Why CCM?

Why is Cross-Cultural Management important today?

" You all know about Cross-Cultural Management. You are reading these lines thinking « another boring tips to do business abroad”. Well, I understand you do. Actually, I also started by reading those guide-books. At best, they were entertaining, at worse useless.

After all, you are neither an anthropologist studying lost civilisations nor a tourist curious of folklore: You are business people and you have one mission – to develop your enterprise.

Do we really care if the business card was given from the wrong hand or if your partner is taking off his jacket during negotiation? Of course not! And you are right.

Business is business after all. A big Mac is a Big Mac in New York, Peking, Paris or Moscow! You are right again. But hold on. It is not so true. The sandwich may be the same, but the environment is different. Did you notice the way the Mac Donald’s in Moscow are decorated? From Pulp Fiction you all know you can get beer in Paris’ Mac Donald’s, but do you know you can get Kwas here? So, things are different.

Why is that? For the sake of success. Of course you may be a large oil company with no Marketing department, no HRM, no Training policy, no corporate canteen, and still make tons of money.

But you can also be the one who looks just the same as this monolith, but do even better thanks to all these business innovations.
If all that (HRM, trainings, etc) are now common to all large companies in the West, it is first of all because it saves money on the long run.
But what about Cross-culture in Russia? Your company is doing well. 30% grow every year.

But aren’t you annoyed to be the subsidiary with the highest employees turnover? Isn’t it amazing that operating costs after several years are still so high? You make wonderful planning and still you have the feeling that your employees do not really get it completely?

It is normal; you experience a discrepancy in your corporate cultural identity. In other words, your co-workers do not share your natural understanding of what is a company.

And that is Cross-Cultural Management.

Each country has differences. Even multinational corporations are influenced by their HQs (except very few true trans-national companies). Toyota, Daimler Chrysler, Renault and Ford are all major players in the world; yet, working in each of them is different.

The new challenge, then, is to understand where you, your company and your employees here in Russia stand.

Coming from academic research, cross-cultural management theories help categorised the peculiarities of cultures, and consequently the peculiarities of the companies.

Your company is American, then without noticing it, your way of conducting business is influenced by what we call the guided missile culture: You are task, project orientated and the results are the first and last goals.

Russia is usually associated with a corporate culture dubbed Eiffel Tower (nothing to do with the French): It is tall, strong, task orientated and extremely hierarchical.

Therefore, it is more than likely that your employees, even with their best will, understand your Guided Missile management with an Eiffel Tower mind. And problems come from that.

We then help companies let their staff be aware of those hidden differences (we let the obvious differences for coffee breaks) in order to better work together and better understand where all are heading to.

If any points presented previously seem oddly similar to your everyday experience, we surely can provide you with the right, professional answers.

Have a good day."