(5 October 1998) A Malaysian Journal: Jackie / v. 07 - Ramblings about Work Merlihat Malaysia (Observing Malaysia) [(C) Copyright 1998, J. Snell, San Jose State University & Universiti Putra ] [Malaysia. This is a continuing series of notes about our experiences living and ] [working in Malaysia, during my 10-month Fullbright Fellowship at the ] [Universiti Putra Malaysia, just outside Kuala Lumpur. Copies may be freely ] [distributed, but must retain this preamble. Anyone wishing to be added to the ] [distribution list, or removed from it, should send me a note. /Jackie ] [ ] Dear Friends, Classes have begun again, so my notes are likely to become few and far between again. Hope that doesn't come as a relief to anyone. [aside: The local supermarket also sells corn yogurt! I didn't buy that, but I did get the 4-pack which has passion fruit, lychee, guava, and orange. I'll have to try kiwi flavor next time. (Dave liked the one he tried.) I'm not much motivated to get the durian flavored yogurt, pudding, cookies, or candy.] Most of the time I am very excited about my work. There are pluses and minuses, as usual. Soon after arrival I was handed a researcher with a patent that should be any university's dream come true. I think I am getting closer to lining up some appropriate companies to joint venture on the project. I think it can become really profitable, but will probably need a year of commercially funded scaling-up studies to get from lab to commercial quantities. That means it will need another round of funding about a year after I leave. I have written some guidelines for researchers working with the University Business Centre (UBC), that are really veiled instructions to the UBC faculty. They were well received by Nik, the director of UBC, and his second in command, Iskandar. In fact they have me as lead speaker in a "road show" visiting the various colleges on campus. Unfortunately I'm short on people to train, so that the work can continue after I leave. The fellow who is supposed to be doing my job is from the agriculture department and doesn't know the first thing about putting together a business or a contract, never mind negotiating one. As little contact as we have, we often seem to be at cross purposes. He is also one of the more traditional Malays who would rather give something away to a bumi (native Malay) company than do business with a local Chinese or Indian. The person before him was replaced because she was setting up businesses to benefit herself, rather than the university. I have been told that several department chairs have been posted to extension campuses in the boonies for the same reason. Before coming here I was surprised and confused by a list of restaurants I found that had both Malay and Malaysian categories. The distinction is completely natural to me now. All the ethnic groups are Malaysian, if they were born here or are naturalized, but there is also a Malay ethnic group. The other primary ethnic groups are Indian and Chinese, and many indigenous groups, mainly from the Borneo (east) side of Malaysia. Malay vs. Malaysian applies to people and all sorts of things besides restaurants. While Malaysians are very proud of the way the "races" or ethnic groups get along -- they have only had one ethnic riot in their history, about 30 years ago -- there is a very high sense of ethnic differences. This is relevant for talking about work, because business cultures among the groups vary, and each group prefers doing business within their own ethnic group. People who are of mixed race seem to tend to identify more with the Malay side, perhaps because Malays get all kinds of special advantages, from higher interest rates at the savings bank, to land ownership, and laws requiring a certain % of corporations to be Malay owned. Many Chinese businesses have "paper" Malay ownership, that is Malay partners who get part of the profits, but are there to satisfy the requirements and play no active role. Government and academic positions are predominantly filled by Malays, though there are lecturers of all nationalities here on campus. Tension between ethnic Chinese and Malays is nothing like as strong as in Indonesia, but is the reason for Singapore splitting off from Malaysia 2 years after independence from the British. The ethnic mix is roughly reversed in Singapore - 60% Chinese I think. There are no special privileges for Malays in Singapore. Even here in Malaysia business is dominated by Chinese, which is a bit of a dilemma for my efforts at tech transfer. A partnership between Malay academics and Chinese businesses would be the most obvious, except for the biases. The federal gov't has grants available for tech transfer that can be awarded only to joint venture's that are majority owned by a Malaysian company. Currently I am talking to a Malaysian palm oil refinery, which has a Chinese owner, and the Indian marketing manager is the one doing the talking with us. I am also talking to the Malaysian subsidiary of a big multinational based in Germany (we think it would qualify as a Malaysian company), and the Swiss office of another big multinational, both of which are in pharmaceuticals (carotene). But this is only after beginning with the largest palm oil co. in Malaysia, Felda, a former gov't agency which began as a small oil palm holders cooperative. Luckily a local venture capitalist, who is Malay royalty, told my colleagues and me that he wouldn't be eager to do business with them because the managers are more interested in lining up Mercedes to drive than doing business. He cited how many administrators there are for each small holder, and I don't remember the number now, but it was impressive. Malays still have great respect for royalty, more so than the British. This gave me lots of support for saying I didn't like the way Felda was dealing with us, and that we didn't need the biggest company; we need a smaller refinery for whom our deal would be more important. We are still communicating with Felda, as well as another Malay royal who wants to invest, but whose expertise is in construction rather than anything related to the patent. The idea that we would look for investors that have experience in the field was entirely new to the Business Centre. I don't think they have "bought into" the idea. Rather I think they have accepted me as someone trying to do the right thing for the university, and figure whatever I accomplish is something that wouldn't have gotten done without me. For many reasons, not the least of which I suspect is "cultural", by which I mean that they have been brought up with certain training and assumptions, much business is done as favors to each other. Well, that part is not