Somebody’s dad once said “nothing worthwhile in life is easy.” I use this expression to keep our focus when making a new innovation that will make life easier for our buyers.

I’ve run across some blogs of folks who give interesting insights on sourcing in China, and one of those blogs is the Silk Road International Blog, run by a guy named David Dayton, who lives in China and inspects products in Chinese factories prior to export. There is a lot of brutal realism here, and sometimes the author gets a bit cynical, but all told you can see that he really believes that China can be a great place to buy great products. Check it out at http://silkroadintl.net/blog/.

A somewhat different perspective is offered by Cyrill Eltshinger in his book Source Code China. Cyrill is one of those interesting people that make doing international businesses so much fun. He’s from Switzerland, where he was drafted into the Army and stayed long enough to become a junior officer in their special forces. After he left the Swiss Army (no knife jokes, please) he went back to college to get his degree – at Texas A&M.

If running into a Swiss Aggie in Beijing is not cool enough, he’s also written a book about his years running a Beijing company that wrote software for huge global corporations. His book has some superb insights about doing business internationally and in China, and is very much worth the read.