Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨)- Executive Vice-President of top rated Asia-focused multicultural advertising agency Kang & Lee, founder of a popular LinkedIn group for Chinese-speaking professionals, mentor to budding Sinophiles, gifted storyteller and a scholar in his own right- is approaching thirty years of connection to China. I sat down with Mr. Gitlin, who is currently working on a memoir about his early years in China, to learn more about a life transformed beginning with a Mandarin class. Part II of this two-part interview details his career in domestic Asia-focused multicultural marketing, his LinkedIn group Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives, the similarities between learning Chinese and American Sign Language, and what it means to shape one’s profession around a particular theme- China. Part I highlights Saul Gitlin’s initial ties to the Middle Kingdom. To learn more about Mr. Gitlin’s journey and a life transformed by China, read on…

Career Roots…
“[Following seven years in China] I was accepted at Columbia for my MBA, but deferred for a year to spend more time with a woman I had met in Israel, who later became my wife. I said to her, “I’ll come back to Israel and hang out with you while you finish your degree as long as you come back to the US with me so that I can do my MBA,” and that’s exactly what happened. I went to Columbia and did my MBA full-time while my wife worked on her doctorate in psychology here, and then I spent a couple of years doing freelance consulting work. At that time, I knew that I had to put down some career roots and that we needed to be in New York. The year before I came to Kang & Lee, I said to myself, “I’ve spent my whole career in marketing to Asians and I’ve just done an MBA focused on marketing and I love this career path but how can I do it without moving back to China?” At that point, I was married, my wife was doing her degree, and I had a son. That led me directly into discovering this world of domestic multicultural marketing and once I identified that as a career possibility, I made a beeline for both the agencies and the clients that were focused on marketing to Asian-Americans. At a certain point, I made contact with Eliot Kang, the man who founded Kang & Lee. He didn’t respond to me immediately, but quite a few months after I initially reached out to him, I received a phone message from him which led to several conversations and eventually an offer to join him as a member of the executive management at Kang & Lee to run strategic planning and corporate communications for the agency. That was in 1997. I then went on to build my career as a multicultural marketing strategist. Kang & Lee is the number one ranked Asian multicultural marketing, consulting and communications agency in the United States, ranked #1 by “Advertising Age” among all Asian multicultural agencies.”

Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives…
“About a year ago, I decided to get active on LinkedIn. My first thought was that using the site might ultimately bring other opportunities. But, I rapidly discovered that LinkedIn was a very useful tool for other things, like learning more about a potential business client and preparing better for meetings. So, increasingly I started to use LinkedIn during my daytime work. In the spirit of getting active, I looked into joining some of their networking groups. I noticed that there were a lot of “China” groups- there’s “Overseas Chinese Group,” “Chinese Investment Group,” lots of China finance groups… There were many China specialty groups. But, I was searching for something else based on the way I define my career and the way I work with clients across many disciplines. I was searching for a group that I couldn’t find. So, I wanted to build a group of people who really value an important definition of who they are professionally as being “China people” versus people of a specific industry or function. There is not a small number of people like me in the world. The common thread for the group had to be superior Chinese language skills and China work experience. I thought that such a community would allow a very vibrant discussion about China while providing fertile territory for career opportunities. [I imagined] that we could have open discussions on politics, Chinese poetry, current events, Chinese economy, finance, marketing, whatever. But, the group would be a way to embrace everybody who sees themselves as a “China person” regardless of what their functional expertise is. I could not find a group that already did that, so I established one.
I established this group called “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives” in July 2008. I gave it a Chinese name (中国通) because I felt like the use of the Chinese language was something that I wanted to promote in the group. I assumed that I would attract non-Asian people, but I also hoped and expected that I would attract a lot of ethnic Chinese professionals both from China and from all over the world. The name 中国通 is typically a designation applied to non-Chinese who have exhibited some mastery of Chinese language and culture, although in my group 中国通 are also Chinese business executives; at least half of my members are Chinese nationals themselves.
Once we had critical mass, I could start to see the group taking off on its own; I was getting 15-20 people interested in membership per day. I take the management of the group very seriously. It is designed for people who have the skills expressed in the title. Today the group now has almost 3,400 members; it is the largest group on LinkedIn using the keyword “Chinese” in the title. In my group, all the members are qualified to be there and come from all over the world. They’ve all been screened by me. There are two exceptions I make for accepting new members. The first is that I will allow students to join the group if they already have China experience or if they write to me to say that they are pursuing a career in China. As part of my own offline career, I take the mentoring of students very seriously and I want to encourage people starting out to get bitten by the China bug. The second exception is recruiters. I will admit any corporate recruiter sitting inside a major company because they are interested in getting China-capable talent. It’s all about opportunities for the core group members.”

Mandarin and American Sign Language…
“I’m currently studying American Sign Language (ASL). There are a lot of similarities between ASL and Chinese. ASL is not English done with hand signs; it has its own grammar with its own rules and a lot of the question formation structures and overall syntax are very similar to ways of saying things in Chinese. As I’m trying to learn ASL, I find that my brain is naturally going into Chinese mode as I form sentences in sign language. Whether its the use of particles at the end of phrases that express questions or the way you use prepositions, there are a lot of things that feel very familiar to Chinese. The second thing is that learning signs for ASL is like learning Chinese characters. Some of them are very iconic and look like what they mean- which is the case with some Chinese characters- but most are more stylized and originally had pictographic roots but evolved into something more abstract which must be learned by rote memorization. Seeing a sign, practicing it and committing it to memory- this is the exact process of learning Chinese characters. You can naturally apply that process to learning signs, except that you are doing it with your hands instead of taking pen to paper. So, in terms of the grammatical aspects as well as the process for acquiring abstract signs, I feel very predisposed for learning ASL. That was an insight that I came into on my own, but when I started asking educators in the ASL community about my observation, several have said that this is known and has been discussed among academic circles. People who know Chinese have an easier time acquiring American sign language.”

China as a Career…
“It’s been twenty-nine years since I first started studying Chinese; [I just turned 47]. People often say to me, “how did you have that vision?” One side of me wants to say, “I’m just a smart guy.” But really, I came into it because of my love for language and it just so happened that I focused on Mandarin, the hot country, the big business opportunity. My language skills and my knowledge of China have opened almost every door that I’ve knocked on. If you look at my resume, you’ll see that I was involved in all kind of things. Some people think that I’ve really jumped all over the place- from the hospitality industry to plastics production to telecommunications to advertising. They ask, “where’s the thread here?” Maybe most people define their career in terms of, “I’m a banker,” or “I’m an insurance agent,” or “I’m a telecom guy.” I define my career another way. My career is defined by China, by Chinese, by Asia. For me, the industries are quite incidental. One of the things that I really enjoy about the marketing communications industry and more specifically, the role that I’m in now, is that I get to develop strong competencies in a variety of industries. I’m sitting on strategic issues for my insurance clients, my telecom clients, my automotive clients… When you work with some of these [diverse types of] clients over a period of years, you really learn a lot.
I am part of a generation of people- and I think it’s growing- who are not defining their careers based on a specific industry but rather on a strong and very important competency that can cross industries and disciplines.”

This concludes Part II of a two-part interview with Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨). If you’ve missed Part I, click here. Mr. Gitlin is Executive Vice-President of Kang & Lee Advertising and Founder of the LinkedIn group, “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives.” To learn more about his professional background, please visit his LinkedIn profile.

Interviews American Sign Language, china, Interviews, Kang & Lee, Mandarin, saul gitlin