Consumer Products, Inc. (a fictitious name) is a multinational consumer product company with subsidiaries around the world, including various Asian countries. ConP has maintained a centralized R&D operation in its headquarters in the Midwest and has transferred its technology to various subsidiaries around the world.
In one Asian country, a popular product began to be manufactured with a defect, which was being detected by consumers. The Asian subsidiary's marketing people communicated this recurrent problem back to the subsidiary's technology people, the same individuals who had been trained in the technology from headquarters.
The Asian technologists did not convey the problem to their American counterparts. The Asian cultural proclivity to be deferent to authority inhibited their communicating bad news to the American "bosses." Within months, the American management for the region began to discover that sales were slipping. Upon investigation they discovered the product defect.
Headquarters' top management decided to take steps to rectify the problem, since this was not the first time that communications difficulties between a foreign subsidiary and headquarters had resulted in impaired business performance. They were concerned about similar difficulties throughout the worldwide organization.
First, they directed that the product be corrected, and it readily was. Next, they decided to help the Asian technology group and its American counterpart improve their communications through a team-building process, so the problem would not recur. They also decided, if possible, to build upon the work with this technology transfer team to develop international technology-transfer/team-building processes throughout the company.
The team building began with the top organizational development manager, the head of R&D, and the president of the international product division agreeing that they would oversee the entire process. They engaged a management consultant team of one Asian from the country in question and one American. The Asian spoke both English and the local language. The thinking behind this decision was that the most timely and effective way for the consultants to gain trust with both groups would be to represent both. To cross a cultural boundary requires a local guide, as Margaret Mead had said in explanation of her success in crossing boundaries in cultures highly suspicious of Westerners.
SOURCE: "Asian-American Technology Transfer," Management Review, June 1987, 35. Reprinted, by permission of the publisher, from Management Review. Copyright © 1987. American Management Association, New York. All rights reserved.
The consultants worked with the Asian technologists and American technologists separately at first. They created interactive seminars in which the participants could acknowledge that their problems in dealing with their foreign counterparts were cross-cultural in origin. They then guided the groups into explicitly discovering their own cultures, their own assumptions, and their own individual personality and management styles. The training was focused on empathy skills-how to treat people as they would want others to treat them. To achieve this, individuals had to learn how to "suspend their own selves"-to act and listen in a manner detached from the "software program" of their own cultures, as much as possible.
Next, the Asian and American technologists were brought together to exchange their cultural learnings. They were also trained in communications skills. The result of the seminars was the development of open, collaborative norms of working and communicating in teams among the Asian and American technologists. The relationship became more productive and profitable, since the team developed the ability to spot problems before they became disasters and could now correct them together.
Based on the success of the Asian-American technology-transfer/team-building project, the top management group formed an international, multi-functional task force to enhance international technology transfer throughout the organization-employing international team-building techniques. The task force was trained in a manner similar to the Asian-American technology transfer group. In turn, it provided the training program to various technology transfer teams of American and foreign technologists throughout the company.
The consensus today is that the rate of successful product adaptation to local markets is higher than it has ever been, and technologists' professional development and morale have received a significant boost worldwide. Suspicions that the American headquarters R&D people are authority-oriented and arrogant has abated significantly as well.
The international team building that began in the technology-transfer area has begun to expand to marketing and finance. The worldwide organization is continuing to evolve in the direction of more networks and international teams.
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