Tom Kurata is getting more than an up-close view of China’s explosive growth.

He’s helping power it.

Kurata, a graduate of Lawrence High School and Kansas University, works as chief representative and country manager for OSIsoft in Shanghai, China.

And it was there, out of an office about half the size of his mother’s living room on Harvard Road in Lawrence, that Kurata recently brokered a deal to provide management software for the country’s coal- and gas-fired electric plants – all 6,000 of them – and their expansive electric lines and transmission grids.

Financial translation: about $450 million.

“Yes, it’s a very, very big deal,” Kurata said last week, during a visit home for the holidays. “It’s one of the largest software deals ever concluded by a foreign company in China.”

Kurata expects the sale to pay off handsomely for the Chinese government and its state-owned utility business, the State Grid Corp. By helping officials identify “parasitic” losses along its electric lines, he said, the government should be able to save anywhere from $800 million to $1 billion a year.

Cleaning up

Not bad for a guy who graduated from LHS in 1969, left KU in 1975 with a double major in East Asian studies and Spanish and then served a hitch in the U.S. Navy before settling back in town as a landscaper and, later, a manufacturing attendant at the Quaker pet foods plant.

Tom Kurata, a Lawrence native, is chief representative and country manager for OSIsoft in Shanghai, China. He discussed the importance of U.S. relations with China at his mother's home in Lawrence. He was home last week for the holidays visiting his mother, Virginia Kurata.

“I was the night janitor,” he said, noting that he’d clean the floor for a few hours at night and then spend the rest of his shift studying for the engineering classes he was taking on a part-time basis at KU.

He’d go on to earn a chemical engineering degree, in 1983, from the University of New Mexico and become a systems engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy (his late father, Fred Kurata, was a prominent engineer and is namesake for the Kurata Thermodynamics Laboratories on KU’s west campus).

In 1986 he moved into international sales for Simulation Sciences Inc., then left for Aspen Technology and, in the fall of 1992, joined Oil Systems Inc.

He was the company’s 30th employee and, by opening OSI’s international sales office, would be responsible for securing sales and establishing markets in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Such sales accounted for about $8 million a year when he joined the company. Today, they represent at least $105 million, or about 25 percent of OSIsoft’s global sales.

The China deal – at $450 million spread across seven years – will be expected to lead to even more business in the world’s fastest-growing economy.

Starting point

“A contract, to the Chinese, is just the starting point of the relationship,” Kurata said. “It’s not the end; it’s the beginning.”

Discovering how Chinese officials do business has been an invaluable learning experience in itself, Kurata said.

While he typically arrives at negotiating sessions with no more than himself and an interpreter – Kurata is conversational in the language, but doesn’t take chances in business settings – his Chinese counterparts typically employ a team approach.

“I will be negotiating with anywhere from 12 to 20 people in the same room,” he said.

Kurata sees a need for people in the United States to immerse themselves in international education.

While scientific expertise is important, he said, such technical know-how often becomes obsolete within five years.

‘Cultural sensitivity’ needed

“Continuous learning, continuous education becomes very, very paramount to success,” he said. “I think that developing cultural sensitivity – the ability to build bridges with people from different cultures – is going to become more and more important as we go along. And the thing that I fear that is happening is that Americans continue to be myopic and not really pay attention to all of the dynamics that are happening in some of the hot zones, the hot spots, like Iraq and the Muslim world, and in China. :

“China is the epicenter of manufacturing in the world today, similar to India being the epicenter of the services industry. And these are not going to go away. And we, as Americans, have to learn how to deal with that.”