One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China - by James McGregor

My Rating: ****

I wish there was such a book about India. Please let me know if you have a recommendation. I could not find one on Amazon.

I feel that people in China share with people in India a fear of the white man. That he will exploit their people without giving them much in return. This book presents the situation from the white man's point of view. It showed me that the white man's intentions are not always as sinister as they are made out to be in the media. You can't blame him for wanting to make a profit. He is not the villian he is made out to be in the media.

The author is well qualified to write such a book. He writes well and handles politically risky topics well, presenting his point in a balanced way.

The elephant and the dragon - by Robyn Meredith

The cover:
Front cover says “...what it means for all of us” but the book only talks about what this means for the United States.

The back cover:
Praise: glowing comments from the CEO of UPS and also from the former president of Mexico! I don't think them to a case that great, I wondered how she managed to get such glowing comments.

Inside:
This book is a lot like other recent books about globalisation -- “the world is flat” etc. There is a lot of good reporting and a lot of information except for some errors (example procedure for foreign travel from India, 20 years ago).
There is not much of an analysis, mostly just narration. The few times she tries to say something of her own she ends up giving free advice on how to run a country (example “India needs to open its economy is it wants to reduce poverty”. I am not saying whether or not this is good advice, just as king what qualifications she has to give such advice)

This book pales in comparison to order the course in the Economist magazine (I'm comparing because I read a good one soon after reading this book).
A different much better book though about China is “One Billion Customers”. I wish there was such a book about India.




Update 1: the elephant book helped me better understand why India's economic policy was so narrow minded before 1991, and why we changed in 1991. Due to our bad experience with the british rule we are very suspisious of the white man.