During lunch recently a former GM of a Fortune 500 company, a good friend, told me the Chinese suppliers he’s been working with have been too busy to call him in for more productivity-boosting tips. Since retiring from the GM position after 10 years in a leadership role in Suzhou, he’s been helping the company’s local suppliers increase production quality. I asked him what had changed. He said dryly, “They’ve gotten busy again.” But not with the Fortune 500 company that had been their primary customer for so many years. Indeed, the American consumer market into which the foreign invested company sells is still too soft for their products to do as well as they had been. “The suppliers have finally learned they need to diversify their customer base beyond the one customer.”

“I’m sure they’ve forgotten what I helped them with,” he said, resigned. “So I’ll just have to start over whenever things slow down for them again.”