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Yesterday I tweeted:
So far this link has been shared, retweeted, and favorite’d 15 times, which is a lot more than most of the links, pictures, and observations I share on Twitter.
Why this tweet? I have some ideas.
1) Clear Audience. I addressed this tweet towards China-philes. This is a relatively broad, inclusive, and self-defined category, and there are a lot of China-philes on Twitter.
2) Specific Keywords. A grad student friend once referred to Harvard as the H-bomb. This name catches people’s attention!
3) Immediate Benefit. The course is available online. It’s free. A Harvard education for anyone with an internet connection and the attention span to sit through a lecture (or 37!)
What do you think? When do you find that your tweets get a lot of attention?
I’ve been chatting with Stacie Berdan about international careers for more than a year. She has been very supportive of my international professional and entrepreneurial adventures. I was delighted when she sent me a copy of her new eBook, Go Global! Launching an International Career Here or Abroad.
Stacie Berdan
Stacie Berdan's books
I wrote the following review for Ms. Career Girl, Nicole Crimaldi’s excellent blog for young professional women. Here’s the beginning:
If you’ve ever dreamed of building an international career, you must read Stacie Berdan’s Go Global! Launching an International Career Here or Abroad. I found myself nodding and smiling throughout this concise, convenient eBook.
Stacie draws from her own experience to give practical, step-by-step advice. She worked for a top global public relations firm in Hong Kong for many years, during which she gained the skills and experience to skip several levels on the corporate ladder. This is her second book about international careers. Her first book, Get Ahead By Going Abroad: A Woman’s Guide to Fast-Track Career Success, was published in 2007.
(And GoGlobal is only five bucks! That’s the price of one cocktail in a college bar! Consider it a cocktail with Stacie Berdan and her network of international professionals.)
Some of my favorite tidbits from GoGlobal!:
- You can launch an international career at home. You don’t have to move to another country, since the modern world of work is packed with international connections.
- Take an honest look at your own personality, to make sure you’re ready for the cross-cultural challenges of working in an international environment. To build your global mindset, study foreign languages, read foreign news, and watch movies from other countries.
- Avoid taking on debt. Debt limits your career options, at home or overseas. There are many ways to gain global experience without going into debt.
- As you prepare to apply for international jobs, begin by defining your global brand. From this you can craft an elevator pitch, cover letter, resume and online presence. I particularly like Stacie’s sequential, non-intimidating process, and suggestion to begin a resume with a Qualifications section that describes your value proposition and 4-5 memorable bullet points.
- Dismal events can lead to career opportunities. Uprisings in the Middle East led to new opportunities for communications firms like Twitter. The tsunami in Japan created new opportunities for construction firms. Both good news and bad news influence the international job market.
These days I give lots of speeches. In Spanish. A language that is not my mother tongue. A language that I speak fluently, without hesitation. But my accent reveals: I come from somewhere else.
On the way to an event, I thought of a comment by Rachel DeWoskin. Rachel’s first book, Foreign Babes in Beijing, is a memoir about her experience as the “bad girl” on a Chinese reality TV show in the 90s, and how the show mirrored her real life in Beijing. It was one of the first books I read about China.
Rachel DeWoskin. Image via www.racheldewoskin.com
I met her at her book signing at The Bookworm in Beijing when she had just published Repeat After Me, a novel about a young English teacher in New York who falls in love with a Chinese dissident.
During the book signing, Rachel described a Chinese friend, who once said:
“He has IS a successful career and a failed personality.” (see note below)
She saw this as a purer form of the English language. A native speaker is unlikely to say “He has is a successful career and a failed personality,” but is there really any better way to express this idea? Native speakers use cliches and lazy, context-based phrases, often without clarity.
The extra effort it takes to speak a non-native language can make the ideas resonate. And stick.
I notice this on airplanes in Chile, where I actually listen to the safety announcements in English because they don’t sound like the rushed, almost-automated announcements on American planes. I notice it when my German, Korean, Chinese, and Chilean clients talk to me in English. Of course a high level of fluency, decent pronunciation, and full understanding of the topic at hand are all helpful. But in any case, being a non-native speaker can add power to the message.
I am proud to give speeches in slightly stunted non-native Spanish. I am always learning new words (recently: vorágine, licitación, apalancamiento). I will continue to learn new words for the rest of my life.
At the end of my recent trip to Concepcion, our host Felipe Sepulveda, founder of Atrévete Hoy, made this video of me talking about my new business, to send an inspirational message to the aspiring entrepreneurs of the Región del Bio Bio and beyond. Listening to it makes me cringe a bit: Gah, I sound so American. Is that really how I talk?
But daring to open my mouth and speak imperfect Spanish and talk about imperfectly-formed ideas on stage has opened the door to so many opportunities. I encourage all of you to banish your doubts, grab a drink (it helps, I swear) and start talking!!
P.S. If you can’t see the video, click on the title of the post to watch it on my website, or click here to watch it directly on YouTube. Gracias!
Amended 11/22/11 following correspondence directly with Rachel DeWoskin. She commented, “what Anna actually said was ‘he IS a successful career and a failed personality,’ even wilder, I think.” This reminds me of the question I always get asked here in Chile, after explaining in Spanish that I am American and my work involves solar energy, China, and mining: “But I don’t understand, what are you?”
