On Art – otherwise known as driving in Beijing

Part of Beijing's Forbidden City

I rarely travel in a group. To be quite honest, while I enjoyed the fellowship of traveling with some dear friends and colleagues across China the following week (if it’s Tuesday, it must be Shenyang…), I can also appreciate the benefits of traveling solo. I’ve never been very patient with luggage.

One significant aspect of travelling en masse is traveling by a rented bus, which becomes cost effective in a group. Our bus driver in Beijing was perhaps the single best driver I have ever encountered (although Ugandan and Lebanese friends could likely give here a run for her money). Not only did she show a remarkable alacrity at managing the maddening traffic of central Beijing, she also had a unique ability to move with lightening speed from the driver’s seat to open the passenger door in the flash of an eye, smiling the whole time.

Driving in Beijing is not for the faint of heart. I often say that we in the United States (along with western Europe and perhaps a few spots in Asia like Hong Kong) drive defensively, while most of the rest of the world drives offensively. While there is a unique play on words to be read here, I mean offensively primarily as the opposite of defense (although it does shade occasionally into the other usage as well). To fail to nose your car into an open space on the road in Kampala or Lima is to show quite a good bit of rudeness. Lane dividers are mere suggestions. The horn has totally different meaning. To wait patiently for others to pass, it seems to me, would send the whole system grinding to a halt. Just as I learned in queues in Russian train stations long ago, to be overly polite is to be quite rude. Pushing and jostling a bit helps everyone to move forward. Yet this is not to suggest that these processes are without rules or represent a state of chaos. While the mass of u-turning cars attempting to turn left on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue today may look chaotic, a deeper look shows that there is a clear method to the madness, a social contract of sorts. Failure to follow these rules – either through undue politeness or aggressiveness – is destabilizing to the whole system. Driving is, in reality, a fine art and a thing of beauty. Our bus driver in Beijing was a master artist.

Leadership, like driving in Beijing, is also an art. While there are clearly administrative methods and procedures that can contribute to leadership effectiveness, it is the higher-context art of leading in the midst of such inscrutable rules where I believe that real success is found. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to exert command and control leadership. I saw this yesterday while hiking on the Great Wall of China. It was a hot and muggy day and the crowds were immense – wall to wall people (pun only slightly intended). About half way up a particularly long and narrow series of steps, a major bottleneck developed. It appeared to center around an elderly Chinese lady who sat down in the middle of the stairs, unable to go any further. People began to veer around her in the narrow spaces available. Others stopped to figure out what was going on. Some crossed to the other side of the stairs when there was a brief break in the downward flow of people. Suddenly, above the din arose a voice with a tellingly American access. “People, people… this isn’t working,” he shouted. “We need people going up on this side and people going down over here. No one sits down. No one stops. Keep it moving.” All of this was done, of course, with “helpful” illustrative hand gestures. I watched as this man, trying so desperately to organize China, was quite literally swept up in a tide of people totally ignoring him. He was not happy and will likely return from his holiday with stories of nearly dying at the hands of unruly Chinese mobs. Gradually, the situation righted itself. A lady trying to climb on the wrong side was gently squeezed into the flow moving in the proper direction and everyone made their way to the top or the bottom. Everyone survived. (Nearly) everyone was happy, even if a bit hot and sweaty.

Lessons learned?

1.     Do not ever, under any circumstance, visit one of the sections of the Great Wall near Beijing on a hot and humid day in July during Chinese holiday season.

2.     An ability to read the dynamics around you and exercise patience and grace will get you a lot further than command and control.

3.     When hiring a bus for a tour group in Beijing, hire the lady who drove us. She will not disappoint. She’s an artist.