Three years into the pandemic, Choson Exchange thrives with online programmes in North Korea
Last year, after a series of workshops on Special Economic Zone development, we realized that it might be more effective to pilot an extended consultation with one promising SEZ. After some exploration, we picked Unjong Park because of availability of infrastructure, stable management, and a commitment to innovation. Also, a commitment to only being 30 minutes drive from Pyongyang - it sits on the border of the capital and Pyongsong city.
Last week, Institutional Investor magazine published an interview with Geoffrey, with the least click-baity headline ever: Geoffrey See is Training North Koreans to Become Entrepreneurs. It is a thoughtful piece that begins by asking questions like "How do you explain concepts like transparency and corporate governance to the citizens of a famously secretive state?", then allows Geoffrey ample space to explain how we at CE think about some of these issues.
We've been busy packing in workshops since the end of the Ebola policy, running our Women in Business and Tech Entrepreneurship programs, as well as our Provincial Development Program. This has delayed publication of our annual report for 2014 slightly, but it is now available for your enjoyment here.
We're always pleased to find the availability and selection of our favorite beverages - coffee and beer - increasing in the DPRK. Sorry, did I say "always"? Because this new offering from the Rajin Beverage Company, "Triangle Beer" tasted like peanut shells and gasoline. It was probably the worst commercially produced bottle of beer I've ever had.
Here is one place to visit and three to skip next time you're in Yanji. Yanji, most travelers' gateway to Rason, in North Korea's far Northeast, is strange city. What other fourth tier Chinese city of less than 1 million people (equivalent to a 'city' of 50,000, if scaled to US relative importance) has its own international airport, world-class coffeeshops and at least 3 craft beer bars? Answer: none, probably.
Want to see the North Korean pavilion at the World Expo, but don’t want to make the trip to Milan? Here’s Choson Exchange’s review for you. North Korea’s flag flies prominently in the heart of Milan on a street paraded with the flags of participating countries. Depending on your point of view, its either the first flag on the street, or the very last.
The Wonsan Investment Seminar has gone ahead after a bit of springtime dithering. There were rumors of this last fall, then ebola "struck" and this compressed planning. In late March, the Wonsan folks couldn't even offer firm dates for a seminar "sometime near the end of May".
This left us to wonder (aloud): "Who would be able to attend an event that requires travel to North Korea with such short notice?"
The answer, it seems, is about 150 people.
About 150 people attending the Wosan Investment Seminar 2015년 원산-투자설명회 #DPRK #PaektuCulturalExchange #InvestDPRK pic.twitter.com/Jedkd8SiQH
— Michael (@mpspavor) May 25, 2015Micheal Spavor, a consultant who recently founded Paekdu Cultural Exchange, is on the trip and seems to be having a good time. Check out his twitter feed for the odd update.
We wanted to go and see how Wonsan's plans are shaping up, but everyone on the CE team already had travel commitments for end of May. It was somewhat reminiscent of the Rason Trade fair in 2013, to which we were invited with three weeks to spare.
One of the things that will have to change - people need more heads up for travel time.
That said, one of the takeaways we try to get our North Korean audiences to, um...take away is just how fast the business world moves these days - the expectation is that texts, emails, phone calls will all get near instant responses in today's wired world. (We're still saying 'wired', right?)
And now we're complaining that they're not going slow enough for us to plan. Oh well.
Partnerships
OK, so I'm a man starting this post by quoting a man who is referencing the ideas of another man. I recognize that this may be a bad start, but frankly, on a recent Women in Business (WIB) program we ran in Pyongyang, I experienced perhaps the greatest solidarity we've seen between the foreign workshop leaders we brought in and the Korean participants.
Workshop leaders covered some specific aspects of expanding one's business through product design and customer relations before moving onto the less concrete, but crucially important, issues of business networking and mentoring. The latter in particular addressed the disadvantages faced by women everywhere and is really the reason for the WIB program.
Many of the volunteers we take stay connected to North Korea issues, either through us or in other ways. Most people leave feeling they learned far more than they imparted and that the country is more interesting, inspiring and complex than they had imagined. Most agree that supporting entrepreneurs leads to positive outcomes.
