http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtcz1xn7LIA
The link above will bring you to the YouTube video I watched on the challenges of managing cultural differences by IESE professor Yih-teen Lee. Embedding the video was disabled, but you can find the video through this link. This video is great because it incorporates many ideas from the last two chapters as well as integrating everything about business globalization we have learned from the entire book.
The professor talks about the challenges of managing cultural differences, the role of Confucianism in business relationships, difficulties in entering the Chinese market for Western Countries, and developing cultural understanding. He starts out by explaining that culture is hard to approach because it is intangible and hard to determine. Companies need to dig deeper than just the surface of a culture in order to be successful in business transactions. If not, there will be failures, like in his example of an American/Korean transaction when the companies followed two conflicting business cultures.
The difficulty Western countries have entering the Chinese market has to do with Confucianism. Confucianism clearly defines the social roles in all different situations. He talked about the inner circle being extremely important in the Chinese culture. This reminded me of the movie “Meet the Parents” when the father held high value of those in the inner circle. Entering and remaining in the inner circle was very important. His example of how Nike entered the Chinese market showed the importance of understanding different cultures and how to translate information in a respectful way. Nike though they were being appropriate, but it ended up being offensive to the Chinese. Developing a deeper cultural understanding is important for both leaders and workers in order to be a globally successful company.
