Question

What are Zhang Xin key personal characteristics? How do they each contribute to her success? What role does culture play in who she is?

The Art and Science of Leadership, 7th Edition

Answer 1

There are four main key factors here:

Demographic factor: Zhang was a female from Chinese, the country which has “close to half of the world’s self-made female billionaires” (as cited in “Zhang Xin: The Humble Chinese Billionaire”, 2015). , while being born in a well-educated family and a famous country of female billionaires gave her more motivation to overcome her situation.

Values: another factor that contributed in her success was the values that she learned while growing up in china and working as 12 hour a shift. She learned the value of hard work and efforts that are needed in order to get out of her situations.

Abilities and Skills: when she came back to china after finishing her degree from Cambridge. She already had worked for the Wall Street and she knows how things work in the market, which gave her an edge over other people.

Personality Traits: she is a down to earth woman, in an interview she said she prefers to fly business class over first as when she think about how much her nanny makes, she thinks business class is okay. This shows she remembers where she came from and remembers her roots. She is humble human being from nature and she is now helping other woman across china to become empowered.

Culture plays an important role she was born in a well-educated family under Mao’s revolution. However, she had to spend her childhood living in poverty with her mom in Hong Kong. She worked 12 hours shift, all this factors made her to push out of this poverty and achieve something for herself. And as she said earlier, culture plays important role in her life as she returned to china from new York to do something here and establish her own empire.