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Gift giving in the international business context
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Friday, 15 August 2008
Gift giving in the international business context
Dateline - Dying to work
Dateline - Dying to work
TOKYO – A recent television special said it all: It showed a building in downtown Tokyo with preprogrammed office lights that uniformly shut off at 10 pm; seconds later, virtually every light in the building came right back on. Despite such displays, the nation that has taken the sting out of the world ‘workaholic,’ producing 10 percent of the world’s exports with just 2 percent of its population, is suddenly obsessed with a deadly phenomenon known as karoshi. That’s the Japanese word for ‘death from overwork.’ Tetsunojo Uehata, the medical authority who coined the word, defines karoshi as a ‘condition in which psychologically unsound word processes are allowed to continue in a way that disrupts the worker’s normal work and life rhythms, leading to a buildup of fatigue in the body and a chronic condition of overwork accompanied by worsening of pre-existent high blood pressure and a hardening of the arteries and finally resulting in a fatal breakdown.’ Translation: All work and no play can really wreck one’s health, even in
Hardly a week goes by without a grim report about some overzealous worker in the prime of his life who could not just say no to overtime. Not long ago, a 39-year-old police sergeant, Haruo Okada, captured headlines as a karoshi victim by working double shifts for a month during the enthronement ceremonies for the nation’s new monarch. There are no reliable figures on the number of victims, but analysts believe that tens of thousands of Japanese become seriously ill or die from overwork each year. Despite promises by the government to trim working hours, the average Japanese clocked 2,150 hours in 1989, compared with 1,924 hours for Americans and 1,643 hours for the French.
Some Japanese want to change. When a group of lawyers and doctors set up the nation’s first karoshi hot line in 1988, 135 people phoned in on the first day. Since then, nearly 2,000 cases have been reported to the 42 hot lines across the nation, and an international call-in center has been set up recently.
To raise public awareness about the problem and to pressure the government and corporate Japan into action, a group of lawyers, doctors and victims’ wives has published a book called ‘Karoshi: When the Corporate Warrior Dies,’ which recount numerous horror stories. Yet the government and most Japanese companies rarely acknowledge karoshi and provide no special compensation to survivors. As the Ministry of Labour defines it, overwork can only be considered a cause of death if a victim ‘worked continuously for 24 hours preceding death,’ or ‘worked 16 hours a day for seven consecutive days leading up to death.’
Alas, the recent media attention probably won’t slow down the production lines much. In a poll conducted by an insurance company, more than 40 percent of the employees the firm covered said they feared that overwork might kill them; few planned to do anything about it. All in all, it looks like another busy year for the folks at the karoshi hot line.
By Jim Impoco
US News & World Report
Learning to cope with corporate culture clashes
Learning to cope with corporate culture clashes
The does and don’t of travelling abroad are a potential minefield for the unprepared traveller. If you spit in some countries, you could end up in prison. In others, spitting is a competitive sport.
The Centre for International Briefing has spent 40 years preparing the wary traveller for such pitfalls. Though it may sound like a covert operation for aspiring secret agents. What the Centre does is prepare travellers for encounters with new social and business customs worldwide. To date, over 50,000 people have passed through its headquarters at
In Asian cultures most of it takes place behind the scenes. In
Greetings, gestures and terms of address are all potential hazards abroad. While we are familiar with short firm handshake in this part of the world, in
The difference between understanding a culture and ignoring its conventions can be the measure of success or failure abroad. Jeff Tom tells the story of a British employee asked to post a letter by her Indonesian employer. ‘She knew the letter was too late for the six o’clock post, so she decided to hold it until the eight o’clock one. Her boss saw the letter on her desk and sacked her for not posting it immediately. In Western cultures, we believe in empowering people and rewarding them for using initiative, but other cultures operate on the basis of obeying direct orders.’
John Doherty, International Marketing Director with the Irish Industrial Development Authority, explains how you can easily take yourself into trouble at a business meeting in
‘In a country like
Tiptoeing through the minefield
DO
· Show an interest in, and at least an elementary knowledge of the country you are visiting.
· Learn a few words of the language – it will be seen as a compliment.
· Be sensitive to countries who have bigger and better-known neighbours, and try not to confuse Canadians with Americans, New Zealanders with Australians, Belgians with French.
