[HBRC Interview] Haiquan Hu: How Entertainment Celebrities Do Business

Jun 25-2014   

This article is a special interview with Haiquan Hu by “Harvard Business Review (Chinese Version, abbreviated as HBRC)”

Background of Haiquan Hu：Haiquan Hu is a current student of EMBA of National School of Development at Peking University and a famous singer.

[Opinion] Corporate management requires managers to remain rational in the strategic development of many aspects including finance and human resource. Therefore, I rarely devote excessive amount of energy into any particular task. I play a flexible role in my team. Sometimes, I am a spectator; sometimes, I become a liaison. My job is to look at the big picture and look for patterns instead of focusing on the details.

Haiquan Hu is a member of YuQuan, a popular singers’ group in China. Since its debut, YuQuan has enjoyed 15 years of success. Haiquan Hu is not only a singer, but also a poet, owner of a creativity company, and investor. His aim is to push for development of Chinese cultural and creative industry. Haiquan Hu admires realistic idealist and admits that he looks only at creative results instead of progress report.

HBRC: You are already a successful artist in the eyes of the public. What is the reason for you to publish poems and proses?

Haiquan Hu: Becoming a poet was my hobby and dream during childhood. As I grew up, the dream faded away, and I forgot about all the poems and proses that I wrote when I was a child. There are many ways for people to communicate. Books and conversations are the same with songs because they all express ideas and facilitate communication.

HBRC: What is the difference of your emotional states when writing a song and writing a piece of literature?

Haiquan Hu: When I write songs, I do it as a professional. However, when I write poems, I can express myself more freely. I have always been composing and writing lyrics as a professional artist. It is my aim to seek innovation in music. When I write a song, I often think about the ways to gain empathy from listeners and to deliver message within the song. Later on in every production, I become very careful about the lyrics. I think of my works as my responsibility. Undeniably, this kind of professionalism will inevitably limit my imagination to some extent. However, writing a piece of literature is different to me. I am not bound by any professionalism or external demand. Therefore, I can achieve freedom in writing and seek for the true self.

HBRC: From a self-centered composer to a corporate manager, what kind of transition did you go through?

Haiquan Hu: Entertainment celebrities face a lot of pressure and challenges when working in business management. There are only a few successful cases. I think the difficulty is caused by difference in thinking pattern. People are sentimental, and artists are even more so because art cannot impress its audience with logic.

I think of myself as a person who is not very rational. However, corporate management requires managers to remain rational when making decisions in areas such as finance and human resource. Therefore, I rarely devote excessive amount of energy into any particular task. I play a flexible role in my team. Sometimes, I am a spectator; sometimes, I become a liaison. My job is to look at the big picture and look for patterns instead of focusing on the details.

HBRC: You became an investor about four to five years ago. Did this transition pose challenges to your skill of thinking rationally?

Haiquan Hu: Some people call investors “vultures” because they seek nothing but profit. In fact, there are different type of investors. As a new business angel, my role is not simply to go after profit.

I look at two things when making an investment decision: whether the founder is a realistic idealist, and whether I have faith in the future of his business or industry. I have my own approaches of making decisions. For example, I am keen to the emotion hidden behind words. Therefore, I pay a lot of attention to the diction of business plans of my target companies. Based on the wording in those reports, I can figure out whether the manager is an idealist or vulture.

HBRC: Do you have any plan for your career development?

Haiquan Hu: The series of transitions in my career is the result of a natural development. I did not have a particularly sudden turning point in my life. My first transition took place about a decade ago. The second transition took place around four to five years ago. I am fortunate to have a goal that I can pursue persistently – a cultural propagandist. Many factors of business are driven by cultural strength. During the past several decades, creativity was not taken seriously in China. I have often looked for innovation from culture, and I believe that I should take on more responsibility and enrich myself. This sometimes requires more resources and capital. It was my intention to quickly turn this idea into reality when I first started my creativity company.

HBRC: How do you trigger creativity to form cultural strength?

Haiquan Hu: The answer is simple in some aspects but not so in the others. It is simple because if you find the right person and give him room for freedom, he will grow on his own. This is similar to the lesson that I learned from composing in different emotional settings – creativity and imagination grows from freedom.

However, these two steps are not easy to accomplish. Firstly, you need to know the other person very well. I often talk to business founders repeatedly. Using scenario planning, I often have them to imagine challenges in difficult situations and look for potential problems. This practice requires lots of communication and cooperation. Secondly, in order to create a room for freedom, I must stay outside the teams while guiding them to the right direction. It is important for a group of people to sense an atmosphere at a specific time.

My cultural creativity company hires the right people who are willing to try and do the things that they want to do the most. I am very interested in employees who were born in the 1990s. I hope that my team will remain interested to the things that they have never done before.

HBRC: How do you build an atmosphere with freedom and energy?

I founded the company using a flat structure. I always look at result of innovation instead of reading progress report. Result-oriented approach brings pressure to employees. However, this pressure is benign – it awakes the people who come here without careful consideration and lets them know about the time to leave.

HBRC: Entertainment celebrities have natural influence. However, as a corporate founder and investor, how do you transform your communication approach?

Haiquan Hu: being an investor as well as a celebrity helps to increase the popularity and credibility of a company. However, the ambiguous identity becomes a drawback. Sometimes, it is difficult for my corporate team to fully trust me. People from other industries tend to either overestimate or underestimate celebrity entertainers. I often have to work hard to give them the right ideas. Nevertheless, I never purposely modified the way I communicate with others. I impress others with my true self in my own company and the companies that I invested in.

 

HBRC: Professor Drucker said that “Management is an empirical art.” Do you think management is more about practicality or artistic value?

Haiquan Hu: I believe that management is a science. However, I also believe that Western experience cannot remain fully applicable in China. One of the major reasons for Western lessons to fail in China is the cultural difference. Culture is tied to the ground. The traditional philosophy of emphasizing on the rule of man instead of the rule of contract will inevitably face serious challenges as development reaches certain level. One of the reasons for me to go to EMBA at Peking University (EMBA of National School of Development at Peking University) is that I want to carefully and systematically study management. Schematic thinking is a hobby; romance is an emotional state. I hope that I can become a relatively rational, domestic, cultural propagandist who accepts the Western management system. It is my goal to seek for empathy and magnify it in the complicated cultural strength.

This article is from official WeChat Posts of“Harvard Business Review”