福喜为何会在中国出事

    福喜对丑闻毫无头绪，因为这家私有公司给了经理人很大自主权。有时候这种做法很管用，比如在华尔街，投资公司允许个人独立决定股票投资，无需集体决策。但在福喜这样的大规模食品加工业务中，全球标准需要每个人严格遵守，并确保落实。

    私有企业福喜的这种权力分散型业务模式给中国经理人留出了自行决策的空间。这一策略曾帮助福喜于上世纪90年代初在中国实现了快速扩张。但如今看来，显然其中是有问题的。福喜没有进行足够的检查，无法确保公司伊利诺伊州总部制定的标准得以贯彻，也没有对距其6600英里之遥的中国工厂进行监控。

    语言障碍也成为一个问题：中国经理人用中文起草文件，不作翻译，因此，只会英文的员工往往不了解相关的具体经营情况或数据。

    被派驻至中国的福喜危机管理团队所做的事情相当简单。那就是，确保每家工厂都遵循全球标准，同时用中文和英文起草文件。他们在工厂增架了摄像头，并投入160万美元开展食品安全研讨会。“过去这是一家创业型公司，在某种程度上可以按自己的规定办事，”福喜的一位员工表示，“如今，有人进来说，‘我们现在要这么做。’”

    这种标准流程是麦当劳最大肉类供应商在任何地方都应遵循的。但福喜过去显然没有做到。

    上周福喜发表声明，证实有6位员工在上海被批捕，并承认过失。该公司表示：“福喜集团将继续全力配合政府有关部门的工作，同时支持政府一贯执行相关食品质量安全法律。”

    早些时候，82岁的福喜集团所有人、肉类食品行业大佬谢尔顿•拉文表示：“如此可怕的错误竟然发生在了我拥有的公司，令我震惊无比。”

    尚不清楚这对福喜自身产生了多大的伤害。麦当劳的一位发言人上周告诉《华尔街日报》（The Wall Street Journal），该公司不排除引进其他长期供应商取代福喜的可能性。如果麦当劳割断双方的联系，这将是历史性的，因为从1955年麦当劳在伊利诺伊州德斯普兰斯开设首家麦当劳餐厅起，福喜就一直在为其供应牛肉饼。

    我遇到的这两位福喜员工都为麦当劳在危机中一直与他们共进退感到自豪。而肯德基没有这么做。“给我们第二次机会，”其中一位说，“我们应该得到第二次机会。”

    或许吧。汉堡吃不死人，过期的冻肉实际上更多是食品质量问题，而不是食品安全问题。但如果对于自己中国业务的情况毫不了解，那就不配有多次机会了。

    麦当劳主要供应商福喜暴露出来的管理问题，对其他在华经商的外资企业是个有益的警示。（财富中文网）

    OSI was clueless because the private company gave managers a lot of autonomy. Sometimes that works, like on Wall Street, where investment companies allow individuals to independently wager on stocks to avoid groupthink. But in Big Food Processing, OSI’s business, global standards need to be exactly followed by everyone—and verified.

    The private OSI’s decentralized business model allowed Chinese managers leeway to make their own decisions. The strategy that helped OSI expand quickly in China since the early 1990s. But it’s now clear there were problems. OSI didn’t audit enough to ensure Chinese plants followed standards coming from OSI’s Illinois headquarters and didn’t monitor its plants located 6,600 miles from headquarters in Aurora, Illinois.

    Even the language barrier was an issue: Chinese managers wrote documents in Chinese and didn’t translate them, so English-speaking employees often couldn’t understand operations or data.

    The OSI crisis teams flooding into China are engaged in pretty simple stuff. Namely, ensuring every plant is following global standards, and writing documents in both English and Chinese. They’re adding cameras in plants and spending $1.6 million on food safety seminars. “Before, it was an entrepreneurial company and you could sort of follow your own rules,” said one OSI employee. “Now, people are coming in and saying, `This is how we’re doing it now.’”

    It’s the type of standard procedural stuff that you expected McDonald’s largest protein supplier to follow everywhere. But it didn’t.

    OSI’s press statement last week, confirming the arrests of six employees in Shanghai, expressed some culpability. “OSI Group will continue to cooperate fully and in good faith with the authorities,” the company said. “We support the government’s consistent application of the country’s food quality and safety laws.”

    Earlier, OSI’s owner Sheldon Lavin, an 82-year with a place in the Meat Industry Hall of Fame said, “It was terribly wrong, and I am appalled that it ever happened in the company that I own.”

    It’s not yet clear how badly OSI hurt itself. A McDonald’s spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal last week the company couldn’t rule out the possibility of replacing OSI as a supplier over the long term. If McDonald’s cuts ties, it would be historic: OSI supplied beef patties to the first ever McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois back in 1955.

    The two employees from OSI I met with were proud that McDonald’s had stuck with them through the crisis. KFC had not. “Give us a second chance,” one said. “We deserve a second chance.”

    They might. No one died eating a Quarter Pounder, and expired frozen meat is really a food quality issue more than a food safety problem. But when you don’t have a clue what’s really happening at your Chinese business, you don’t deserve many chances.

    The problems at OSI, a key supplier to McDonald's, are a salutary lesson to companies doing business in China on the need for proper supervision.