Herbert Zhang

张律师欢迎您的访问。

Herbert ZHANG ZhiYong

First of all, welcome! Warm welcome to my website! I am Herbert ZHANG ZhiYong. This website tells you about me, Herbert the person, the lawyer, and the once trainer and HR professional. If you read Chinese, this website also tells you about the Song Dynasty.

Enjoy your stay.

I was born on a very special day in the 60's. The village where I was born is called South Zhang Village. You can imagine that to the north there is a North Zhang Village.

I went Shanghai when I was 17 and studied in Shanghai Maritime University. We studied many interesting subjects like marine engineering, navigation and equally many dull ones like Shipping Regulational English. Of all the dull subjects, English Grammar was the dullest. We had a few teachers from the West, the older the more conscientious and professional.

Four years later I was assigned to work in Beijing, the Capital of the People's Republic of China. My first job was in an import and export company of the Ministry of Communications, a respected and respectable job, a very good place to work. After some business contact with big MNC's like Siemens, GE, Mitsubishi...I started to ask myself the question. Why do so many local Chinese companies seem to operate less effectively and less efficiently than those western MNC's?

I spent more than 10 years in the foreign trade business run by the State. After that I worked for foreign companies in China. I joined LeGrand as a New Product Marketing Manager. I was told once when I was in Guangzhou Trade Fair that Legrand makes the best product in the field in the world. After that I joined Matsushita as a sales manager. People say that the founder of the Matsushita company, Mr. Konosike Matsushita is the God of Business Management. Indeed the management at Matsushita was impeccable.

At that time I was finishing my MBA study and I was attaching great importance to Human Resources Management in a business. When miraculously an opportunity occurred and I took up an HR job at MSAS, the office of an English company, the Ocean Group then, now a company of the Deutch Poste Group.

When Cadbury offered me a better job I readily accepted. Training was a very lucrative business at that time and started my training company.

Some years later, I joined Carrefour as a regional hr manager and I stayed there for 3 years.

After so many years of passion and devotion, I now have a thorough understanding of training and hr issues of businesses. I believe my previous experience in sales and marketing, purchasing, quality management help me become a better training and hr manager. By the way, when I was in Matsushita and MSAS, I was deeply involved in total quality management.

I know companies, training and hr managers, line managers are more or less struggling, with problems with recruitment, with performance management, motivation, retention, employee relationship, etc.

For me, training and human resources is always an important factor that determines the productivity of the employees and the profitability of a company.

If you attach equal amount of importance to training and hr management, whether you are an hr or not, we can be teachers to each other. You can contact me and I am sure that we will both improve in training and hr management.

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Time pass and I still remember the days in the 80's when I was working in the China Communications Import and Export Service Company where I had my first encounters with western lawyers. To be honest, at that time I did not expect myself to be a lawyer today.