[dkokelley]

I know a western family that lives in China working in import/export. They came to visit and said something that stuck with me. "China is a very big place. If you ever hear of something that happens in China, it's probably true somewhere."

I'm sure I've butchered their words, but the point is that because of how big China is, it is difficult to correctly assume that what you may believe is true for all or even most of China. I'm not saying that what you say isn't true, but I ask that we clarify and quantify our use of "the Chinese way" when making claims about it.

[electromagnetic]

Agreed, the work ethic of Silicon Valley is definitely not representative of "the American way". Work ethic can vary vastly between states/provinces, cities and even companies. The work ethic I grew up with in the north of England is rather different than the one here in the Greater Toronto Area. However the work ethic of my wives family again is completely different, they come from the east coast where the work is either fishing or farming.

I can work like a dog from 9-5, once it's quitting time I'm done. I don't need lunch or breaks, that's how I was taught to work. I can't even approach office culture because from my point of view everyone is a slackass doing nothing because there's always some people who appear not to be working.

Perhaps my view of working is similar to those of the Chinese where the industry grew out of manual labour. In fact this so called "Chinese way" is indicative of Japan and South Korea (as mentioned elsewhere), where all of the money grew out of steel and ships. When you deal with extreme hazards like red-hot steel (the process of building ships included a lot of manually placed red-hot rivets, and in China still does) so I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the CEO's and directors grew up from these industries and inherited the work ethic. In the west we turned to the service industries quite early, we're not agricultural or industry any more, so the 100% focus needed for work has likely diminished too.

One thing I was taught early, 'Never assume, just find out and then you'll know.' This advice has served me well from measuring cuts with materials to dealing with people. It's very ignorant to assume when it's simple to find out. Assumptions can easily kill and I've been witness to that; I saw a guy shot across the room because he assumed the power was turned off when we were working, finding out was merely asking a sentence (to us or his boss who was a foot away) but he didn't and he ended up in hospital (it wasn't negligence on our part, his boss asked us to turn a circuit on so they could run their power tools and the kid decided to run a jump off the live line at the same time).