BOOK REVIEW: Chicken Lips, Wheeler Dealer, and the Beady-Eyed MBA: An Entrepreneur's Wild Adventures On The New Silk Roadby Frank Farwell, John Wiley and Sons
IT MIGHT sound like a hippie manual or a guide for children who want to go into business, but Chicken Lips, Wheeler-Dealer, and the Beady-Eyed MBAis a classic how-to entrepreneur manual, a funny, honest and insightful guide to running a business.
Frank Farwell worked as a hungry young journalist before signing up to do his MBA, then setting up a business selling garments by mail and telephone order using catalogues and advertisements in the New Yorkermagazine.
Farwell scaled great heights with WinterSilks before selling it for a fortune. His journalistic background makes the book a light and clear read, but it is by no means lightweight.
There is a slightly disingenuous “midwestern yokel” tone to the book at times which belies Farwell’s astute and steely approach to doing business.
Many business books suffer from the fact that they are generally dictated by self-important chief executives to brow-beaten journalists before the ghosted material has all the interesting material sucked out by some overweening public relations department – even before the publisher’s mangle comes into play.
"Chicken Lips" has an anarchic and surreal heart. Many of the characters are not named but given stage-names – a duo of contacts in Hong Kong are Tiger Lady and Hammerhead, a debt collector is Leg Breaker, a tricky New York supplier is Old Man Hard-ass, so at times the book feels like the Alice in Wonderlandof the corporate world.
But Farwell's message is deeply serious and "Chicken Lips" was recently nominated for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
This is as much a Madison, Wisconsin, book as it is a China book, but China’s rise forms the backdrop to much of its action, and the success of WinterSilks probably would have come at an even higher cost without China.
It is a worthwhile book for anyone trying to set up a business in these troubled times, and will make Irish businessfolk think about a few things.
When it comes to financing, Farwell argues that you will be able to comfortably service bank debt just as long as you pick a low-tech product and sell direct.
His description of hiring a buxom former Miss Wisconsin to advertise their WinterSilks wares early in their career is hilarious after the way her curves filled out a turtleneck sweater managed to upset many of their customers.
“I had alienated our customers – the very people I was trying to please,” writes Farwell.
“Since my company was tiny, however, the mistakes were also tiny – and survivable. They provided the necessary start-up lessons at a minimal financial cost,” he wrote in a recent commentary about his business.
He believes that the dark days of 1979-1983, which share a lot of characteristics with today’s straitened times, were the best time to strike out on one’s own because if you had no money you were forced into a kind of boot camp that was a big driver of success later on.
This is not a book for anyone looking for insights into Chinese history but it reveals a lot more about how things work in China through his descriptions of doing business there.
In some ways "Chicken Lips" bears similarities to another great book about doing business in China, Tim Clissold's Mr China. Its breathless early chapters, as the opportunities that cheap production in China become apparent, are of a type with so many warning books about China, where everything starts so well until the nefarious ways of local partners lead to everything going wrong.
At one point there is even an overt link to Clissold’s book when he develops chest pains from the stress of running a business. His health suffers throughout, and this aspect is also cautionary.
Notably, early contact in 1981-82 goes through the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, still a prudent route of approach when doing business with China.
“What we did not know was that China at that time was agonisingly slow to deliver and, in some government offices through which our order had to pass, somewhat nonchalant about doing business,” he said.
Hong Kong comes to the rescue again a couple of years later when Farwell runs short on supplies of his silk garments and a local company offers him a conduit into what was then the fledgling manufacturing miracle across the border in Guangdong province.
His descriptions of doing business at that key moment in economic history, which led to the whole world changing, are masterly.
He talks of the ancient Chinese practice of producing silk, and how that translates into selling silk long johns to clients across America, and you share in the way he relishes doing business.
The human elements are well drawn – Farwell’s horror as he fires someone for the first time, and his concession that he made a mistake in firing the employee in question. Frantically sweeping water off the roof after the weight of snow causes a devastating leak in the company headquarters. The grotesque strain caused by late deliveries of sweaters which means they could miss the vital winter season.
Grey Flannel Godzilla, Overfed Cowboy, the Delusional Printer, Smiling Dan . . . all coming soon to an MBA reading list near you.
Clifford Coonan is China Correspondent of The Irish Times. He lives in Beijing.