In the last few weeks, I’ve presented several workshops at Chile Start-Up School, an extracurricular project started by a Start-Up Chile team from Norway. The students come from several different universities, and a wide variety of majors, including engineering, English, film, and many more.
The course is based on the Business Model Generation framework, which has become a bible for entrepreneurs everywhere. I’ve really enjoyed teaching the workshops.
For the initial class, my parents gave guest lectures too! Mom talked about strategies to learn from your customers. Dad talked about failure in Silicon Valley. And I talked about Chile and China (an abbreviated version of this talk.)
For the second class, we got into the real meat of the Business Model Generation framework. Here is a two-minute YouTube video that explains this canvas in a concise and visual way:
In this workshop, we discussed two main areas: Customer Segments and Value Propositions. The definitions and some of the examples came straight from the book, but I brought in my own examples to put a fun spin on it.
I printed out pictures of fun gifts, such as…
Barnoculars. Image via coolbuzz.org
Image via werd.com. Thank you Caitlin Davis for recommending this fabulous website filled with fun gifts for guys. My students thank you too!!
I also summarized my friend Jonathan Heeter’s post about his band’s Freemium business model on Slide #28.
Overall, it was a fun workshop, and I think all of the students got a really clear idea of customer segments and value propositions.
Here are the slides. SlideShare made the formatting a bit funky, but it should be understandable 
View more presentations from Leslie Forman
If you are a teacher or workshop leader, you are more than welcome to use this lesson idea. Let me know how it works out for you!
DO: Host a pumpkin carving contest among your employees.
Duarte Design, the global leader in presentation design and training, hosts a pumpkin decorating contest every year. Founder and Principal Nancy Duarte answered a few questions about the contest in an interview with Geetesh at Indezine.
Geetesh: The Pumpkin Contest that you folks at Duarte conduct every Halloween has become an annual tradition – tell us something about how this evolved? And was it always so much fun?
Nancy: We started the pumpkin contest when our firm was in a small office above a Starbucks and across from a Dentist office (this was LONG before the internet existed). The dentist would send their patients across the hall to cast a paper ballot for the best pumpkin. We also have had to put some rules in place so employees don’t cheat.
We had a gal that worked here who was relatively famous in the Philippines and her pumpkins always seemed to get 100 times more votes than anyone else’s. So we put a rule in place that you can’t tell anyone which pumpkin is yours. Decorating the pumpkins is a blast. Each year, I feel all crafty carving mine and patting myself on the back confident I would win and then I bring my pumpkin and all my hopes are dashed. The creativity from the team is so CraZy I’ve NEVER won.
This one is my favorite from this year’s series:
Sick of Pumpkin. My favorite pumpkin from the 16th Annual Duarte Pumpkin Contest. Image via Duarte.com/Halloween
Go to http://www.duarte.com/halloween/ to vote for your favorites!!
DO: Integrate the best holiday of the entire year into your email marketing campaigns.
This is a screenshot of an email I received from SolidWorks, an unfamiliar company. I am not sure how I got on their list. But I found their email so fabulous that I decided to share it with you anyways! Yay for using fun Halloween "problems" to articulate the value proposition of your business!
DON’T: PhotoShop a child’s face onto your costume package without permission, no matter how cute she is!
Marc van der Chijs, who introduces himself as “A Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai, over 10 years in China. Chief Evangelist of Spil Games, co-founder of among others Tudou.com and UnitedStyles.com, and angel investor in Chinese Internet and tech start-ups,” found a Halloween surprise. When his wife Grace was shopping at Carrefour, she found a costume package featuring a photo of his daughter, Elaine! The costume company had (badly) PhotoShop’d a photo of her on a not-that-cute costume. Marc posted about this in detail on his blog. I’ve decided against posting any photos of his adorable daughter or the misuse of her photo on the packages, because that might place me in the same category as the costume company. But I think you should read his posts!
Part 1: Elaine’s Picture Used Without Permission On Chinese Halloween Costumes
Part 2: Elaine’s Picture Removed from Halloween Products — The Chinese Way!
Part 3 (added 10/30/11): Elaine’s Story on Front Page of China Daily. The China Daily reporter did some investigative research on the case. The manufacturer, Beijing’s Xinxin Jingyi Gift, gave the following explanation:
“We did not put the girl’s face on our package on purpose -we don’t have a visual design department and we outsourced the design project to a man surnamed Xiao, but we did not know how he got a picture of the little girl,” said Yin.
Xiao, the designer, said he found the picture from nipic.com, a website for sharing visual design materials.
“The job outsourced from Xinxin was just a part-time job, because I work in a printing studio so they asked me to print something with a foreign girl’s face,” said Xiao.
Xiao said he did hesitate when he used Elaine’s face, but considering the girl might be thousands of miles away and would not be recognized in China, he just went ahead and printed it on the packaging.
“I feel quite sorry for what happened,” said Xiao. [more]
So, that’s your handy digest of Halloween advice for your company. Remember: DO carve pumpkins, DO write creative emails, but DON’T use pictures of kids without permission.
Happy Halloween! Best holiday of the year!!! Yay!!!
I'm Leslie and I connect entrepreneurs in Chile, China, California, and beyond — especially through translation, training, and trade. More about me.
