bloom: Jie Wu
It’s not easy to uproot yourself and move halfway around the world to live, study and work in a new language, culture and country. 🌏 But that's exactly what Jie Wu did when she moved from China to Belgium. 20 years later, Jie is still based in Belgium, combining the best of both worlds as Team Manager for OMP China. Want to find out how she does it? Keep on reading.
Putting theory into practice
Moving from China to Belgium is a big decision. What made you decide to come to Belgium? And what has kept you here?
Jie: I was born and raised in China. After graduating with my Bachelor’s in Business Engineering, I was working as a student coordinator/professor assistant when the university offered me the chance to study abroad. It was supposed to be for one year, and I thought, why not? I’d have support from the university for the year and then I’d return to China with an advanced qualification and a lot of new experiences.
So, the first time I left China was to go to Leuven, Belgium, to do my Master’s in Industrial Management in 2002. The course was aimed at giving engineers more management knowledge, and it’s where I first learned about operations management and optimization, which has been extremely useful in my career.
During my course, I met my husband. My parents told me to return, that it was just a short romance, but then he came with me to China to meet my parents and they loved him! He convinced them that Western culture was quite traditional and not as wild as they believed. They gave me their blessing to return to Belgium.
"I enjoy logical thinking, contact with industry professionals and seeing tangible outcomes."
When you settled in Belgium, you first became a research assistant at the University of Antwerp before joining the business world. What were your plans at this time?
Jie: That’s a good question. I think it’s partly due to Chinese culture, where the older generation thinks that it’s good for girls to work in the academic world, where you have long holidays for family, for children. I tried it, but it wasn’t my passion. However, after two years as a research assistant at the University of Antwerp, I realized that I wanted to pursue a more practical path because I prefer applying theory to real-world industry scenarios. I enjoy logical thinking, contact with industry professionals and seeing tangible outcomes.
Bringing China and Belgium closer
After a few years in academia, you decided to change things up and move to the corporate world. What was the appeal?
Just as I was realizing that I needed to use my knowledge in a more hands-on way, I got an offer from OMP. They wanted to explore the Chinese market, so it was a perfect match. In fact, 15 years later, I’m still at OMP, now responsible for the Chinese market.
I’ve found the role to be really interesting. On one side, there’s the technology: advanced software and knowledge about the industry and advanced planning. And on the other side, I can connect with my roots. I love working in an environment where I can combine the two.
And transitioning from engineering to tech was easier than I thought. I’ve always been good at math, even though I chose to study business engineering in China. I was actually disappointed to discover that business engineering had less math and programming than I was expecting. When I started at OMP, I had to catch up on some programming. And programming doesn’t lie, you get the results of what you programmed.
I’m assuming there are cultural differences between Belgium and China. What have you noticed? And how do you help your team in China with these differences?
Jie: It’s been a long journey to learn how to work in a Belgian company, even if it has international offices. I manage a team of almost 20 people in China and I’ve been helping them to integrate since we opened the office a decade ago. It means discussing experiences, sharing the company DNA with a ‘China’ touch, and making small changes so there is better cooperation between them and the rest of the company. This enables everyone to feel and perform the best of themselves. But it’s not just my team, I’m also helping Chinese customers to better understand the solution, so they work better within their global companies. That’s what I’m passionate about.
"It’s difficult to get people in China to give you detailed feedback."
The way of giving instructions and feedback is very different in Belgium than in China. For example, in China, it’s very top-down. Your boss asks you to do something, you don’t need to talk or ask questions. You just work quietly so nobody will notice you. It’s difficult to get people in China to give you detailed feedback. Whereas in Belgium, it’s more open, you speak up to share feedback and ideas for improvement.
You can think about it like the differences in techniques. The waterfall technique is you say something, you do it and then you check, that’s a bit more like the Chinese culture. And the agile technique of ongoing interaction is more Belgian.
To be honest, as well as helping to integrate our Chinese team into a Belgian company, I also feel as if I’m a bit of a bridge, helping technical teams and businesspeople to better understand each other.
I’ve heard that you have up to 100 people working on some projects, to me that feels like an entire medium-sized company working on a single project. How do you manage so many stakeholders, especially when they’re spread worldwide?
Jie: 100 people working on a single project might sound like a lot, but it works. OMP has over 35 years of experience in supply chain planning software, so we are quite mature when it comes to project management methodology. We have developed detailed templates, documents, and guidelines on how to start, structure, coordinate, and govern projects of different sizes.
We always break projects down into small stages and identify risks as early as possible. We also work in an agile way, taking a sprint approach where we check in with the customer at least every four weeks. This means they can quickly give feedback to ensure that we continue to work towards the right goal.
Within the team, everyone has a clear role. Responsibility is crucial for large international teams. Who is the project manager? Executive lead? Lead consultant? And who supports each of these people? We also focus on good communication, both sharing our ideas and feedback clearly as well as listening well to our colleagues and the customer. This helps when we’re working across cultures and time zones.
Life-long learning
We’ve talked a lot about your work life, but what do you like to do when you’re not working?
Jie: I’m a mom, so when I’m not working, I spend a lot of time with my kids. If you’re talking about what I like to do for myself, I keep learning. I’m trying to learn to play tennis and I practice playing the piano which I’ve been doing for almost 10 years. It’s not going fast as I only have limited time to practice. I’ve always enjoyed music. I was given an electronic piano by my father when I was 6 or 7 years old, which I enjoyed playing. When I came here, I decided I wanted to show my kids the value of learning. And to do that, they needed to see me learning something, so I found a good music school and registered for official lessons. It has been amazing.
"I decided I wanted to show my children the value of 'continuing to learn.' To do that, I felt I had to lead by example."
I’m also interested in exploring new things. I don’t like doing the same thing again and again, I need to try something new. My motto is to be happy and keep learning day by day. Luckily, I’ve found that learning new things helps to make me feel better. From my Chinese culture, I’ve learned not to give up. My parents always say that if you try something, you should do it seriously and not give up quickly. That helps when things are difficult to learn.
Continuing to learn is a good example for your kids. Is there anything else that you’re interested in at the moment?
Jie: I’ve always wanted to build a stronger bridge between Europe and China. I want to understand more about the Chinese market and shorten the gaps, but there’s still so much more to learn. From the cultural point of view, it’s okay. But the Chinese market is changing all the time, and it sometimes takes me quite some time to say that we need to do something. Not all global trends apply to China, so I have to work out how to bring China-specific information to the company to grow our local presence. Even with our business development team in China, I feel that we still have room to improve here.
Every time I go back to China it seems that everything is changing rapidly, but it’s not always positive change. Life in Belgium is quite stable in comparison. In general, I feel China is now looking a lot more at long-term than it previously did, and they’re now investing in fundamental industries that they need to stay ahead. However, the overall level of education in China needs to be improved. Some people have a really high level of education, which is to a global standard, but there are lots of poor people who aren’t anywhere near this level.
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