Doing business across cultures_7

MANAGING CHANGE AND CONTINUITY ACROSS CULTURES 4 From Guided Missile to Eiffel Tower and back Guided 4 Missile Eiffel Tower For several years a company has successfully met the growing com-plexity and customization of its industry via project groups, peopled by representatives of key functions, i.e., manufacturing, R&D, mar-keting, sales etc. This has helped it win strategic accounts and partner several key customers. But it cannot ignore the relentless commoditization of its industry, nor the high costs of the expert team, which may require only a few minutes input from highly specialized persons but might take up hours of their time. An increasing number of orders are for routine commodities and the company will be priced out of business if it gives “Rolls Royce” ser-vice to standard requests. It must find ways of meeting these fast and cheaply, positioning itself as a low-cost supplier for this mature part of the market. It needs to belt out standard products at a profit if it is serious about survival. Project groups are anyway better employed in newer markets mak-ing unusual requests. Once a group becomes “boring” it is time for standard products, not gilded ones. Project groups should hand over any operations that have become routine and repetitive to lower-cost processes. Their advice could be invaluable in how to cut costs and they should get feedback on the quality of such con-sulting. 169 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES 5 From Family Culture to Incubator and back Guided 4 Missile Eiffel Tower This company always had a close, fun, familiar, and intimate cul-ture, in which the founders and their offspring had genuine concern and affection for the whole “family” of employees. The founder was a brilliant entrepreneur and his heritage has endured. His son, his nephew, and his niece all went to graduate schools and are real pro-fessionals. They are popular within the company and are very well qualified. And yet…the founder is in his seventies. The company needs to renew itself. There have been no major innovations in fifteen years, and the business is living off the proceeds of the past. The proposal from a group of entrepreneurs is to buy up a small firm famous for its inventiveness yet lacking scale or adequate resources. The entre-preneurs want stock options which could put them at salaries larger than the founder’s and much higher than anyone else earns. Nor are they very respectful of company history and traditions. “Create or die” was their message at a recent meeting. The problem is not just their employment but the fact that their inno-vations, if successful, will change the whole company. It has been proposed that they share their vision of the future with the founder and he, they, and his family share it with everyone. They will decide as a group how enthused they are. 170 MANAGING CHANGE AND CONTINUITY ACROSS CULTURES 6 From Family to Eiffel Tower and back Family 6 Culture Eiffel Tower There comes a time when a company is simply too large to cohere at the level of personal relationships. Most of us can remember about a hundred names or more, but when a company gets bigger than this then informality reaches its limits. Unknown people must have a role, a task, a job description, or it becomes impossible to know whether people are doing the job they are paid to do. Bureaucracy creeps in when “the span of control” gets too wide. Up to now no one has invented a real remedy for the “inevitable” arrival of the role or task culture, which consigns the Family culture to occasional parties. One device is to have small business units of less than one hundred, so that each “family” has “tasks” which they supervise in personal ways. Another possible remedy is to have “sculpted” or “creeping” job descriptions which are co-defined by supervisors and supervisees. Big corporations have ways of keeping family values alive; witness the Japanese tradition of the “elder brother–younger brother” mentoring relationship. Motorola still encourages the recruitment of relatives. In 1993 one employee had fifty relatives working for the company. Computer summer camps to which employees’ children are invited can become an avenue for later recruitment. Many large companies have encouraged networking among minori-ties and mentoring relationships across departments and functions, 171 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES so that vulnerable persons have would-be champions, not in direct authority over them but ready to speak up for them. 7 From Family to Guided Missile and back Family 7 Culture Guided Missile This is a good family company but it has to professionalize. The founder’s sons and daughters are good people but no one seriously believes that they would have been selected on merit. Indeed, merit is not a high priority in this company nor is professionalism. Many customers have been with the company for thirty years or more and their loyalty, both to the company and to the family, is profound and touching. But the industry is changing now and there are rival tech-nologies that need constant appraisal and expert judgement. Three task forces have been set up, each chaired by a family member. Their mandate is to identify the professional expertise lacked and the best way to get across to such people. It is only when you set up such task forces that you realize how few experts you have! The hope is that the family members will become the main advocates of more professionalism and will allow themselves to be well advised. The company started recruiting from the country’s leading engi-neering school only this year but most of those to whom it offered jobs turned it down. 172 MANAGING CHANGE AND CONTINUITY ACROSS CULTURES 8 From Eiffel Tower to Incubator and back Eiffel 8 Tower Incubator This move was relatively rare until the concept of reengineering became popular. Eiffel Tower cultures are completely dismantled by consultants, “reengineered,” and then restored to Eiffel Tower status but in a new, less costly configuration. Because of the very high con-trast between Eiffel Towers and Incubators this process is often traumatic and amounts to radical surgery, often costing hundreds of jobs. The Incubator phase is temporary and rarely done by those within the Eiffel Tower culture but more usually by change agents consult-ing to the corporation. A less common but more constructive alternative is the Scanlon Plan, invented by Joseph Scanlon. Routine “Eiffel Tower” operations are suspended for an hour or two each week and workers brain-storm possible changes in their work practices which will increase efficiency, lower costs, avoid waste, and innovate in general. Each work unit calculates an input–output ratio so that the pay-off for any innovations can be calculated. The general rule is that workers receive 50 percent of this pay-off, while 50 percent goes to the orga-nization and its shareholders. For, say, 90 minutes every Friday afternoon all employees go into “incubator mode” and critique and improve their work environments. Although such work is done in teams and is in part a guided missile operation, the stress is upon the creativity of individual workers, on 173 ... - tailieumienphi.vn