Japan is seen as a tough place for foreign women to work. Yet new research suggests that female expatriates posted there may actually have an advantage over their male counterparts in sales and marketing.

Yin Tongyao tells how Chery became China’s leading car exporter by accident. McKinsey Quarterly has further background on the global ambitions of China’s companies too.

Elsewhere, executives are being urged to treat their poor middle managers better. Ambitious middle managers might like to know that if they covet the chief executive’s job, they should be a company lifer and a chief financial officer first.

Freek Vermeulen favours spurious reorganisations that serve no logical purpose but which nonetheless break down barriers between employees.

BV Krishnamurthy is railing against the new Bangalore International Airport, declaring: “A city that prides itself on being the Silicon City of India deserves better.”

Two new pieces of research suggest that managers with experience of multiple foreign postings are unusually valuable. After studying various multinationals, McKinsey says companies should move “talent” regularly between countries and divisions. Senior managers at the companies they studied had made 1.5 cross-border moves on average. At the best-performing businesses, however, the norm was to have had two such switches. Meanwhile, an academic paper in American Psychologist claims to have proved that working abroad can make you a more creative person.

As someone who has worked abroad twice, I like these findings, which massage my ego in all the right places. But there is a little piece of me that resists the idea that the mere fact of having lived in a foreign country can make you more talented or effective. It makes me think of my first term at university, with all those dreadful people who had just spent a year travelling in Asia, and who felt superior to everyone else as a consequence.

The plummeting value of the US dollar has helped Atlanta to emerge as a particularly desirable location in which to hold conferences and training sessions. The city has burst into the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of top ten destinations for business travel, occupying 6th position. Three other US cities make the list. Here is the top ten in full (the ranking relates to December 2007 and is based on cost and environmental issues such as infrastructure and culture):

1. Vancouver

2. Toronto

3. Adelaide

4. Honolulu

5. Perth

6. Atlanta

7. Auckland

8. Helsinki

9. Pittsburgh

10. Detroit