In high school, she continued her Chinese studies at Columbia University and spent her senior year at Fu-Jen University in Taiwan. Kamsky majored in East Asian Studies at Princeton University, where she graduated with honors, and took intensive programs in Chinese and Japanese at Yale, Stanford and Middlebury College. Her company, Kamsky Associates, has been advising multinationals on doing business in China and the rest of Asia since 1980. She spoke with Asiaweek's Louise Nameth in New York. You hear so many stories these days about foreign companies, many of them American, getting disillusioned about China and pulling out.
People go to China rather starry-eyed.
They don't realize that China is not just a single place where there's a single way of doing things. When I work with a company, I first make sure that we do a comprehensive market analysis. You meet with the mayor and party secretary. You talk to the customers to see what their requirements are. I had a very big company that came to me recently.