Do you think they just do this only for business purposes? How about rent a mourner? Very prevalent. You can be more creative but I will not go there.
Rent a White Guy
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: Rent a White Guy
#52You know, if we would prefer that people not judge presentations/companies/etc. according to the race of the person they see (or anything else in the category of "outward appearances easily faked by bringing someone in"), then this sort of thing is really good. It confounds people who do make judgments based on outward appearances; it fools them out of their money, punishes them for their prejudices and induces them to change.
Re: Rent a White Guy
#53If the tradition is well-known among Chinese, what's the point anyway? (Or is it dirty secret of business people only?)
Re: Rent a White Guy
#54This presents a good opportunity. Why watch movies for the day while getting paid, when you can work on your startup instead?!
Re: Rent a White Guy
#55Good article, but it never addressed the question I had: who is this posturing for?
If this is for people external to the company -- the press, potential customers, or fake-it-till-you-make-it, then that's great. If this is for investors -- people who have put money in the company -- then that would be fraud, at least over here.
One of these can be really cool and show a lot of chutzpah. The other can be a sign that the investment-structuring process has serious flaws.
Kind of a key question.
Re: Rent a White Guy
#56It sounds like they weren't hiring white guys because the Chinese have an 'inferiority complex', but because the Chinese economy is export driven and successful companies sell stuff to Americans and they wanted to imply to potential investors and officials that they were already working on deals with American companies. In short, they were committing fraud, but because their lie involved fictitious American customers…
Wouldn't the investors be able to see through the smoke, though? I mean, if a phony starts getting peppered with technical questions, and he balks, shouldn't that be a giveaway?
It's hard enough to tell the phonies from the real thing, for a domain expert. Investors are usually not experts at their domain, and only have limited time to assert the person.
Re: Rent a White Guy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very often, probably most of the time, said white guy isn't even an ordained minister in any Church. It's not really an issue, though, because doing a "Christian" wedding is more of a fashion statement than a religious one; there are very few practicing Christians among the native Japanese population.
Quite. There's a lucrative industry in Japan of providing gorgeous purpose-built western-style chapels, or rather, their imagined vision of what a wedding chapel should look like. No one is getting scammed because they are only doing it because they want the movie-like glamour of the fashion of a western wedding. This is also a country where many buddhist and shinto temples are for-profit family businesses, so the wh…
So it's basically Japans version of a Vegas wedding?
Re: Rent a White Guy
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either Yeah ok that just plain isn't true. I worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and now at McKinsey and Co in New York as a consultant. While we do have a graphics department that we can call on to help spruce things up, as well as workers in India to…
1 bank out of the 700-odd in London? YMMV, clearly.
Still, his viewpoint is hands-on. What's your story?
Re: Rent a White Guy
#59They have this in America too -- it's called a CEO.
Re: Rent a White Guy
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either Yeah ok that just plain isn't true. I worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and now at McKinsey and Co in New York as a consultant. While we do have a graphics department that we can call on to help spruce things up, as well as workers in India to…
1 bank out of the 700-odd in London? YMMV, clearly.
Given the large number of banks, it's definitely possible that some adopt the "white guy in China" mode of operating. However, having worked in the industry and living on Wall Street, I do have close friends at virtually every bulge bracket bank and management consulting firm, so I can attest that my experience is not unique (at least when it comes to bulge brackets and large boutiques).