Succeeding at Business in Southeast Asia

CHAPTER 12Utilizing Resources: Where to Find the Information and Connections You’ll Need

If you look within your own organization, you might find a strong finance team or a strong operations team. When you’re looking to grow, you wouldn’t turn your back on those strong teams within your own organization, so why would you turn your back on strong resources outside of your organization?

I don’t mean your financial resources when I talk about utilizing your resources, although these are very important. What I’m talking about here is knowing what resources are available to you for your own growth. For example, have you reached out to your city, state, and federal government offices? Have you reached out to the foreign government offices in the region or country? To an America, this may seem like a strange approach, but if you were Asian, your government would be your first call. In this chapter, I’ll be discussing a number of different resources available to you, what they can offer, when you should reach out to them, and how best to utilize their information and resources.

In the United States, we often think back to the story of someone making it on their own, putting the world on their shoulders, and carrying it forward. These are great stories, but they’re just that; they’re stories. More often than not, the story of someone doing this omits all the people that helped the person along the way. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook on his own; Bill Gates didn’t create all of ...