Global Services Blog

Globalization Wisdom Series: Secret #2

This is the third in a series of an excerpt from the newly published book by Atul Vashistha, Globalization Wisdom: The Seven Secrets of Great Globalizers.

Business transformation is one way that great globalizers leverage services globalization to create competitive advantage. Services globalization should now constitute an important part of the strategic plan of any firm. As I have said before, if your three-year or even one-year business plan doesn’t include the globalization of services, throw it out and rewrite it or you’ll be written off. That may sound harsh, but in today’s competitive business world services globalization is no longer an option that a few elite companies take; it is a business imperative for any company that wishes to survive and flourish, especially in this economy.

As discussed in Secret #1, services globalization is much more than offshore outsourcing. It is the complete embracing of cross-border operations as a means to reduce costs, improve quality, and enable business growth. It is also a means for business transformation.

And that’s the second secret of successful globalizers: Welcome globalization as a transformation lever.  Companies that have really embraced the idea of globalization as a transformation lever see it as a way to do business differently. They use it as a lever to, for example, change the way they keep in touch with their customers, launch new products, and even treat their employees.

Successful globalizers see that globalization is about more than cost savings and they ask themselves: What can globalization do for my business in addition to reducing costs?  How can I leverage it to build competitive advantage? Once they figure out the answer, they act quickly to realize it.

There are six steps to leveraging transformation opportunities in services globalization:

o   Generating solid leadership commitment. A successful business transformation—especially one as highly visible and potentially disruptive as globalization—requires the cooperation, buy-in, and commitment of an organization’s employees, from the top to the bottom.

o   Developing a new organizational design and structure. Specifically, the organization must define the new roles for the global delivery centers and redefine the roles for existing centers—developing new operating models that account for new jobs and work structures, performance management systems and governance teams.

o   Collaboratively mapping out and executing change management. Here, change management involves helping existing team members to become resilient, enable knowledge transfer, engage resource planning and communicate.

o   Communicating effectively. Effective communication involves planning for the human impact of the change and identifying potential points of resistance as well as developing a plan to accommodate that impact and deal with that resistance.

o   Educating and developing new competencies. The education process should begin with the identification of training needs and development of a training curriculum for both the existing onshore and the new global organizations.

o   Redesigning business processes to include automation, new onshore/offshore interactions, knowledge management, and other support systems and to manage increasingly complex business networks. Sometimes process redesign involves thinking about business practices in an entirely new way.

A few years ago, Electronic Arts (EA) began to realize that they needed innovation from outside the U.S. to address increasingly large client bases in Asian and European markets. They asked: How do I grow my business in Asia where the typical U.S.-type PC console mode doesn’t work? Globalization, for them, was about addressing the market in a whole different way. Now, they have facilities in China and India and leverage partners in Ukraine, Vietnam, China, India, Russia and other such locations.

Plantronics CEO Ken Kannappan told me how he looks for the unique advantages that each potential location will offer. “Europe, for example, is at the forefront of Bluetooth® technology, so that’s where we develop those products. China is a far more cost-effective location for some processes, compared to California, so we have functions done there, too. It’s natural to get those competency centers where you can get a rich trove of talent of the most cost-effective process.” I heard similar stories from Yahoo, Oracle and Google engineering executives.

Genpact, formerly Gecis, succeeded in its global business transformation initiatives in part because of the solid leadership commitment and buy-in that started at the top with CEO Jack Welch. Gecis began in India as a small operation and became one of the largest offshore operations in the world. Early on, top-level managers created a governance team with clearly defined strategic and tactical objectives to guide Gecis in its transformation process. Eventually the governance team, still fully supported by top-level management, expanded its focus to include increasing the company’s operational complexity. It was that type of enduring commitment, combined with the leadership mandate handed down from the top that allowed Gecis to leverage services globalization as a business transformation agent and be the successful global services firm, Genpact, today.

HSBC Holdings plc (HSBC) is a good example of an organization that developed a new organizational design and structure in order to facilitate its global business transformation. Six years after opening its first offshore operating centers in China, HSBC had established offshore operations in ten Asian countries. That globalization was coordinated by a group called the Global Processing Team, which evolved from a small team reporting to the company’s UK Senior Manager for Personal Financial Services to a strategic division of its own that reports directly to the Group CEO.

