Business from a Confucious Stand Point: Chou’s Business Platform

Through Sinyi Real Estate’s innovative “people centered” business approach, founder Chun-Chi Chou created a stable business environment emphasizing employees and customers as the backbone of his corporate structure. Chou’s business platform focused mainly on how to create value for customers by training employees to treat customers with the highest regard. Examining the Ethical Culture Building report published by the Ethics Resource Center, “a leader’s ability to consistently promote ethical conduct in an organization is critical to ensuring that employees understand how to make ‘doing what is right’ a priority” (Ethics Resource Center, 2006). Chou exhibited his leadership qualities and orchestrated this approach to differentiate his company from the traditional mold of Taiwanese real estate firms, which were regarded as “fraud [business’s]”, mainly due to their “lack of transparency during the transactional process”(Liu, 2009). Chou’s radical business endeavor set the stage for a changing landscape in the Taiwanese real estate industry and soon enough competitors would try and emulate his ethical corporate philosophy.

From a Confucius standpoint, Chou used an approach that centered his business in light of customers needs. Chou’s vision became clear, “profitableness is embedded in righteousness” (Lui, 2009). At the time Chou constructed this Confucian business model, Taiwan’s homeownership rate was at eighty percent of the market representing the highest percentage compared to the surrounding countries. Due to the fact eighty percent of the Taiwanese population sought to buy a home, Chou’s vision directly impacted and helped citizens, aligning his corporate mission with the shared value theory. Comparing Chou’s vision to Michae...

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...iven the relative high ratings received from the Gallup poles posted in realtors magazine, it would seem that U.S. based real estate firms may have the ability to incorporate many of Sinyi Real Estates innovations into their corporate structures. However, bigger firms such as CB Richard Ellis, Colony Capital or Blackstone who are all traded on public stock exchanges, may be too focused on corporate earrings reports that they would not exercise Chou’s idea of internal promotion because the rate at which firms would need to internally hire employees to run separate corporate branches may not grow at a rate fast enough to keep up with shareholder expectations. Even though this may be the case, U.S. firms in any regard should look to Sinyi Real Estates business model to further enhance their abilities to better serve stakeholder groups associated within a corporation.