“Depending on how you read it, China’s biggest publishing sensation in years, Wolf Totem, is a moving novel of nomads and settlers and their relation with wolves on the Mongolian steppes, a guide to doing business in New China, an ecological handbook, or a piece of military strategy.” So says The Independent’s Clifford Coonan in his review of Wolf Totem (狼图腾), and he’s right.
Unlike most popular novels in China, the name Wolf Totem may ring a bell among English speakers. We’ve got Penguin to thank that for that. They paid an amazing US$100,000 for the rights, and their English version of Wolf Totem, translated by the much-respected Howard Goldblatt, sold 80,000 hardback copies in 2008 alone.
“Set during the Cultural Revolution, Wolf Totem describes the education of an intellectual from China’s majority Han community living with nomadic herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia,” writes Pankaj Mishra in his NY Times review. But, complains Alice Poon at the AsiaSentinel, author Jiang Rong explains away “the weak disposition of the Chinese ethnic race with a simplistic rationale that it is due to traditional sedentary agricultural lifestyle since ancient times,” and attributes “all glory and success in certain periods to the venturesome nomadic characteristics of China’s hunter-gatherer tribes.”
“Simplistic” that rationale may be, but the idea that Chinese people ought to “discard their submissive character and assume a more aggressive, or wolf-like, outlook on life and the world at large” (Poon’s words) has caught on like wild-fire in certain circles in China: Featured at business forums, a popular new year’s present for military types — and an inspiration to China’s business publishers.
Here are just three of the management books — none available in English to date — inspired by Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem:
- Notes on Wolf Totem: Observing the Wolf Pack, Learning Management (从狼群争斗中学经营管理：狼图腾启示录)
- Hua Wei: Wolf Management in Action (狼性管理在华为)
- Managing like a Wolf (狼性管理)
If you’d like an English-language table of contents, synopsis, an excerpt or further market intelligence on these or similar books, e-mail me at xumushi@yahoo.com and tell me what you want. For the latest news on the upcoming film version of Wolf Totem, click here.
Here’s my translation of the Table of Contents from a book on the application of “wolf-think” at Hua Wei, China’s best-known, and most aggressively global, telecoms player:
Hua Wei: Wolf Management in Action
“Corporate development means nurturing a wolf pack. The wolf has three key traits: An acute sense of smell; An unyielding spirit that attacks without fear for itself; An innate esprit de corps.” (Hua Wei CEO, Ren Zheng-Fei)
Chapter 1: Wolf as King: Hua Wei’s Strategic Planning
Chapter 2: Call of the Wolf: Decision-making at Hua Wei
Chapter 3: The Fearless Wolf: Hua Wei’s Crisis Management
Chapter 4: Unequalled Lupine Wisdom: HR Management at Hua Wei
Chapter 5: The Wolf’s Art of War: Hua Wei’s Marketing Operations
Chapter 6: Sharp as a Wolf: Hua Wei Manufacturing and R&D
Chapter 7: A Wolf’s Spirit Never Dies: Hua Wei’s Corporate Culture Management
Chapter 8: The Wolf Pack: Hua Wei’s Organizational Management
Chapter 9: Pride of Self: Brand Management at Hua Wei
Chapter 10: Wolf Turf Expansion: Hua Wei’s Capital Operations
January 30th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
[...] In the pack: A Chinese wolves-and-nomads novel with international appeal inspires a raft of management books. [Bruce [...]