The emergence of an overarching governance group to guide HSBC in its newly expanded global endeavors—and the flexible expansion of the group itself—allowed HSBC to take full advantage of the business transformation opportunities presented by the company’s globalization. As they undertook global sourcing and transformation, leaders like P&G not only focused on effective knowledge transfer but also worked to ensure that 99.5% of their affected staff was placed with the outsourcers or alternate employers. Other firms such as Schneider Electric made sure that cultural training was done at both ends to enhance mutual understanding and collaboration.

Effective communication is the fourth critical step to successful business transformation.  E-Loan found that by communicating effectively, openly and honestly that it built trust relationships with its clients and it educated them on the benefits of services globalization, in turn allowing the company to reap the cost savings and other benefits it had envisioned for its global business transformation.

In many cases, the transformative opportunity in globalization is the ability to focus on core competencies. Group VP and CIO Ron Kifer explains that globalization allowed Applied Materials to transform his organization, by becoming focused on those core competencies that added competitive value.

“Services globalization provides us with the opportunity to take all those me-too capabilities that don’t add any value to the business and move them to where they can be most effectively supplied, where we can take advantage of the more mature processes, metrics and capabilities of our strategic partners and refocus our entire internal team on real value-added core competencies,” he says.

Because globalization increases the complexity of an organization’s business networks it is vital that those networks be optimally managed to ensure the highest level of efficiency in the delivery cycle. Otherwise, the potential benefits of a global business transformation could easily be eroded by new inefficiencies.

Through these six critical steps, many companies have demonstrated successful business transformations through services globalization. What began as a purely cost-saving proposition has now proven itself as a fully transformative lever—provided that organizations use it as such.

In other words, if an organization goes into a globalization initiative with only cost savings in mind and does not take all of the six steps highlighted here, the company may or may not achieve significant cost savings, and likely will not see the other benefits of a full-scale business transformation.

Successful globalizers, in contrast, take on a globalization initiative with cost savings and other benefits—perhaps improved efficiency, increased capacity and quality of service delivery—in mind. They expect globalization to be a transformation lever for their business and they take the six steps necessary to ensure the realization of that transformative aspect.

Successful globalizers understand that, as Andrew Grove (Former CEO & Chairman of Intel) said, “A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”

Atul Vashistha is Founder & Chairman of Neo Advisory (formerly neoIT), a leading management consultancy since 1999, focused on independent, objective and actionable advice to enterprises that seek to transform their organizations by capitalizing on outsourcing and globalization. He is also Founder of NeoGroup, a firm focused on managing, monitoring and improving supply relationships.  His latest venture is BestOutsourcingJobs.com, an online job portal focused on outsourcing careers. He can be reached at atul@vashistha.com. 

Globalization Wisdom Series: Secret #1

By Atul Vashistha

This is an excerpt from the newly published book by Atul Vashistha, Globalization Wisdom: The Seven Secrets of Great Globalizers.

One underlying fact successful globalizers understand is that services globalization has come a long way from offshore outsourcing and continues to evolve every day. As services globalization evolves, new opportunities arise. The reality, as Applied Materials GVP and CIO Ron Kifer sees it, is that a company can embrace, leverage and be a part of that globalization or it can become its victim.

“It’s greatly important that global organizations understand that we’re moving to a globalized economy and understand that they have to have the flexibility to be able to do the work wherever the work is more cost-effectively done and wherever the work is high-touch to the customer. That’s why we’re pushing globalization as a key strategic initiative in our organization because we want to be on the leading edge of that,” Kifer explains.

That concept of flexibility—of being open to new opportunities—leads into the first secret of successful globalizers: Embrace globalization. Successful globalizers welcome services globalization into their organizations with open arms; they allow themselves to be constantly learning, constantly open to the new opportunities—and challenges—that the evolution of services globalization presents. Embracing globalization means looking at the big picture; considering every corner of the world as a potential sourcing destination and thinking about the unique advantages and opportunities that each location offers.

Embracing globalization is also an important stepping-stone in the development of a services globalization strategy. Whatever may come, organizations must be always mindful that they are embracing globalization for all that it may offer.

Model for Embracing Globalization

The basic model for embracing globalization has four components: 

1)    Embrace globalization across the business.

