same, if its still around that is…

On a more positive note, Momentum program @ Pru has turned out to be everything that I’ve though it could and would be. Great people, awesome company and an amazing location. Doesn’t get much better than that, if you ask me.

After finishing an MBA mid 2008 is was really torn, I had an offer from IBM to go into their Project management training program in a smaller Canadian city, I was interviewing with Eli Lilly and Company for the pharmaceutical sales and had some discussions with boutique management consulting firms. But it all felt quite routine and didn’t excite me at the very least. I mean all of the positions were solid, but it felt like I had to sacrifice something in order to take each and every one of them. I would have had to settle if I was to take one of them, so I kept my fingers crossed and continued actively looking for an opportunity that would be a better all around “fit” for what I was looking for.

And I can tell you this: I wasn’t looking for a horizontal comfortable move. I was searching for a stretch opportunity that would be both interesting and challenging. And to my surprise I did find it, browsing through the Pru’s Momentum website. I remember reading about the Momentum and thinking… wow, this sounds exactly like a perfect opportunity for me. The second though was… is this really real or just one of those smart marketing tricks.

After the chance to meet with men and women of Pru including people who were already in the Momentum I was pretty convinced, this was not a marketing trick, the Momentum program was exactly what I was looking for and I desperately wanted in.

To be completely honest with you, I had always envisioned Insurance organizations as a bit of slow moving entities, unexciting, and such. But after getting to know number of people at Pru and chatting with the CEO of Insurance operations as part of my interview process I was absolutely sold. Apparently I was mistaken, insurance companies are not all alike and after 160 years of existence Pru is still very much alive and kicking [competition].

So three rounds of interviews later, I was in. I landed the job that I really wanted and was packing my suitcases in Toronto, Canada and getting ready for my cross Pacific move to Hong Kong.

Hello new world!!!