Lessons For A Healthy Business

Fosun Chairman Guo Guangchang would like you to call him a fellow student, even as he aims to take over the China market for middle class living.

- Peggy Sito and Eugene Tang

When Guo Guangchang bought his first American asset, 28 Liberty Building (formerly known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza) in the financial district of New York in 2013, he envisaged American camaraderie and back-slapping good nature throughout his US business. 

He wanted his employees to call him George, recalling an episode in the post-merger integration of the Travelers Group with Citibank in 1998, when the Co-Chairmen Sandy Weill and Co-Chief Executive John Reed stood by the corporate headquarters every morning, shaking every employee’s hand as they walked in. It was an exercise that went on for a year.

“Call me Sandy” or “call me John”, they had supposedly urged. Guo took this anecdote as a lesson in how to deal with Americans.

However, the American employees at the New York office called him Guo Zong (Director Guo), language copied from Chinese officialdom that neither impressed the Shanghai-born businessman, nor was in line with his vision of entrepreneurship. “I started sending out office memos addressing everybody as tongxue (fellow classmates), and signing off myself as Guo tongxue,” he says. “That finally did the trick.”

Aside from studying business, Guo is an ardent student and practitioner of tai chi. He is repeatedly photographed in traditional tai chi garb. It’s more than mere appearances. Fosun’s Hong Kong office, located in the ICBC Tower on Garden Road, occupies some of the world’s most expensive commercial real estate. Even so, at least 800 square feet of space has been given over to a tai chi studio, adding about HK$200,000 to the company’s monthly rent. Fosun has one of these in every single one of its offices worldwide, where staff are encouraged to turn up early in the mornings for tai chi lessons.