香港商史密斯遠東股份有限公司台灣分公司

Close to the downtown area

There don't seem to be many people in the office. The boss is from Hong Kong, and the main employees seem to be doing telemarketing.

They are constantly hiring (high turnover rate?).....

- Good office location, integrated with an MRT station and convenient for commuting; high floor, great view, with an unobstructed view of Taipei 101

- Overtime is generally not necessary, mainly requiring coordination with customers’ working hours

- The base salary is fair, and compared with peers, the commission percentage after closing a deal is also quite good

- Poor management, limited room for business development:

1. Rather than calling it a multinational American company, it would be more accurate to say that it is headquartered in the United States and has more than a dozen offices around the world that each operate independently. Because it is a family business, compared with typical American companies that place greater emphasis on systems and policies from HQ top to bottom, management here places greater emphasis on trust. Therefore, the Presidents and VPs in Asia are basically people who have been with Smith for around 20 years. Of course, some of them really are management professionals. But in Taipei, for example, the organization is under the Korea VP. The Korean VP is a senior employee and a high-performing salesperson who likes to maintain control. They assigned a junior sales employee to Taiwan and selected another equally junior salesperson in Taiwan, putting the two in charge of Taiwan together under the title of trading manager. Naturally, neither has any actual management authority; their role is simply to help the Korean VP monitor office colleagues and collect information. Taiwan’s leaders have little experience, and their business and general handling abilities are below average—let alone their interpersonal skills. But they really are good employees from the VP’s perspective: they follow orders without question. The kind of manager you imagine would secure business opportunities for subordinates and push things internally simply does not exist here. They only keep pushing you to provide information to satisfy the Korean VP.

2. Compared with other parts of Asia, the Taiwan office is relatively new. You may think that all Taiwanese customers can be developed here, but in reality, Taiwan’s “Big Five” electronics companies and major networking manufacturers have long been controlled by the offices in Korea, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Colleagues in the Taiwan office can only develop small and medium-sized enterprise customers, so the opportunities have already been restricted. In addition, if a Taiwan salesperson finds a promising SME customer to develop, the Korean VP will come and take the customer if they find out before the account is closed. In other words, besides having to guard against salespeople from other offices taking your customers, you should be even more concerned that your boss above you will take them.

If you have already reached retirement age, have some connections with major Taiwanese customers, and have negotiated a fairly good base salary, you can stay out of these internal disputes, and there is still money to be made here. But if you are a young person who still wants to build your capabilities and has ideals and ambitions, even if you negotiate a good base salary, I suggest you look around more and think carefully. There is no business or management Role Model here in Taiwan, and you have no one to emulate who can lead you to improve. After three to five years, you may find that you have improved very little—or perhaps have simply become greedier and even less capable of handling people and situations.