هو إستراتيجية

: Ability to engage in learning other’s culture, getting historical and different perspective of a nation, religion, culture or ethnicity.

Of the 3 components of Cultural Intelligence, I personally think being Mindful is the only way one can change their behavior or communication style over the period to time but ‘Mindfulness’ is a very hazy concept that cannot be quantified. The ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Skills ‘ can be taught. How does an organization influence and provide incentives to be ‘mindful’ or become ‘reflective’? Its this sticky aspect of embracing diversity which makes it very difficult for organizations to monitor progress. That is the primary reason when the organizations talk about diversity they are more focused on attaining superficial goals (i.e. X% of minority workers). They cannot coerce employees or manager to be ‘mindful’.

There is a tremendous potential if the organizations harnesses the collective intelligence of its work force that transcends every cultural barriers, but there is no easy way for organizations to provide incentives to change those behaviors. Mind you, being mindful is a powerful ability that will differentiate individual employee from crowd. As the Globalization of Labor continues, individuals that can fine tune their communication to be culturally sensitive will no doubt succeed.

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Early Humans were nomads, wandering the earth.  As they found an ideal place as defined by alluvial soil, abundant supply of fresh water and balmy weather, they started to settle down.  Initial large agrarian society emerged out in places like Mesopotamia and Indus Valley. As more people settled, it led to imbalanced Supply and Demand for the basic needs.  Limited resources led to wars which in turn led to creation of boundaries and a military to manage who can come and stay.  As the economies of the countries were small initially, the countries restricted movement of people.

Industrial revolution led to rise in productivity.  We began to see first signs of movement of labor in form of urbanization. But still the labor movement was restricted to the confines of the country border. Information revolution with the rise of computing power, networking etc. led to the need for large number of skilled workers.  ‘Dot com’ phenomenon and Y2K issues in late 1990s suddenly spiked the demand for skilled labor and developed countries opened the flood gates for temporary immigration of skilled labor.    

Now, integration of global labor pool caused by accelerated technological trends has started to create more division of labor leading to more specialization.  Global organizations are now in need of highly skilled or talented workers.  Rising wealth in Asian countries, demographic shifts (graying of workers in developed world) and lowering of barriers to set up a ‘for profit’ enterprise worldwide (both due to technology and government policies in the countries world wide), will only increase the competition for ‘Talented’ labor.   Interesting observation in Economist about the World in Flux, talks how the “market for talented people is increasingly fierce – and global”.  Here are some of the latest statistics and trends from the article.

• Currently 3% of the world population lives in foreign countries
• In Europe Schengen area – which allows passport-free movement of labor is being expanded to include more countries in Eastern Europe
• Serious debate currently in Europe on how to attract more skilled foreign workers
• Britain is going to implement “Point system” similar to Australia, New Zealand and Canada to attract young skilled foreign workers
• Temporary workers program is being packaged as “circular migration” in the rich countries to make it more palatable for the voters
• Booming Asia is attracting highly skilled Westerners (I think this trend will only accelerate and create a brain drain in the developed countries for the first time!)

According to the article “it will become normal for well educated to spend some part of the year in some one else’s country”.  The question I have is: Are we becoming nomadic again?  In some sense globalization is slowly erasing the country boundaries.   There is always the risk of backlash due to terrorism and jingoism.  But in the long run I believe economic incentives for globalization far outweigh the risks associated with it and the talented people will be on the move!

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Globalization, a process that is still going on, has lowered the barrier for large organizations to expand and hire the right resources irrespective of their location. The employees and the customers are now culturally diverse and are challenging the ‘ethno centric’ corporate culture. Due to these new emerging realities the complexity and unpredictability for IT development and the implementation has increased exponentially.

Ashby’s law of requisite variety, states that the internal complexity of an organization should match the complexity of the external environment. Large Global Organizations seem to have taken Ashby’s law to their heart and have instituted overly complex business processes and well as complex hierarchal and matrix organizational structure. The downside of adding layers of complexity to an organization is that it slows down the process of decision making. Everyone in the organization wants to do the right thing and more resources are spent to systematize analysis process that aids decision making. These check and balances create an organization culture that penalizes ‘off the cuff risk taking mentality’. Large organizations get muddled in ‘analysis paralyses’ and are not willing to take quick decisions. Hence organizations become slower as they become global.  

Globalization is a double edged sword. Accelerated globalization has lowered the barriers to entry and new competitors emerge at a faster rate. Keeping track of new and emerging competitors by the established companies is becoming an impossible task. Just a few years back, none of the motor companies in Detroit or in Japan would have anticipated a competition from India. Tata Motor Company is that company. It is in an advanced negotiation phase with Ford Motor Company to buy beleaguered Land Rover and Jaguar arm from them. Tata also recently released world’s cheapest car. Because of accelerated competition due to globalization organization cannot afford to move at a slower pace. Their products and priorities should be constantly shifting to take advantage of emerging trends and customer preferences just to survive.

