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A multinational team in the United States: Many of the foreign team members will not substantially participate in meetings, hesitant to speak up. On occasion, some of the foreign team will even occasionally fall asleep in the meeting room. The effect of this was a growing sense that the foreign
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The key to success in business is often the little stuff. In my experience, it is most often the result of doing a lot of small - and strategically correct - things every day without fail. It is strikingly similar to the challenge of moving a boulder by hand. The
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I just spent a week in San Francisco California. I love the place. The climate is near perfect. There is abundant opportunity, especially if you are an entrepreneur. Plants grow like gangbusters. You can expect 70 degree temperatures in the summertime. Architecture and public spaces are some of the most
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Let's build a FaceBook application" "We need an iPhone App." "We are hiring a new intern to manage our Twitter feed." Do these declarative statements sound familiar to you? If you are in tech, in retail, or even just IN BUSINESS these days,
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Would you keep live hand grenades in your desk drawer? Not unless you are Blackwater Intenational. That being the case, why do so many companies keep comparably deadly problems in their metaphorical desk drawer for months or even years without dealing with them? What are we talking about here? Single
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Eskimos depend on killing one or two whales to survive for a whole year. They risk everything on being successful in this task. Whales on the other hand survive by eating millions of tiny shrimp. A failure to capture any one, any thousand, any ten thousand of those shrimp will
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As a child, everything is new. Everything tends to grab your attention, but some things stand out and grab yourimagination. For me, one of those things was the idea of doing some kind of business. The idea that you could choose to use your time to interact with people and
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As I have stated any number of times in this blog and in others, Communication is very often the single biggest obstacle in business. Whether it is communicating a value proposition with customers, a strategy to management, or the details of a plan to a team, communication is one linchpin
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A multinational team in the United States: When a semiconductor company found a problem on one of their projects, a mid-level engineer immediately sent an email message to their Japanese client company (who was paying for the work), telling them of the issue. The response from the Japanese company was
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An American company outsourced a team to China:After training 15 Chinese workers how to do their tasks, the American team had most of its members transferred to other groups or fired, leaving only 3 original members to continue handling the American side of the work. The remaining 3 members
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When an American company opened an office in India: Business operations needed to adjust to include frequent phone-based conference calls. The American team quickly began to complain about the language skills of the Indians, claiming that they were too difficult to understand over the phone. Tensions mounted over time, and
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A multinational team in the United States: On this team, a Japanese engineer was getting increasingly frustrated with his American manager. He sent repeated formal emails to the manager requesting action, but did not get any ‘appropriate’ response. After weeks of such frustration, he became so upset that he began