All in all, our decision-making equipment is pretty sound. We don't follow the lead lemming over a cliff. We can't be fooled into thinking that a 99-cent lure is a meal. We don't try to catch car fenders with our teeth. Then again, it wasn't a dog who launched New Coke. So there are a few bugs – little design flaws of the mind – that can have big consequences.

In China, the word guanxi is in the top ten vocabulary list of all successful businesses. Great Chinese businesses and business(wo)men just cannot survive and thrive without developing excellent guanxi with organizations of authority, such as the state-owned banks. But to a deeper extent, guanxi penetrates all manners of Chinese society.