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By Grant Hall. Founder of League Cultural Diplomacy
Do any of these statements sound familiar? If they do, it’s time to find a cultural solution to your cultural problem.
Broadly speaking, as I wrote about in The twin challenges of international business, there are two main needs that your business will need to meet in its overseas operations:
- The need to get the business aspects of your operations right, and
- The need to get the cultural aspects of your operations right.
In Business failures in China; a failure to connect at a cultural level, I wrote about the inability of many otherwise successful western companies to achieve success in China. I said that the roots of their failures appeared to indicate more than simply an inability to understand the local culture – they demonstrate a failure to connect with their target market at a cultural level.
In wherewordsfailblog.com‘s most read post, The silent killer murdering international business ventures, I wrote about how an ignorance of the need to prioritise culture when operating in foreign markets or across cultures is akin to a silent killer whereby the cause of death is often misdiagnosed.
So, how do you know if your organisation has a cultural problem with its overseas business venture?
Look at the list of statements below. If they reflect your experience or the assessments of your organisation and you’re confident that you have the business aspects of your operations right, you might have a cultural problem.
We don’t seem to fit in
We’ve had a PR disaster
We can’t meet the right people
We lack beneficial relationships
We’ve been asked to pay bribes
We don’t understand the culture
Government red-tape is stifling us
No one’s buying what we’re selling
We don’t know our partners very well
Our locally based workforce is unstable
Our potential business partners avoid us
Our business partners want us to change
We’re not getting enough PR cut-through
We have difficulty interpreting local needs
There’s more pain than joy in our relationships
Bureaucratic processes are slowing our progress
Our network isn’t well connected to the right people
We’re not a priority for our potential business partners
We can’t get our staff to understand our way of thinking
There is a key decision maker blocking our path to success
We’re having problems recruiting and keeping the right staff
We aren’t connecting with our partners as well as we had hoped
Potential partners often seem to walk away from us… and we’re not sure why
People aren’t buying enough of our products or services… and we’re not sure why not
We are struggling to walk the talk in regards to the behaviors we know are important in the region
Potentially profitable agreements often seem to fall over at the last minute… and we’re not sure why
Do any of these statements sound familiar? If they do, it’s time to find a cultural solution to your cultural problem. My business, League Cultural Diplomacy finds cultural solutions for it’s clients through corporate cultural diplomacy (CCD). Drawing on the finest traditions of statecraft and international diplomacy, many successful companies now use CCD as a tool to manage international business relationships and gain influence in foreign markets.
If you want to know more about CCD, be sure to check out some of wherewordsfailblog.com‘s earlier posts including:
What is corporate cultural diplomacy?
2 Dozen reasons to use cultural diplomacy
Culture tools: prevention, maintenance and repair
And stay tuned to wherewordsfailblog.com for more!
where words fail 