Building a Happy Company

We live in trying times. There is lingering consumer malaise brought on by the European debt crisis, the economic outlook remains uncertain, and low-working-hour, high-wage jobs are becoming rarer in virtually every field. Against this backdrop, the Eurasian Publishing Group’s February 2013 announcement that it was moving to a four-day workweek sent shockwaves through Taiwan.

That day’s meeting at Eurasian seemed no different from any other until just moments before its close. When Chien then announced that the company would be implementing a four-day workweek, the entire staff sat dumbstruck for a few seconds before breaking into thunderous applause. One person, overcome with emotion at ­Chien keeping the promise he had made to his employees 20 years previously, even wept.

Chien loves volunteering with charities and was involved in setting up the Paper Windmill Theatre’s tour of all of Taiwan’s townships.

What kind of company does something so bold in such difficult times?

Eurasian’s offices, located near the Taipei Arena, are simply decorated, but spend a few minutes inside and you begin to sense a sort of quiet cheer.

Inside ­Chien’s office, you find a mustached figure who grins constantly when speaking. The upbeat atmosphere he creates spills over to the rest of the company. Even his business card is interesting, lacking a title until you flip it over to the English-language side, where he designates himself “publisher” in tiny type.

Forms of address affect how we relate to other people. With that in mind, ­Chien asks employees not to address him as “chairman,” “boss” or “publisher,” but as “Mr. ­Chien.” In private, a few even jokingly call him “Old ­Chien” or “Mustachio.” For his part, ­Chien doesn’t use the term “employee” and instead refers to all his staff as “colleague.”

The company culture grows out of ­Chien’s vision of how a business should be run. He believes that companies should do more than simply pursue profits, that the company should also be a forum in which employees serve one another and grow together. ­Chien characterizes his team at Eurasian as an “exceptional assemblage”: a group of people who seamlessly cohere, work together towards common goals, and help bring out the best in one another. Given a plan and a consensus, the team quickly and efficiently produces outstanding results.

“One of the biggest threats people today face is burnout. They run their tanks dry meeting the demands of their jobs.” ­Chien says that if the publishing industry is to be a distributor of information on “better living,” the people who work in the industry have to set an example and themselves live happy lives.

For that reason, work and leisure are equally important to the Eurasian team. The cyclical, highly planned way in which they operate—they have a firm grasp of their publishing schedule for a year in advance, meet every spring to work out the details of that fall’s company trip, and begin planning their year-end banquet in the summer—enables them to be very comfortable in their work.

Chien Chi-chong has given the publishing industry a new mission. His Eurasian Publishing Group stresses that every title should bring happiness to and resonate with the public.

Within the publishing industry, Eurasian is known not only for being a happy company, but for producing bestsellers.

The Eurasian Group currently has six imprints: Eurasian, Fine, Prophet, Athena, Solutions, and Solo. It also has a marketing arm and investment division that enable it to handle the entire upstream portion of the publishing process itself. The group employs nearly 100 people, puts out more than 150 titles per year covering virtually every subject under the sun, and generates excellent sales figures. In fact, if you look at the various annual bestseller lists from recent years, you’ll find that nearly half of the top-10 titles and a quarter of the top-100 titles are Eurasian releases.

The company gives equal weight to works by domestic and international authors, and in recent years has released volumes selling hundreds of thousands and even in excess of a million copies each. These have included such seminal works as The Secret, The Last Lecture, Saga no Ga­bai Ba­chan (“­Super Granny”), the series The Illness-Free Life, and Understanding World Politics, the last of these authored by Liu Bih-rong, one of Taiwan’s foremost authorities on the art of negotiation.

How has Eurasian been able to achieve such enviable results? The answer is rooted in the company’s mission: “Respect readers; publish good books.” Where most publishers are somewhat elitist, Eurasia gives precedence to readers’ perspectives. It responds to social needs, and demands that each book it publishes resonate with readers.

Chien’s personal background has had a profound influence on his company’s orientation as well.

Born to a prominent Chang­hua family in 1955, ­Chien saw his family’s fortunes take a turn for the worse before he finished high school. He ended up failing the university entrance exams and moving to Tai­pei, where he got a job in sales. His work exposed him to international trade and real estate, further honing his sales skills.

Chien says that his establishment of a publishing house was entirely serendipitous. In 1980, a bookstore he’d worked for went bankrupt owing him more than NT$1 million. He took payment in encyclopedias from the store’s inventory, then he and others among the store’s creditors founded Wu­lian Publishing to sell them. ­Chien’s subsequent efforts to bring his sales background to bear on the new business upended the literati-driven management model that had previously dominated the publishing industry.

In 1984, Wu­lian became Eurasian. The new company had a new orientation and soon began attracting Taiwan’s best writers to its imprint.

With Eurasian’s 2013 move to a four day workweek, Chien’s vision of a happy company has made a giant leap forward.

Chien established the principles of balancing cultural, social, and market factors in promoting the company’s development, and of making sales an explicit element of its publishing strategy. He also decided to focus on publishing works written in an accessible style as a means of getting good books into ordinary households.

