Lele Sang is Globe Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and coauthor (with Professor Karl Ulrich) of Winning in China: 8 Stories of Success and Failure in the World’s Largest Economy (Wharton School Press, 2021). She is also a contributor to Harvard Business Review and writes about international business. A formal journalist and editor, She has interviewed world leaders from prime ministers to Fortune 500 company CEOs. In addition to journalism, she had stints at startups and multinational corporations as a marketer in both the United States and China.

Lele was a visiting scholar at the University of California - Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She holds an MPA degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In this podcast, she shares:

• Several counter-intuitive lessons from the successes and failures of companies like Amazon, Norwegian Cruise Lines, and Intel
• Three conditions necessary to compete in China
• What competitive advantages may not work in China though it works in your market
• Five key managerial decisions when competing in China

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"One characteristic of the Chinese market is consumers are open-minded, they always want to try new products and new services. So that actually provides an opportunity for global companies to create demand for their offerings."

-Lele Sang

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Short preview of Lele's episode

00:48—Introducing Lele + The topic of today’s episode

2:04—If you really know me, you know that...

4:09—What is your definition of strategy?

5:04—Can you tell us how you went from being a journalist to where you are now?

5:58—Can you explain what caused you to expand the focus of your book from being about the failure of tech companies entering China, to a broader focus?

6:20—Can you give us an example of how competing in China is different than other markets?

8:18—Can you give us examples of companies that successfully did enter the Chinese market, and what we can learn from them?

10:41—What do you think we have to learn about Amazon's attempt to enter the Chinese market, which wasn't the most successful?

12:49—What do you find that people most get wrong that doesn't work in the China context?

14:00—You talk about five key managerial decisions you have to make to compete in China—can you brief us on those?

16:16—How can people connect and learn from you?

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Additional Resources:

Personal Page: https://www.lelesang.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lelesang

Wharton Faculty Page: https://wsp.wharton.upenn.edu/book_author/lele-sang/

Thank you to our guest, our executive producer Zach Ness, our editor James Pearce, and the Outthinker team. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

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