BRIGHT CHINA CASE by ThEME

BrightChina’s management team believes that for China to become a sustainable functioning society, its business leaders must proactively address community service needs and create opportunity and respect for everyone.

BrightChina’s management believes that, if leaders better understood the responsibility of management, the vast majority of enterprises in China would be socially responsible. Hence, in the late 1990s, its mission and investments were broadened to help all of China learn how to lead in the Drucker way. The first strategic social investment was in a Servicemaster franchise, after BrightChina Chairman, Ming Lo Shao, was in the Chicago airport and observed its cleaning crew wearing uniforms, proud of what they were doing—in contrasted to cleaning people in China who worked on the floor with their hands, without training, equipment, or dignity.

[Chairman] Shao and his management team had come to believe that China’s management needed training. The team believed that the underlying Chinese culture would support and even embrace social responsibility. Yet a manager was often seen as a controlling profit-seeker. This prompted the second strategic social investment—a management-training institute. After visiting and studying many of the top universities world-wide, Shao concluded that China needed a non-traditional institute. He then went to California to visit the 90-year-old Peter Drucker. With Drucker’s encouragement, the Bright China Management Institute was launched.

In 2006, the institute was re-named the Peter F. Drucker Academy. The academy trains about 5,000 students per year and is targeting 10,000 per year by 2009.

The BrightChina management team’s third strategic investment is in the BrightChina Foundation established to help educate and build entrepreneurial capabilities in rural areas and prisons.

The BrightChina model of linking profit, not-profit, and education under a broader organizational umbrella would be unusual in any nation. That this model was developed in China is compelling evidence of the power of management determination against all odds.