On Wednesday I read that a Chinese H1N1 patient had died while in hospital in Hangzhou. However, the strange thing was that her fever had already been gone for 7 days, so it was not very likely that H1N1 had killed her. At first I still suspected that doctors were just trying to hide the fact that H1N1 had now also been fatal for someone in China (she would have been the first Chinese swine fever casualty), but then I read that the female patient died while in the toilet, which made it even more unlikely that swine fever was the reason for her death.

Her relatives also suspected something else had gone wrong and a violent mob of 50 people attacked the hospital, throwing rocks at windows and ambulances . The crowd was right that something was fishy about her death, because today the hospital admitted that they were at fault: the 34-year old woman had been electrocuted while taking a shower! So you survive H1N1 only to be killed before being released by faulty electrical wiring… One more reason to avoid Chinese public hospitals as much as possible (just like public fountains).

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolmel/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Every year all Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games employees get a free health check. One part of that is an eye test, which is performed in our company. Because we had some visitors from Spil Games in Holland, they also could do the eye check (both passed, but one unintentionally tried to cheat because he was wearing contacts – which the doctors found out about right away of course :-).

Interesting is that when I left Daimler in 2002 I needed to wear glasses while driving or while watching a movie. Nowadays I don’t need my glasses anymore, and today’s eye test confirmed that my eyes only have a slight deviation from optimal. Kind of strange isn’t it? Could it be because my computer screen at Daimler was not good enough and that when I stopped working and went back to university my eyes recovered? I cannot explain it, but maybe one of my readers can?

Spil Games Asia has a job opening for a new manager of our game development studio in Shanghai. If you’re interested in this position, here is the job description:

SHANGHAI GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO MANAGER

Tasks and Responsibilities:

For our Game Development Studio in Shanghai we are looking for a Manager. As the Game Development Studio Manager, you will be responsible for defining, developing, and launching new games (Flash and Shockwave) on our casual gaming portals. You will make sure that our games are accessible and fun, and therefore successful with our target groups (primarily women over 20 playing sometimes with their children under 8, “tweens” aged 8-15, and young girls aged 5-12). You will report functionally to the Game Development Director in The Netherlands but you will also be part of the Management Team of Spil Games Asia. Other tasks and responsibilities will include:

* Leading the programmers, artists and game designers of the Shanghai game studio (50 people)
* Managing and expanding our network of external game developers and studios in China
* Working closely with our game studios in The Netherlands and Germany
* Translating game concepts into successful games
* Optimizing game production by setting goals and guidelines and managing work flow based on high level business targets
* Coming up with original and attractive game content for our various portals
* Working with different departments, such as IT, Marketing, and Portal Management, to fine-tune strategy
* Controlling and analyzing the performance of produced games
* Drafting planning and progress reports and maintaining and managing the department budget

Your profile:

* A relevant Bachelor’s or Master’s degree
* Minimum 5 years management experience in a gaming environment
* Experience in leading large teams
* Strong interpersonal skills, a good communicator
* Good decision-making capabilities
* Intercultural competence, especially within both the Chinese and Western culture
* A proven track record in the casual online gaming market, especially in flash games
* Extensive knowledge of game development, design, user experience, art, and technology
* Experience with Flash and Shockwave 3D
* Familiarity with the target groups and how to meet their needs
* Able to guide complex projects in a dynamic work environment
* Flexible, goal-oriented, and familiar with stakeholder management
* Has an innovative, creative, and problem-solving mentality
* Solid oral and written communication skills in English and preferably Chinese. Non-Chinese speakers will be considered, but candidates with good Chinese (Mandarin) skills will have our strong preference

SPIL GAMES offers:

* A good salary
* An ambitious and fast-growing company
* A fun and dynamic work environment

Job interviews can take place in either Shanghai or Hilversum (The Netherlands).

For More Information:

Esther de Kruijff, HR Manager
Phone: +31 35 646 63 07

or

Peter Hofstede, Game Development Director
Phone: +31 35 646 63 00
peter.hofstede@spilgames.com

On Saturday I wrote about the apartment building that collapsed (or better: fell over) in Shanghai. Over the past days more details about what may have caused this have become available. As many people suggested substandard construction materials may have been a reason, but that was not the only cause. Initial investigations point at the fact that the developer was excavating an area for a garage under the building (Did they forget to build one? It does not seem logical to first build an apartment building and then build a garage below it). They made a big pile of the earth next to a flood wall of the river, causing the flood wall to collapse the day before the building went down. This combination may have been fatal for the building. The official probe will still take some time to finish.

In the mean time the developer is filling up the garage again (shouldn’t they wait until the investigation into what went wrong is finished?) and inspectors are monitoring the other buildings in the compound every 30 minutes. The people living there moved in again after the government told them it was safe to do so. To tell you the truth, if I would be living there I would not dare to go back. The buildings all look the same, so I assume the same building materials were used. Can you really prevent another collapse by checking a building every 30 minutes?

