Imagine you own a significant share in a major business venture – let’s say, oh, 30%. Now let’s visualize the other 70% being held by an multinational conglomerate by the name of, oh, I don’t know… “Learson Pongman”… a publishing and education company which has its tentacles in over 70 countries and has had business dealings with my own country-of-residence for something on the order of half-a-century.
What do you do?
If your answer if to kick back, relax, and let the virtually assured dividends come rolling in… well congratulations. Your brain is officially working normally. Let me present you with this laurel, and hardy handshake.
If, however, your answer was to resist the 70% ownership at every turn (after, y’know, selling that 70%) over a period of 3 years, and then – and this is where it gets good - try (unsuccessfully) to fire those who disagreed/were not intimidated by you, and then unlawfully detain/imprison the president of the Asian branch of the parent company, his staff and lawyer in your office for a period of hours, under guard… well, then hello to my now former general manager and welcome to my page. I do hope you enjoy it, given that you’re newly unemployed, and may soon be facing jail time for, well, basically going off the deep-end.
In my extended stay at – let’s drop the transparent euphemisms, shall we? – Pearson, I’ve been privy to quite a few power struggles, shifts, and complete reversals of direction. I’ve seen promises broken, words revoked, ignored, and the supposed “values” of the company outright ignored in the interest of something called “guanxi,” which is to say, “face, relations, connections.” I’ve become accustomed to a multinational company from the UK being run in a quintessentially – and I mean this in an entirely negatively fashion – Chinese way. The semi-corrupt, completely opaque bureaucracy that governed my work environment had long-since become old hat. I tolerated it because, by and large, I was able to ignore it, and the upper echelons largely ignored my backwater campus as being just too darned inconveniently located to actually come and enforce everything.
And yet, as of Tuesday, I bore witness to something completely new. And found myself utterly dumbfounded at the machinations that unfurled quite literally before my eyes. Nancy and Caelan had boarded their train for Wenzhou, and I’d returned home to wile away the remaining hours of the day with WoW, Skyrim, or whatever else might strike my fancy. And so, there I was doing my best not to become food for a frost troll, when my cell phone began thrumming away with a series of texts. It was a series of messages resembling something the Enigma Machine might churn out than an official company SMS. It came in 4 parts, crudely cut apart at random places, and then delivered in reverse order. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued. I had, along with the rest of the staff, been “invited” to a meeting at the headquarters with the aforementioned President of Pearson Asia Pacific. Now, to explain, this was very strange because I had until now never been “invited” to any function other than the annual party. Meeting times and places were simply sent out via email and through the local center managers that “there will be a meeting at…” and sometimes that we were “required” to attend. Further, I had never before received a text message from the company. It was a degree of sophistication upper management had simply lacked. And finally, the invitation was for that very day… and while I’ve long since grown used to the Chinese vagaries regarding future-planning, this level of immediacy was again unprecedented.
So I bid my dark elf goodbye and trekked out to People’s Square out of little more than sheer curiosity. Arriving at the building, I was greeted by a few of my coworkers hailing others down with directions. The meeting at HQ, they relayed to me, had been cancelled and the center closed entirely. The Asia Pacific President, Mr. Dugie Cameron and his entourage had relocated to a 3rd floor restaurant of the nearby shopping mall, where they awaited anyone who might show up.
Once assembled, he relayed the tale of sorrow and woe to us all: he had flown in from Hong Kong to try to solve a rather grave crisis of leadership at the managerial level, one which put the entire operation in Shanghai at risk. It seemed that somewhere in the byzantine bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education, there was some mid-level official who had taken a rather intense dislike to the fact that Pearson was operating in Shanghai/China. So much so that when the school had to renew its license to operate in the city, this person had stipulated they would not authorize any renewal if the name “Pearson” was still attached to the company. Now of course, the “whys” of it is sheer speculation – perhaps he’d been bribed to do exactly that, perhaps he was a jaded former customer hell-bent on revenge, perhaps an alien parasite invaded his brain and turned him into a drone for the hive cluster. Regardless, on the last day of the year the renewal had finally gone through – with the Pearson brand stripped from it. The general managers/minority shareholders/husband-wife pair in change of negotiations had essentially promised that Pearson was going to be removed entirely from its operation in Shanghai.
Obviously, that didn’t sit too well with the company as a whole. And thus Mr. Cameron flew in to deal with the rogue duo face-to-face, lawyer in tow. I’m sure expected a fair amount of static, posturing, and heated negotiation. What they certainly had not expected was to be locked away in the office building, and placed under guard for a period of hours, and denied access to communication devices. Yeah, that’s a no-no. I’m not sure what the Chinese word for “false imprisonment” and “kidnapping” are, but they’re definitely on the books as a general “bad idea.” After the cleaning lady finally came along and unlocked the door from the outside, they relocated to said restaurant.
As for the mysterious text message, apparently the normal company email system had been taken over by the duo, who had managed to acquire sole administrator-level access of the system. There were able then to monitor, and block, any mail they so chose. Thus, they’d been able to effectively close down the primary means of intercompany communication. Mr. Cameron had been forced to reroute the messages about the meeting through his Hong Kong office using available cellphone contact info.
But that wasn’t the end of the paranoid craziness that had seized the GMs. After the negotiations broke down into kidnapping, they had tried to terminate several of the upper-level staff for being “pro-Pearson” and attempted with some success to intimidate the center managers into not attending the meeting. Several had been cowed into coming out on the side of the GMs. Talk about backing the wrong horse. As for the “firings,” well it turns out it’s rather difficult to fire someone who doesn’t work for you. The employees had been hired and brought in by Pearson, thus nullifying the monomaniacal purge it seems the GMs had envisioned.
From the sounds of it, the ex-GMs had been blackmailing the company, hoping for a big payday – to the turn of $50,000,000 (yes, that’s in USD) – to make them go away. Well, now they’re more likely to be going away for quite a while… to prison.
The open question at this point is, what becomes of the company? The license to operate was procured under false pretenses – no, the 70% multinational shareholder did not simply raise anchor and disappear over the horizon. So there is the possibility that the Ministry of Education may follow the letter of the law and begin proceedings to close the school down. That, however, is relatively unlikely. For one, it seems there is only one MoE official who took issue with Pearson’s ownership in the country. Everyone else they’ve contacted in the Ministry seems to think there shouldn’t be a problem… so it may be as simple as just resubmitting the application to someone else. For another, Pearson is not simply the owner of Longman Schools; they own at least two other school chains throughout the country, including the giant Wall Street English. They create tens of thousands of jobs – most of which are for local staff, rather than foreign experts such as myself. The company’s ability to generate currency is rather substantial, and to jeopardize that would be unwise for an economy in a precarious position. On a related point, the last thing the Chinese government needs at the moment is yet more bad press, especially when it comes to foreign investment. With competing entities like Disney and English First having equal stakes in the ESL industry, rocking that boat could have a significant ripple effect. Suffice it to say, methinks this will all pan out in the end.
Still, it’s been a very interesting few days – especially since the company annual party was held the day after this all went down, including the two GMs in question. Believe me, there were quite a few people waiting for that ball to drop (alas, it never did). In my wildest dreams, I see there being a substantive shift in company policy away from the profit-at-all-cost mentality of the former head. But hey, I’m not fool, and I know that it’s just as likely (in fact, much moreso) that barring a new name at the top of the billing, the status quo is likely to remain firmly intact.
Time will tell.
(CS) TAW Out.
LYRIC HERE
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