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Attitude
By Michael Alan Hamlin
March 19, 2001
"The worse Mother Nature is,
the better human nature becomes," says Mark Victor Hansen about
the value of adversity. That’s right, the value of adversity.
Mr. Hansen was in town last week to make two presentations (organized
by my firm, TeamAsia) that had a lot to do with how people need
long odds to do great things. He is the co-author of the Chicken
Soup for the Soul series of books and audiotapes. Over 75 million
of the books have been sold, and Mr. Hansen says his goal is to
sell one billion.
Overcoming adversity is big business.
To sell a billion books Mr. Hansen will have to keep
a steady stream of titles coming, and it was no surprise to learn
that he’s got a long list in the works. One of those will be
Chicken Soup for the Filipino Soul, he vows. "Filipinos are
the best-read country in Asia," he says by way of explaining
the reasons for the proposed book, "and they are also the best
story tellers." He announced plans for the book during a news
conference that preceded his presentations, and in the presentations
themselves. I expect him to be deluged with submissions by authors
and aspiring authors alike (If you want to give it a go, write a
story from your life — or that of someone you know — and
send it to Mark Victor Hansen & Associates, PO Box 7665, Newport
Beach, CA 92658 USA or fax to 949 722 6912.).
It’s clear from Mr. Hansen’s remarks that
he has a sincere soft spot for Filipinos. Perhaps that’s because
the Filipinos have had to deal with so much adversity over 400 years
of colonialism, war, independence and struggling democracy. That
adversity, by his reasoning, has instilled cultural attributes that
are built around a genuine appreciation for life, and how much better
it can potentially become. In short, the best human nature has to
offer.
But Mr. Hansen’s remarks about adversity and human
nature weren’t inspired by the Filipino condition. Rather,
he made the statement in response to conditions he observed in Taiwan
following a devastating earthquake two years ago. The earthquake
destroyed 100,000 homes, took 4,000 lives, and cost businesses billions
of dollars in damage and lost revenue when product deliveries couldn’t
be met until manufacturing lines were restored. Because Taiwan is
an important source of semiconductors, world prices quickly soared
on the assumption that it would take a year or more to fully restore
capacity.
Mr. Hansen was invited to Taiwan by its government
in the aftermath of the earthquake to help inspire shell-shocked
citizens and leaders alike who faced a huge, daunting task in rebuilding
the country. As Mr. Hansen observes, "the biggest builder in
the United States only builds 10,000 homes a year. Taiwan needed
to build 100,000 as fast as it possibly could."
Instilling the confidence to successfully undertake
that task, the government believed, was essential if its recovery
program was to succeed. Mr. Hansen was invited to speak to government
and private sector groups because of his message that there are
no limitations to what individuals, and individuals cooperating
together, can achieve. He was to remind the people of Taiwan that
they could rebuild their country, and in the process, build it better.
Confidence wasn’t the only thing required to do
that, however. Although Taiwan is a wealthy nation — it enjoys
one of the highest levels of foreign reserves in the world, for
instance — private sector participation, or more specifically,
financial contributions, would be required to provide shelter to
the homeless. To raise the funds, Mr. Hansen spoke at a series of
dinners for wealthy donors.
"One of the principal things to strike me about
the crowd," Mr. Hansen says, "was the average age of the
group. These were mostly successful, fairly young entrepreneurs
and executives. I’d expected a much older crowd." It must
have been the right group. In just one meeting Mr. Hansen was able
to raise US$7 million. "I did it by starting things off auctioning
my tie," he says, smiling.
Mr. Hansen wears only Pandaldi ties. The last time
he was in Italy, he bought around 150, most of which he gave away
to friends. They are distinguished by two things. First is their
design, which is eclectic, to be sure (Mr. Hansen and I do not share
the same taste in ties, by the way.). Second, they are probably
the only tie that comes with a genuine gold — not gold plated
— gold bar sewed into the fabric, near the label at the back.
The ties weren’t all the crowd was willing to bid for, and
at one almost embarrassing point, Mr. Hansen wondered how much clothing
he would leave the dinner with.
To raise US$7 million a presentation, Mr. Hansen may
have been inspired by his own face-to-face experience with an aftershock,
which were still taking place during his visit. Booked into the
22nd floor of a hotel — safer than the lower floors, he was
told, because Taiwan earthquakes sway rather than shake, obliterating
the lower floors of buildings first — Mr. Hansen dove under
the desk in his room when tremors began soon after checking in.
Shoved violently back and forth under the desk — the building
was built to sway to withstand earthquakes — he quickly acquired
a sense of the helpless horror earthquakes instill with icy ferocity.
Although Mr. Hansen lives in California, which is also a highly
earthquake prone area, he’d never had such an experience.
And it provided the well-known author a sense of the
difficulty in store. It would be difficult to instill the confidence
in people that they could deal with circumstances in which they
felt utterly out of control, and helpless. Yet as he observed people
going about the process of putting their lives back together again,
one thing especially stood out. And that was the way people sacrificed
to help each other, despite their own pain and loss.
Because Taiwan is an entrepreneurial culture, it is
not distinguished by cooperative relationships. It took a crisis
for that to happen. And that became Mr. Hansen’s message: "The
worse Mother Nature becomes, the better human nature is." So
while a tragedy like Taiwan’s is devastating in many ways —
the grief for loved ones lost, and the pain of losing one’s
life work, for instance — there was also a blessing.
It made people better people.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing director of TeamAsia
and the author of two books on Asian corporations and economies.
His latest book is The New Asian Corporation: Managing for the Future
in Post-Crisis Asia.)
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