From The China Blog -Time:
As many of you know, Jim McGregor’s book, “One Billion Customers, Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China, ” is one of the best `China books’ of the past couple of years. Jim’s a former reporter–WSJ Bureau Chief in Beijing–who went on to bigger and better things. His book paid implicit homage to a memoir written by one of his foreunners, Carl Crow, an American businessman whose “400 million customers,” is regarded as a minor classic by the commercial cognoscenti. Crow was Shanghai-based during the chaotic (and, for many foreign businesses, highly profitable) interwar years in the early 20th century, but portions of his account of that period remain startlingly fresh for those trying to sell to today’s `one billion customers’.
Attached is Jim’s entertaining review of a new biography of Crow–an early foreign China hand whose life and times are still pertinent to his present-day successors.
Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures of an American in Shanghai by Paul French [Full Text]