Visual Networking Exercise
This particular workshop was something a bit more than that, however. My British upbringing has given me a low degree of credulity towards expressions of sincerity, but for me, slightly on the outside of events in this workshop, it was inspiring to see a kinship and affinity between the Koreans and non-Koreans that I don't think I'd observed before.
There was a broad solidarity around the idea that gender discrimination in professional spheres is not only bad for individuals but also bad for organisations and societies. (I think the small percentage of men in the audience and volunteer team would support that statement, too.)
But perhaps more than that there was a uniquely engaging set of personalities on both sides. Korean students - famously shy - were extremely proactive in getting conversations started with workshop leaders. They responded to interactive elements in the program with alacrity. Our volunteers were also a remarkable mix of people - intellectual, outgoing, approachable, playful and knowledgeable. The combination of characters created an ease of connection that allowed for a deeper understanding of not only content but of each other. There was, in the most positive way, more laughter during this workshop than in any other.
At one point during a networking exercise that tasked people with building teams that incorporated various skillsets, one participant happened on the idea that the foreigners needed to be snagged - after all, they had international contacts and spoke good English. This led to a scramble to steal foreigners from one team to another. At another point, a spirited debate about planning for business expansion inspired laughs (but then some awkwardness, to be frank) as neither debater was prepared to concede her point.
I should note that I'm extremely sensitive to the potential issues with running and assessing our WIB program. The Choson Exchange full-time staff who designed and run our Women in Business program are male. We're not chest-beating masculine archetypes (apologies to my colleagues if they saw themselves thus), but we are men nonetheless. I justify it by saying it's important and no one else is doing it in the DPRK. Hopefully we accept enough input from our volunteers that we stay honest.
I'm also sensitive to the fact that we are all privileged people - professional, white-collar types - making connections with other lucky, educated people. This is true and not unproblematic, but these are nonetheless connections that need to made.
On May 24th, many male journalists will write about women crossing the the DMZ and will struggle to describe it fairly, without gender creating biases. Regardless of how that turns out - and there are many ways it could be done badly - I hope that some degree of solidarity will be found.
After all, the more of it there is, across national, cultural, ethnic, class and even gender lines, the better.
In mid-April, we quite figuratively destroyed two records during our tech entrepreneurship workshop.
The first was our attendance record for a single workshop, set at 87 last summer. For this workshop we had 103 participants. This speaks to branding: the DPRK has a bit of a tech fetish, longstanding, and a more recently pronounced interest in commerce and management. This has made it easier to reach bigger audiences
Keeping them happy is another thing, but its safe to say that with at least one person, we nailed it: the second record we figuratively obliterated was for highest individual score on our feedback form, from some anonymous student:
Note that this person took the time to increase the scale to 13, before thinking "hold on, I don't need this to go to their heads - I'll give them a 12". I guess he or she didn't think that the incredible concepts he learned were so applicable, giving a measly 8 for the next question, but that's OK.
Topics included lean start-up methods, product management and development strategies for small companies. We may have raised expectations for quality on this trip, but ours have also been raised: I suspect that from now on, whenever we review feedback, we'll feel a tinge of disappointment if we don't have any 12 out of 10s.
This restaurant in Pyongyang is innovating - they get the waitresses and cooks to sing in the evening!
Last month, two weeks after the Ebola quarantine measures were lifted in North Korea, we entered Pyongyang to run a workshop on ‘partnering with foreign businesspeople.’ Participants were particularly appreciative of one particular talk – a professor who spoke about Singapore’s efforts to attract foreign investment.
The professor ended his talk with the story of “the Lion and the Gazelle”, apparently a favorite story of Singapore’s bureaucrats. This is how it goes (paraphrased):
In the morning, the gazelle wakes up thinking “if I run too slowly, I will be devoured by the lion.” The same morning, the lion wakes up thinking “if I run too slowly, I will not catch the gazelle and will starve to death.”
The moral of the story? Investment attraction is a competition, and every country needs to be continually improving its business environment to attract investors. We hope that the message gets through to the businesspeople, academics and policymakers in attendance, that there is A LOT more North Korea can do to make the country minimally hospitable to foreign businesspeople.