These moves quickly transformed Taiwan’s publishing industry. Hotshot mass-market writers like Tsao Yu-fang, Lin Qing­xuan, Wu ­Danru, and ­Guang Yu began moving to Eurasian. With the support of readers, Eurasian grew from a single imprint into a full-fledged publishing group and the Taiwanese literary community’s longstanding, if nebulous, distinction between pure literature and mass-market literature crumbled.

Over the years, ­Chien developed what he calls his “75, 85, 95” management philosophy.

It’s basically a ratings system in which 75 equates to “passable,” 85 to “good,” and 95 to “excellent.” No matter how good a book is, it has to sell well to rate higher than a 75. It’s the job of the publishing team to elevate good books from “75s” to “95s.” When a finished book elicits a “Wow!” from every department prior to its publication, the team is sure that readers will love it.

By systematizing the ratings process, and placing the department of planning and marketing and the department of sales and distribution on an equal footing with the editorial department, ­Chien has created a sort of “iron triangle” specializing in the production of bestsellers.

The approach has made Eurasian popular for more than just its books: its sales and marketing strategy has now been incorporated into business-school curricula. Take, for example, how it handled the 2006 release of the popular Japanese novel Saga no Ga­bai Ba­chan. Chien was very impressed with the readability and power of the Chinese-language translation, and with how well the book conveyed human tenacity and the idea of bettering oneself. Feeling that it would be a shame not to share the book with the broad public, he wrote some 50 letters to the principals of high schools around Taiwan that very night, recommending the book to them.

By writing the letters by hand with a calligraphy brush, he expressed a passion and sincerity beyond the capabilities of email to convey, moving the principals who received them to read the book for themselves. When they thought highly of it and mentioned it in meetings, the book’s word-of-mouth began to spread like wildfire. It went on to sell more than 300,000 copies in just one year. Management magazine then named ­Chien’s letters the most innovative marketing campaign of the year, an honor in which all three segments of the “iron triangle” took great pride.

Eurasian plunks down a hefty chunk of change on its annual company trips, which have taken employees all over the world. Here, Chien and his colleagues pose for a group photo in a hot-air balloon during a company trip to Turkey.

Generally speaking, the company believes that no genre is inherently superior to any other. In ­Chien’s eyes, a translation of a workout reference by Korean exercise maven Jung Da­yeon is just as important as Things I Finally Get, author ­Hsiao Yeh’s first book in years.

The group’s various departments work together well because they trust each other, and they are always innovating.

For example, in 2010, the planning team asked Australian You­tube sensation Nick Vujicic, a man born without arms and legs, to share his inspirational life story. The Chinese-language edition of his autobiography, Life Without Limbs, actually came out before the English edition—a first for the Taiwanese publishing industry—and went on to sell some 300,000 copies.

Chien loves to meet new people and always notices their strengths. He enjoys putting those strengths to use, and has created tailor-made publishing opportunities for numerous writers. Back in Eurasian’s early days, for example, he spent millions of NT dollars to produce an audiobook of Lin Qing­xuan’s Open the Window of Your Heart. After singer ­Cheng Hwa-­jiuan married and moved to Germany, he helped her transition from music to books, enabling her to win Germany’s Mark Twain Travel Journalism Award. More recently, he invited ­Hsiao Yeh, who had long since given up writing, to put pen to paper for Things I Finally Get. The book sold nearly 100,000 copies, and attracted crowds of more than 1,000 people to the author’s campus lectures.

Film director Wu Nien-jen, a good friend of Chien’s, was an enthusiastic proponent of the bestselling Saga no Gabai Bachan (“Super Granny”), a Eurasian title.

His publishing work aside, Chien is also an enthusiastic philanthropist who no longer knows just how many charitable organizations he has donated his time and money to.

In one noteworthy example, he worked with filmmakers Wu Nien-jen and Ko I-chen, theater director Lee Yung-feng, author Hsiao Yeh and others to bring about the Paper Windmill Theatre’s tour of 319 townships. Intended to open children’s eyes to the arts, the tour was humorously dubbed “The Grandpas Strike Back” by Taiwan’s arts community.

As the troupe made its way around Taiwan, ­Chien came face to face with many disadvantaged children in the communities they visited. Often being raised either by grandparents or a single parent, these kids lacked someone to care for them after school. As a result, their academic performance suffered and some were even dropping out of school. Moved by their plight, he founded the Happy Study Association as a platform for providing guidance resources to disadvantaged kids once the school day ends. ­Chien then made sure to have the Boyo Social Welfare Foundation, established by former National Chi Nan University president Richard Lee, develop lesson plans and train teachers, and persuaded Wu Nien-jen to become the association’s president.

Chien laughs, recalling that Wu’s first reaction to his proposal was to exclaim: “This will take a lifetime! Can’t we just play golf?” But he says that Wu has always been the kind of person who takes little while giving a lot, and was soon persuaded to take on the job.

To Chien, publishing has never been about profit. He notes that for all that people who work in the industry seem to lead simple, quiet outer lives, their inner lives are magnificent. And he wholeheartedly believes that people shouldn’t live to work, but only work to live.

Eurasian will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2014, and ­Chien is hoping that it will be around for a long time to come, always responding to the needs of our society.

For Chien, that last point really is the heart of the matter. As a publisher and as a philanthropist, he has always sought to address social needs, and in so doing has made our society a better, happier place.