So, even though Globalization magnifies complexity, the global organization cannot deal with that complexity by creating more complexity within. That will slow them down. The managers and executive need to go against the conventional wisdom of Ashby’s law and simplify business process and simplify decision making processes. Granted some level of complexity is required. I am not disputing Ashby’s law is flawed, but the focus should not be to overly complicate everything. The new focus by the organization should be on Simplicity – Problems once identified should be attacked directly.

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Michael Porter’s ground breaking HBR article in 1979 on Five Competitive Forces called “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” has been revised by the author after about three decades. His new work not only updates and extends but also reaffirms his findings. You can find the article in its entirety here. You can also listen to an interview with Michael Porter. A link to his interview is here.

In my view Michael Porter drives home an important point in his interview. Rivalry with the competitors does not need to be zero sum game. Most of the competition is focused on price and market segment gain. This invariable accelerates the move towards the commoditization of the product. This in the short run appears good for the consumers (because they get a good price) but in the long run its bad for them (because they will be left with no choice as many of the competitors will be driven away by the intense competition and the product will be a commodity product). This is the kind of environment when any competitive advantage is meaningless because the competition will imitate it eventually. That’s the assumption Nicholas Carr makes in his argument for “IT Doesn’t Matter”. BTW, he has written a new book The Big Switch (I have not read it yet but will read it soon). In a commoditized world, where perfect market is at work, price is the only tangible factor that balances supply and demand. Hence no need for IT to pursue differentiation.

According to Porter it does not have to be that way. So instead of mindless competition based on the price, multiple rivals can be successful by competing on different aspects of customer needs. This is the big take away from the revised Michael Porter’s Five Competitive Forces article. He calls this new competitive model as positive sum game where firms compete based on their core competency not to gain market share but to carve out a niche. Consumers will be willing to pay a price premium to get that level of ‘customized’ product/service. This is how everyone wins. In this scenario the business process which is based on firm’s core competency is going to be different for different competitors. And IT can play a major role in automating those core business processes. Positive sum competition is the basic assumption where IT can and will Matter.

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Two online articles Is the Enterprise Afraid of Web 2.0? and Why CEOs Are Afraid of Social Media investigate interesting reaction by the Traditional Firms on the rise of collaborative tools and social media. On the superficial level, executives and CIOs seem enthusiastic about wikis, blogs and social networking and have shown willingness to embrace this new development. You will see lot of 2.0 slapped to everything conventional and executives are pounding their chest as to how they have unshackled new ways of harnessing collaborative power within their organization. But at a deeper level, the traditional firms are downright scared of this new development. Externally they need to deal with the following changes:

• On a competitive landscape, new competitors will begin to emerge unconventionally due to lowering of barriers to collaborate and this will get more and more difficult for the traditional companies to keep track of their new competitors.
• The role of producers and consumers is beginning to blur and merge because of collaborative technology and is creating a new breed of prosumers. Traditional Organizations need a new set of rules to manage prosumers.

Internally the organization needs to restructure itself radically (read my blog on Why Traditional Organizations fail to leverage Web 2.0 technologies).  From the article Why CEOs are afraid of Social Media: “To believers and practitioners of traditional top-down, command-and-control, for-me-to-know-and-you-to-find-out management (which is to say most of the people who run large business organizations–even those who talk a good participatory game), blogs, wikis, social networking sites are IEDs littered along the road to organizational stability…” and according to the article Is the Enterprise Afraid of Web 2.0? “Web 2.0 challenges the core assumptions about information in the corporation—who gets it, who owns it, and who has power because they have it. And that’s a really scary thing for people used to controlling it…”

There you have it. To integrate social media and collaborative technologies, the traditional organization need to go through some drastic changes in their internal structure. Just by changing Enterprise to Enterprise 2.0 superficially will not enable the organization to harness the collaborative energy within the organization or with the prosumers. Traditional Firms will be challenged seriously by new and emerging competitors if they do not radically alter their power structure and control of information to take advantage of Web 2.0.

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Professor Donald Marchand of IMD in his article Realizing IT Values: A Shared Responsibility between Senior Managers and the CIO gives an interesting perspective on how to make IT matter. Check out the Senior Manager and CIO leadership Matrix below which shows how to make IT Matter to an organization.

Basic premise of the article is that “IT and knowledge capabilities embedded in strategy and business model are too important to be left to CIO alone. For most companies competing globally in service or industrial products businesses, the use of knowledge embedded in their people, information about products, customers and operations, and IT applications and competencies can inhibit or enhance competitive success.”

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