2)    Ask whether your processes should be performed better elsewhere.

3)    Mandate the globalization of processes that can be performed better elsewhere.

4)    Keep an eye on the future.

When the offshore outsourcing trend first caught hold of U.S. businesses, most firms saw it as an opportunity to reduce costs through labor arbitrage. But as the movement has evolved—as offshore outsourcing has become services globalization—companies have looked past cost considerations.

In fact, flexibility is even more important than cost in services globalization. “If cost was your primary consideration, I think that you’re going to fall short of meeting the real objectives,” Kifer says.

“The real objective of a sound globalization strategy is to have a flexible workforce and global model and to realize that the markets, customers and competitive environment is going to change, which will require a company to maintain competitiveness to be able to do work in a different model in a different place over time," he adds. And that’s why successful globalizers embrace it across the business.

Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft, once said that, “If we are not realistic about what we’re good at, then there is a chance of going backwards in the face of further competition.” In asking why each process cannot be done elsewhere, an organization must be realistic about which processes are a) core competencies and b) performed most efficiently in-house.

There’s no room for egoism in this process: to survive, a business must be willing to strip itself bare, down to only those processes that are true core competencies. Every business function should be on the table for globalization until it’s taken off, and only because it can be performed most efficiently in-house domestically.

Mandating the globalization of processes that cannot be done elsewhere is an important part of stripping an organization bare. Within a company, some people will resist globalization. Successful globalizers neither back down from that resistance nor tolerate it. Effective change management that secures top-level commitment and buy-in and addresses points of resistance is a critical part of a successful globalization initiative.

Companies must be constantly vigilant and always prepared to scrap the old way of doing business to take advantage of new opportunities. It used to be that to engage in this sort of flexibility made companies leaders. Today it is a business imperative. As Thomas Friedman wrote in The World is Flat, “If you want to grow and flourish in a flat world, you better learn how to change and align yourself with it.”

Companies that have embraced globalization, including leading companies such as GE, Aviva, Texas Instruments, Google and Proctor & Gamble, have found large pools of productive labor in offshore destinations. But they have found something more in offshore employees as well: top engineering talent, attention to detail and quality, sophisticated mid-level and senior-level management, and even a level of brand identity and loyalty that rivals that of their domestic employees.

The most successful globalizers are companies who have visionary leaders at their helms. Steve Bandrowczak, former Lenovo CIO, says that trying to succeed in globalization without visionary leaders is like trying to bake a delicious cake with stale ingredients. “I don’t care how you mix it,” he explains, “you’re going to come out with a bad cake.”

Visionary leaders—the ones at the helm of globalization since the beginning of globalization—saw the big picture as it emerged: how the playing field expanded from the U.S. and Western Europe to encompass India, the Philippines, China, Ireland, Poland, Chile, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and more. These visionary leaders understood, even in the early days of globalization, that global sourcing would become a key competitive advantage. They saw that global sourcing could not only allow them to reduce their costs, but it could also allow them to grow more quickly, to cut time to market, and even to improve efficiency and raise quality levels.

Embracing globalization is the first secret of successful globalizers not because it is necessarily the most important, but because it lays the foundation for the six secrets that follow. Indeed, we’ll see the principles that underlie this first secret pop up throughout the next chapters.

Embracing globalization is about seeing the big picture. It’s about looking beyond a single destination or a particular set of processes. It’s about an attitude change; about bringing the principles of services globalization into the business and embracing them in every decision that’s made.

Atul Vashistha is Founder & Chairman of Neo Advisory (formerly neoIT), a leading management consultancy since 1999, focused on independent, objective and actionable advice to enterprises that seek to transform their organizations by capitalizing on outsourcing and globalization. He is also Founder of NeoGroup, a firm focused on managing, monitoring and improving supply relationships.  His latest venture is BestOutsourcingJobs.com, an online job portal focused on outsourcing careers. He can be reached at atul@vashistha.com. 

Globalization Wisdom Series: Introduction

By Atul Vashistha

Continual technological, social and economic advancements propel us further into a global business world in which business executives in Boise, Idaho can teleconference with business executives in Beijing, China as if they were sitting across the table from each other. Entire departments now work remotely from home offices and other locations as the rule rather than the exception. And with the cropping up of freelance online employment markets that serve as intermediaries between businesses and services workers, the ability to globalize is more accessible to businesses and individuals of all sizes.