People who bought apartments in the collapsed building are now asking for refunds of their investment, but the question is whether the developer has enough money to reimburse them (in total the community had 629 apartments, of which 489 had been sold so far). The developer’s bank account was “under control”, the district government said, and they also had put 9 people from the developer “under control”. To make matters worse for the developer, an investigation showed that the company was able to buy the land for less than a third of the price of what other developers had paid for similar parcels of land. I assume the government employee responsible for this transaction won’t be sleeping so well these days.

This morning I saw some tweets about an apartment building in Shanghai that had collapsed, but only tonight I saw some pictures of what had happened. The building on Lianhua Road, just a few kilometers south of where I live (I go bike riding there sometimes), apparently just fell over!

It makes you wonder how safe other buildings in Shanghai are. Luckily there was only one casualty because the building was still under construction. If I would have bought an apartment in one of the other buildings I would seriously reconsider whether to move in or not!

Source: Daqi via ESNW

On August 31 I will give the keynote speech during the Opening of the Academic Year at Maastricht University, the university where I received my masters degree in Business Economics. I am very honored that I was asked by the board of the university to give this speech. I still remember that when I first became a student in 1991 the Dutch prime minister Mr. Ruud Lubbers opened the Academic Year, and at that time I would have never imagined that I would ever get this honor. The theme of the day will be “Innovation and Leadership”, so I plan to give a talk related to this.

In the morning there will be a symposium where I will discuss a management idea and students can challenge me about that (see the flyer above that was distributed among students). The winners will get nice prizes. If you’re in Maastricht on August 31 I look forward to seeing you there, and if you are a student in Maastricht: feel free to challenge me!

A couple of weeks ago I was quite frustrated when an online booking for a KLM flight turned out to be impossible to do from China. While doing the booking I tweeted about it and I later also wrote a blog post about the experience. It happened several times before that my blog was quoted in newspaper articles (sometimes even completely wrong, like in March this year), but now it also happened to a tweet, or actually a string of several tweets, that I wrote.

The tweets were picked up by a Dutch journalist, who did some research and today wrote among others about my experience and about the reaction of the KLM, in Dutch newspaper Het Parool. Part of the article in a rough English translation, with below it part of the original Dutch text:

“After Marc van der Chijs, who works for Dutch game company Spil Games in China, earlier this month twittered about his frustrations about a difficult booking with airline KLM, something remarkable happened. The KLM started following Van der Chijs’ twitter account.

Even more remarkable was that Van der Chijs on his next KLM flight suddenly received an upgrade from economy to business class. “Coincidence?”, the then twittered, “problably not.” In the meantime he has been invited for a discussion about the problem with a KLM manager.

Next to Van der Chijs, de KLM also follows 2300 other Twitterers in the world. According to a spokesperson of the company that happens ‘on a project basis’. “We monitor Twitter and try to react whenever possible. But there is no policy for it.”

The company does not seem to know what it wants to do yet. One hour after our question the KLM adds the words ‘unofficial’ and ‘fan’ to the KLM-profile ‘Royal Dutch Airlines’.

(…) Despite the fact that many companies try to use Twitter commercially, it is still mainly a media to share personal experiences. Marc van der Chijs, who managed to get KLM on its knees, twittered around the same time a lot about the delivery of his second child.”

Original Dutch text:
“Nadat Marc van der Chijs, die voor het Nederlandse gamebedrijf Spil Games in China zit, eerder deze maand zijn frustratie over een helse boeking bij luchtvaartmaatschappij KLM van zich af twitterde, gebeurde er iets opmerkelijks. De KLM begon Van der Chijs’ twitteraccount te volgen.

Opmerkelijker nog was dat Van der Chijs plotseling op de eerstvolgende KLM-vlucht ongevraagd bleek omgeboekt van economy naar businessclass. ”Toeval? twitterde hij vervolgens, ”waarschijnlijk niet.” Hij is inmiddels uitgenodigd voor een gesprek met een KLM-vertegenwoordiger.

Naast van der Chijs volgt de KLM nog ruim 2300 andere Twitteraars in de wereld. Dat gebeurt volgens een woordvoerder van de maatschappij ‘op projectbasis’. ”We monitoren Twitter en proberen waar mogelijk te reageren. Maar er is momenteel geen beleid.”

De maatschappij lijkt er ook nog niet uit. Een uur na onze vraag wordt aan het KLM-twitterprofiel ‘Royal Dutch Airlines’ in hoofdletters de woorden ‘unofficial’ en ‘fan’ toegevoegd.

(…) Ondanks alle commerciële pogingen, blijft Twitter vooralsnog een uitvalsbasis voor persoonlijke belevenissen. Marc van der Chijs, die de KLM op de knieën kreeg, twitterde er rond dezelfde tijd vrolijk op los over de aanloop naar de bevalling van zijn tweede kind.”

By the way, while posting the picture on top of this blog post I suddenly notice a KLM Google Ad next to it. Irony!

Right after Elaine was born Scott was not too happy with her: she took all his mother’s attention and of course he was a bit jealous of her. But after three weeks he changed and suddenly started to play the role of big brother. It is so cute to see the two of them spending time together. Scott loves to hold her and wants to kiss her all the time. We’re very happy with our two kids, and we look forward to seeing them both grow up together.