For a Chinese Drugmaker, Team Building Means Military-Style Drills

We're all familiar with American team building. Perhaps you go on a ropes course or do some trust falls. Or everyone happily participates in an "icebreaker" during which you reveal what kind of kitchen utensil you would be, if you were, in fact, a sentient kitchen utensil. (I would be a microplane.) It all feels a little bit silly, but perhaps, at the end of the day, you know your coworkers a little better and that's fine.

Take a look at the video above, which Chemical and Engineering News posted this week. It takes you inside the Chinese drug R&D lab run by HEC Pharm just outside Hong Kong. At about the 1:30 mark, C&EN's reporter spies some HEC employees doing the kind of left-right-left drilling that we associate with the military. That's the HEC sales force, it turns out. Call it team building with Chinese characteristics.

More generally, this video is an unusual peek into yet another arena -- pharmaceuticals -- where Chinese companies are moving up the value chain from production to research and branding. 45 seconds in, there is a "forest" of high-pressure liquid chromatographs, which help scientists identify what's actually in a chemical mixture. The scale of the facility, which already employs 1200, is impressive.

Companies like Lenovo and ZTE have already shown that Chinese outfits can be competitive globally, even though pharma continues to be dominated by American and European concerns. What's fascinating is that as these companies compete on a technological level, they bring their cultural weight and norms with them. That is to say, just as European drug salesman had to get used to American companies' icebreakers, our sales people better polish up their boots if Chinese corporations end up dominating pharma.