The initial wave of globalization in the late 1990s and early 2000s was about taking advantage of lower labor costs in offshore destinations. With the rapid, inexpensive transmission of data available, businesses can leverage the time zone difference with India to achieve 24-hour workdays. But those opportunities were only the beginning of what services globalization offers. Today's successful globalizers understand that there are a number of additional advantages to services globalization and embrace them where other not so successful leaders do not. Furthermore, they understand that they can't afford not to.

Successfully implemented, globalization can be a means for shoring up competitive advantage as organizations take advantage not only of lower labor costs but also diverse intellectual capabilities, growth and quality enhancement opportunities, as well as the ability to get products to market more quickly. Successful globalizers that embrace a global and flexible mentality are constantly looking for opportunities to improve—whether those opportunities present themselves in Michigan, Mexico, Malaysia, or anywhere in between. Much more than bottom-line labor costs and longer workdays, successful globalization means a more successful business, period. 

Some organizations and leaders have leveraged those opportunities successfully. Most have not. Successful globalizers realize—while many not so successful organizations and leaders do not—that services globalization is not a one-shot deal. It is still a relatively new way of doing business; a new part of the business lifecycle that requires not only diligent planning, but also ongoing management. And it requires strong commitment from the organization’s leadership.

Not surprisingly, the companies and leaders that are successful globalizers engage in similar practices—key practices that other companies regardless of size can emulate. In my two decades of consulting major corporations on global sourcing I’ve seen similar trends and patterns among firms that have succeeded in services globalization and have come to recognize that there are seven best practices in successful services globalization. This and the next seven articles are book excerpts are from my upcoming book, Globalization Wisdom: The 7 Secrets of Great Globalizers. They are about sharing those leading practices from successful globalizers, the seven secrets.

The seven articles that follow expound the key attitudes and behaviors that successful globalizers share—and offer concrete guides for replicating their success within your own organization. I’ve paired what I know from my work with Neo Advisory (Formerly neoIT), as an advisor to firms looking to globalize their services, with sage advice and stories from executives at organizations that are successful globalizers, many of whom were among the first to globalize services, including Applied Materials, Lenovo, Virgin, Cisco, FedEx and Plantronics. The end result is a book designed specifically for C-level executives at organizations positioned at all stages of global maturity.

Road Map

Perhaps one of the most fundamental secrets of successful globalizers is that services globalization, like most business initiatives, is a lot about trying, learning and retrying. By understanding the paths that other organizations have taken to become successful globalizers, the learning curve on your own path will hopefully be shorter.

In the course of the next seven articles (book excerpts), we’ll highlight the following seven secrets to successful globalizers:

Secret #1: Embrace Globalization

Secret #2: Welcome Globalization as a Transformation Lever

Secret #3: Adopt a Lifecycle Approach

Secret #4: Align Business and Globalization Objectives

Secret #5: Assign the Best People

Secret #6: Implement a Strong Governance Model

Secret #7: Embrace a Continuous Improvement Mindset

Atul Vashistha is Founder & Chairman of Neo Advisory (formerly neoIT), a leading management consultancy since 1999, focused on independent, objective and actionable advice to enterprises that seek to transform their organizations by capitalizing on globalization. He is also Founder of NeoGroup, a firm focused on providing outsourced management of supply relationships and governance. His latest venture is BestOutsourcingJobs.com, an online job portal focused on outsourcing careers.

Calling All Job Seekers & Employers/Recruiters!

We are proud to announce that the largest association of outsourcing professionals, IAOP, has adopted us as their exclusive job site.  We are looking forward to feedback from you on how we can make this a better resource for you.  Please send in your ideas!

Atul

Founder, Best Outsourcing Jobs

Chairman, Neo Advisory (Formerly neoIT) & Neo Group

Checking Out the Employer's Corporate Culture

By Rusty Weston

How much do you know about the corporate culture of a prospective employer? Until you work there, you're in the dark, right? By reputation, an outsourcing company might be known as a meat grinder or a smaller firm as a cold and unfriendly place. Yet how much of this reputation is true and how much of it is sour grapes?