really different in the US, but many Malays (as opposed to the Chinese) don't have a sense of what sort of things go into making a business work. The researcher on the carotene project is quite the exception, and most of the academics have trained overseas, so have been exposed to many ideas, and are all over the map in their level of sophistication vs. traditionalism (if that really is a dimension). Malays are artistic and meticulous about many things, but planning is not one of them. In general, planning is not something they like or aspire to, as witnessed by the driving; I suspect it is even difficult due to basic cultural training/perspectives. One-way streets are virtually ignored, and just because a motorcycle is coming the wrong way doesn't mean it won't take its half out of the middle; this gets even more interesting when the half is taken by a car! I often have to come to a near complete stop as a car approaches me head-on on a street too narrow for us to pass at more than one mile/hr. Sometimes one of us even has to back up to unsnarl, but the other driver doesn't realize that until a few feet in front of me. I usually do the waiting, of course, because I do look more than a few feet ahead, but that doesn't mean someone won't go around me, just to make a snarl. I believe this is Malaysian culture (Malays, Chinese, and Indians, inclusive) at least for the driving. Last night we sat and watched as cars tried to cut in line from both sides at a toll booth on a freeway! In addition, the judicial and police systems around here are slow and inefficient to the max., so even traffic accidents go unreported. People would rather settle among themselves, even with complete strangers, than get involved in the time and paper work a police report involves. Cars are expensive, but insurance is cheap, in spite of Malaysia having one of the highest accident (& mortality) rates in the world. Even if I succeed in getting the high profit carotene business started, I will be more proud of driving here... IF I can manage to leave without an accident. Dave says there is no question of whether we will have an accident, only how bad. The University Business Centre has many of the usual academic problems, but exaggerated. All the administrative posts are filled by academics, and they all have full teaching loads. Since the financial crisis student loads have been doubling and tripling and then doubling again. Nik, who is the director, teaches 3 classes. One of them has 400 students, and not enough chairs. He said "but the labs are smaller, they have only 100". Can you imagine teaching a lab of 100 students? An American here tells me her department has some classes of 700 and even 1200. Of course, no rooms were built with that in mind. Nik says there are only 3 "full" professors on the whole campus. Apparently this is in line with a British academic model. They are much less likely to give promotions here than in the US. Promotions are given for research; working at UBC counts for nothing, so nobody wants to do it. Nik said he asked the Vice Chancellor (equivalent to our President) to let him off when his appointment was up, but he got renewed anyway. Lucky for me. He said "You can't say no". So how come all the other people that don't want to work here don't have appointments anyway? (I haven't gotten up my nerve to ask that yet). Saying "no" is considered impolite and even disloyal. About as close as they come is a sentence that starts "because...", but doesn't actually say the no, or even explain why. Finding out the real reason something can't be done, or why they don't want to, may take weeks of trying different things, but on campus, at least, enough people have gone to school in the states or UK that I have a few people who will give me the straight dope. My books say we foreigners must pay very close attention to know when yes means "Yes, I understand, but I don't agree" or "Yes, but I won't do it". However, I don't think even the locals always know when "yes" means "no". The Vice Chancellor gives many jobs to someone, and they won't say "I can't" or "I won't", they just don't do it. The result is that the Business Centre often has someone appointed to a job for 2 years, who then doesn't do anything, and then gets replaced at the end of the term. I have heard some people make offhand comments about the current political difficulties, including wishing for one or another extreme action against the installed leader. They sometimes say they wish they were in America, noting its occasional removal of a leader by violence there, but they acknowledge it won't happen here. Some of you have sent questions, the answers to which might be of general interest so: I'm looking at my tourist book. The highest rain months for KL seem to be April, October and November, w/about 250mm (about 10 inches) rain. May and December come close behind. They say we don't really get a monsoon; the East coast does (Nov - Feb). For the NE monsoon, the peninsula protects KL, and for the NW monsoon Sumatra protects us from the full brunt. Never mind total rain though, the book says KL once got over 2 inches of rain in 15 minutes! The local pronunciation of KL is a very fast 'Kuala' followed by 'LOOMpur'. As a general rule words are accented on the next to last syllable, which takes some getting used to. Towns near us are BANG-i, Sri KemBANGan, and KAjang. The hardest thing for us is not aspirating the vowels, though. The g in Bangi is pronounced like the g in Kajang. Try it. One of the administrators I deal with occasionally is named Bakiyah - but it is pronounced Ba'ya, with the ' standing for a glottal stop. It makes Bahasa very difficult for us to understand, when the vowels are frequently "swallowed". Indonesians speak the same language, but they DO aspirate the vowels, so it doesn't sound "boingie" like Malay and [[Ed Note: The text dropped off here. It looks like Jackie word processor messed up. /d]] -------------------- Jackie Snell June 1998 - March 1999: jaq@admin.upm.edu.my University Business Centre O: +60(3)948-5649 4th Floor Admin. Bldg. F: +60(3)943-2513 Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor H: +60(3)945-7239 Malaysia Dave's hand-phone: +60(19)329-9445 after April 1, 1999: snell_j@cob.sjsu.edu Marketing Dept., San Jose State University +1 408 924 3484 One Washington Square fax: +1 408 924 3445 San Jose, CA 95192-0069 USA www.cob.sjsu.edu/facstaff/snell_j =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Dave Crocker Tel: +1(408)246 8253 675 Spruce Drive Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA Brandenburg Consulting Tel: +60(19)3299 445 Post Office Box 296, U.P.M. Fax: +1(408)246 8253 Serdang, Selangor 43400 MALAYSIA