· Familiarise yourself with the basics of business and social etiquette. As a starting point, learning how to greet people is very important.
Don’t
· Assume you won’t meet any communication problems because you speak English. You may think you are paying somebody a compliment by telling them their business is going a bomb. Americans will infer you think it is falling.
· Appear too reserved. As Americans are generally more exuberant than their European colleagues, they may equate reserve with lack of enthusiasm.
The Irish Independent
Thursday, 14 August 2008
New working model
As we embark on this new investigation of the future of work, there are several lessons we can draw by looking back. First, time, and our own adaptability, may solve some of our deepest problems. There are still developed countries worried about large-scale unemployment, France and Germany among them. But their problems are now widely seen as the result of excessive labor market regulation. Far from telling employees to enjoy more leisure, French and German companies are trying to find ways to ensure their staff work more hours. And in the UK, employers and policymakers now worry about a shortage of workers, not of work.
Second, the countries that seem poised to assume world economic leadership – Japan in the past; India and specially China now – may face obstacles that are barely visible today. And third, there is nothing new about our sense that we are at a turning point. People have often felt that work was changing in ways they had not seen before. Is it different this time? Is the way we work really changing fundamentally?
In one sense yes, simply because the countries that are playing a fuller part in the world economy, particularly China and India, have such large populations. ‘We simply have not comprehended yet the full impact of 2.5bn people coming into the world economy who were not part of it before,’ says Kim Clark, dean of Harvard Business School.
The second change is the technology affecting work today. The internet and broadband connections have made it far easier for companies to distribute their work around the world and to remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The trends towards both outsourcing and offshoring have offered India and China huge opportunities to develop their people’s skill. They have also provided companies around the world with enticements that are difficult to resist. Diana Farrell, director of McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s in-house economic think-tank, says that 70 per cent of the costs of a typical company in the developed world come from labor and 30 per cent from capital. Capital is expensive and labor cheap in countries such as India and China. Companies that benefit from the cost savings involved in employing Indian and Chinese labor are at a significant advantage.
The problem is, Ms Farrell says, that competitor companies can achieve the same benefits by moving some of their operations to India or China too. Competitive advantage can only be retained if companies understand that there is more to be gained from India or china than cost-cutting. The two countries are potentially huge markets too. Lower vehicle development costs in India, for example, mean cheap cars can be produced for the local market. New niche markets can be found for these products in developed countries too.
Companies can address business problems in India and China that they could not solved in their home markets. For example, Ms Farrell cites an airline that used to find it uneconomic to chase debts of less than $200. By using Indian accountants, they were able to chase debts of $50. This is good for western companies, but what of western workers?
A common question heard in the US and Western Europe today is: “What are we all going go to do?” Prof Clark says: ’First of all we have to recognize something that’s lost in a lot of these conversations: most of us don’t work in places that are competing with the Chinese, or the Indians.’
Technology is likely to continue to allow more jobs to be done remotely, but, Prof Clark argues, there will be an opposing trend too: companies offering a more personal service at close quarters. Ms Farrell argues that demographic changes mean there are going to be fewer Americans and western Europeans to do the jobs available anyway.
Japan and Western Europe are ageing societies. Even the US, still a relatively young country by comparison, will have 5 per cent fewer people of working age by 2015 than it does today.
Faced with these projections, western societies can either export the jobs or impact the workers.
Will China and India become as dominant as Japan once looked like becoming? Prof Clark says the most significant obstacle they face is the quality of the universities. Few of them show signs of becoming the world-class research centers they need to be if China and India are to become world economic leaders.
Financial times
Monday, 4 August 2008
Masayoshi Son and SOFTBANK
Masayoshi Son and SOFTBANK
Masayoshi Son was born in
I spent a long time doing research and making business plans before I started the company. I was living in
I’d gone to the States to study when I was sixteen I went to
I wanted a business I could fall in love with. It had to be unique and original. It had to have great growth potential. I had about 25 points like this and I took a big sheet of paper and gave each business idea scores. Then I picked the best one. It turned out to be the personal computer software business. So in 1981 we finally moved to
Guinness
working with technically skilled personnel in maintaining plant and equipment. In both jobs I reported directly to a supervisor. Since then, however, the structure of the company has significantly changed and the supervisor layer no longer exists. General workers now report a plant manager. I was then promoted to the position of laboratory officer in the quality assurance laboratory. The job involved carrying out a wide range of analyses on all aspects of the brewing process. For the past year I’ve worked in the personnel departments as an Industrial Relations Manager. In this role I report directly to the Personnel Manager of the company.
