Leading the Future - Building Sustainable Competitive Advantages for Enterprises

Author: (USA) John Hegel
III. John Sley Brown / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Absorbing the best cultures from both sides. Implementing management across two cultures can be challenging, as it requires managers to understand and respect the different cultural needs of both sides. However, it also presents an opportunity to absorb the best elements of both cultures, thereby improving corporate performance. Taking the Philippines-based call center company as an example, hospitality and a willingness to help are cultural traits of the Philippines, which gives Filipinos a natural advantage in providing excellent customer service. They can quickly build friendly relationships with customers, making them feel genuine warmth. But Philippine culture is also highly hierarchical: in the workplace, managers give orders, and workers follow. This culture is not conducive to establishing an efficient enterprise because employees are reluctant to offer constructive feedback to their managers, fearing trouble for themselves. To address this issue, eTelecare has fostered a non-hierarchical, performance-based culture. Its managers and corporate leaders are promoted from within rather than being brought in from outside.
China's factories have notable achievements in integrating Chinese and American management styles. American companies are generally more systematic in production processes, ensuring continuity even when employees are replaced. However, this method lacks flexibility. Chinese managers generally dislike overly rigid job roles for workers and prefer to assign tasks flexibly based on individual skills. By effectively integrating these two approaches, Chinese factories have created more efficient production processes—combining strict discipline with the ability to respond effectively to sudden issues like changes in customer demand or supply disruptions...
To effectively integrate the best aspects of two cultures, a significant reliance is placed on hiring and cultivating outstanding middle managers locally. Most American companies are not doing well enough in this regard. They often send senior managers from their home countries while recruiting middle managers from other companies. He Jiangbo of Lirun Company describes this typical situation as follows: "Senior managers often hire local managers based on Western judgment. These hired individuals may not be Westerners themselves, but they might come from the same university and have spent most of their lives abroad. As a result, these middle managers are not effective leaders in the local cultural environment."
Compressing work cycles. Some methods for compressing work cycles are economically unfeasible in the U.S. but can be implemented in offshore operations. For example, by leveraging the lower wage levels of offshore engineers, a major laptop manufacturer reduced the time to launch a new model by one-third. To shorten the design and testing cycles, the Taiwanese company that serves this enterprise doubled the number of engineers on the product development team—still spending only four-fifths of the cost of hiring engineers domestically. The same approach can be used to accelerate the entry of products into multiple countries—just set up several parallel development teams to develop different versions for different countries simultaneously.
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