Work in Taiwan: My next computer company job and really learning the ropes XI

The following happened at MTI but it could equally go under the marketing in Taiwan topic – or even a separate one, ‘Mickey of the day’ - I have since worked in other Taiwan companies and while the marketing is bad Mickey took it to new heights of stupidity.

Every three or four months Mickey would call an emergency meeting after being roughly appraised by the upper management - Now that we had a qualified engineer in charge of marketing, they couldn’t see why big things weren’t happening.

“Xien zi wo di pressure hao da. (I am under a lot of pressure at the moment.) Hen dwo ren zi ask product marketing xien zai zai zuo she ma?” (Lots of people are asking what product marketing is doing),” said Mickey in the part English/part Chinese style all the guys use in these companies.

“Wo men bu gou professional, bu gou innovative. (We have to be more professional and innovative).”

It was those special two words again that western companies supposedly were and therefore every manager in Taiwan had to pay lip service to - Pity he never gave any concrete example of how. And this missed the point as it didn’t seem to occur to him that nobody in his department was doing product marketing: Mickey was acting as assistant to the vice president spending most of his time abroad talking to clients; Fred, the new guy recruited as a product manager was actually performing the job of account manager; the technology guy spent all his time testing new solutions; Josh was working with sales; and the girl recruited to handle marketing information was doing manuals…oh, and Joe, the guy who didn’t recognize my white skin, he had an unusual job: Mickey found out that Joe could actually do marketing and so his job was to organize all the research he had done in his previous job for an international company and give us daily presentations. Mostly of them totally unrelated to the smartphone market but it didn’t matter to Mickey.

Anyway, then we got to the point of the meeting: we were going to get better by internally reorganizing. “I think one thing Robin Liao did was organize marketing into good divisions, but I think we can do it better,” said Mickey.

Product marketing, corporate marketing and technical marketing. You can get that on the first page of the textbook, I thought.

Mickey continued, “But I think we should now be divided into PIM, MIM and TIM – product information management, marketing information management and technology information management. And I think because Bryant is obviously in TIM and Josh, because you don’t have a technical background are in MIM…Now the people in MIM are going to provide the data to support the people in PIM who will be drawing up specs…”

So I can’t propose a product only fucking write the marketing plan once it has been done…Hold on it doesn’t matter as I don’t think PIM are actually allowed to think of new products either.