COLGATE-PALMOLIVE COMPANY
William Colgate founded the Colgate Company in 1806 as a starch, soap and candle business in 
Colgate-Palmolive’s five main sectors of business are: Oral Care, Body Care, Household Surface Care, Fabric Care and Pet Nutrition and Health Care. In the area of Oral Care, Colgate-Palmolive is the world leader in toothpaste. As a result of the company’s heavy investment in research and technology, it has developed and toothbrushes. To strengthen its presence in professional products, Colgate-Palmolive bought the Ora Pharm Company of 
The company has always paid close attention to the environment. It has already made great progress in the use of recyclable bottles and packaging materials.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Making a corporate marriage work
- by Stefan Stern
Bringing two companies together is an enormous task. There are grand, big-picture questions that to be solved, such as the new group’s strategy and direction. There are also administrative, logistical and technical challenges. Will new contracts of employment be required? Where should the headquarters of the combined operation be located? How can the companies’ information technology systems be integrated?
“It takes a certain humility to make a merger work,” says Charles Hampden-Turner, coauthor of Building Cross-cultural Competence. “It doesn’t follow that your company is a better one simply because it has taken another company over. It just means that you’ve got more money and have been prepared to pay,” ha says.
Work on bringing the partners together should start well before the deal become public knowledge. But how can executives start planning integration without the news leaking out? Some used a so-called “clean room”, where both sides to a deal can meet and discuss future plans confidentially. Computer manufacturers Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, for example, adopted this approach in their $25bn (￡13.3bn) merger.
Speed is of the essence. Roger Pudney of the UK’s Ashridge business school says: “There is often a tendency for companies to relax once the deal is signed, but this is the point at which speed of implementation becomes crucial. Successful Mergers and Acquisitions companies stress the importance of quick wins as a way of demonstrating that the new combination is already producing added value.”
HP and Compaq ran a series of “Fast Start” seminars for their staff as soon as the deal was announced, to provide reassurance and a sense of direction – seminars that had been planned in advance in the clean room. Offering employees detailed information is essential at the early stage. An internal human resources website set up for HP and Compaq staff received 2m hits on the day the merger was unveiled.
Managers will inevitably be occupied with practical, administrative changes, such as establishing new terms and conditions and pushing through any redundancies. Yet dealing with the cultural issues in a merger is more subtle and challenging. And when things go wrong in this context they can go wrong very quickly.
Michelle Bligh, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, California, has suggested measures leaders should take to avoid the worst consequences of mergers. After studying a merger of health organizations in the US, Prof Bligh advised leaders to avoid taking a dictatorial, top-down approach or micromanaging the transition. They need to respond as the new situation demands, she says, and must “help followers negotiate, modify and even manipulate cultural similarities and differences in the post merger environment”.
Prof Bligh identifies a few simple ground rules. Managers should recognize cultural differences between the companies, for example, by learning about the history of the new partner. They should give employees reasons why change is necessary, and find practical ways of communicating. As one manager told her: “When you sit down and start showing employees the nitty-gritty, you get buy-in a lot quicker.”
Symbolism matters too. “Instead of making great speeches,” Dr Hampden-Turner suggests, “why not start acting differently and providing a lead that way? Words are too easy, but actions will be noticed.” Even apparently simple gestures can count. Discussing employees’ new working conditions and being visible on the ‘shop floor’, for example, may reassure staff that management has an interest in their well-being. One manager in Prof Bligh’s study said: “We have to start with the little things: they really matter to people.”
How do the most successful acquirers handle the process of merger integration? General Electric, the US engineering conglomerate, has made more than 400 acquisitions in the past 20 years. But it is still learning how to make these deals work better. When GE bought Amersham, the UK bioscience company, for $9bn, it made a big effort to reassure the acquired business that it would not be steam-rollered.
Talk of a revival in merger and acquisitions activity is on the rise. Investment bankers and management consultants are once again seeking out potential deals and making flattering noises as they lead candidates to the altar. But marriages succeed or fail in the years following the wedding. Even before the hangover has worn off, the hard work has to begin.