It's imperative to discover the true nature of corporate culture before you accept a job offer. If the company likes go-getters, but you're a slow-starter, look elsewhere. If the company likes consensus builders, but you shoot from the hip, maybe it's not a good fit for you.

Unless you're equipped with science-fiction powers of precognition, your options for evaluating the culture as a job candidate or job seeker appear limited to talking to people and power-reading on the web. The obvious place to start, the careers section of the corporate site, is usually a dead end. There you can read the type of gloss that belongs on a Hallmark greeting card. If reading about the CEO's family values melts your heart, so be it, but I'd rather know if the company nurtures or chews up its young. And to get that kind of information you have to dig - deep.

Headhunters know this better than job seekers do. "There's no point in a client attracting an individual who will not enjoy the environment," says Andrew Kris, partner, Borderless Executive Search in Belgium. "If the [new hire] isn't successful in the job at the end of the day this will be considered a failure by the headhunter."

If you have the advantage of working with a recruiter here's what to check out:

• Before the recruiter talks to you, the recruiting firm should spend time with its corporate client and conduct a thorough assessment of the company's culture. What is it like to work there and which types of employees are most likely to fit in and succeed?
• The culture of the company should be embedded into the job description, says Kris. If it's not mentioned that could mean that the recruiter doesn't know.
• Once there appears to be a good match and a job offer seems imminent, arrange to talk to your prospective boss's direct reports. "Ask what it's like to work here and what this guy is like to work for?" suggests Kris. You need answers "before you make a life-changing decision."

Of course, not everyone has the advantage of working with a recruiter (or headhunter if you prefer); many workers, especially those just starting out are likely to respond to ads or choose a company that they know or admire. To peel back the onion, Jac Fitz-enz, Founder & CEO, Human Capital Source in Silicon Valley suggests looking at case studies of companies that do an excellent job of managing talent. Beyond newsstand publications such as Fast Company, Forbes, Businessweek and Fortune, try the Harvard Business Review, HR trades and journals, such as Workforce Management (though not all of it is free). "Those would be the first ones I would look for if I wanted to make a change and find a company that's somewhat enlightened," he says.

Another option is networking with people who either currently or recently worked in the organization. Mining social media sites such as Linked-In or Xing among others can provide you with a fast and easy source for those contacts. You may be surprised to learn that employees and former employees are only too happy to receive your unsolicited e-mail and to offer you guidance.

And yet, even in the Internet age, the sniff test still applies. "There are all kinds of non-verbal clues when you walk in the door," says Fitz-enz. He remembers the first time he walked through the lobby doors at Hewlett-Packard's corporate headquarters: "There was a feeling about the place, an aura about it ... and it wasn't a little cozy room."

Fitz-enz says that you can sense the culture in the energy of the people and in the look of the worker's eyes. "You just have to pay attention," he says.

"Ultimately," says Borderless Executive Search's Kris, "it's cultural adaptability that makes for success in any new organization you move to."

Blog courtesy of My Global Career.

Why Job Seekers Should Read Annual Reports

By Rusty Weston

In this post-Enron era of mandated transparency, corporate annual reports offer greater insights to a broader range of stakeholders, not just investors.

Though annual reports suffer from an excess of glossy prose and disclosures, savvy corporations realize that it's not just financial analysts and investors reading between the lines. Increasingly, job candidates are mining annual reports to better equip themselves for interviews and to gauge the corporate culture.

"The strongest candidates are the ones that dig into annual reports," says Lori Blackman, president of DNL Global, a Dallas-based recruiting firm. "The job candidates' objective should be to help grow the company."

Here are some questions job seekers should keep in mind when reading an annual statement:

• Is the company profitable? Which lines of business turn a profit and which underdeliver?
• What are the company's biggest business or market-driven challenges?
• Does the company focus solely on executive compensation or does it tout an equity distribution plan for rank and file workers, too?
• Does the company discuss its commitment to talent management?
• Does the company express a preference for home-grown rather than acquired talent?
• Does the company have a commitment to global diversity? Is this commitment reflected in their choices of directors and executives?
• Does the company have a viable global growth strategy?
• Is the company committed to building greener, more energy efficient operations?
• Does the company support volunteerism and creative philanthropy?

Profitability. The good news is you don't have to be an MBA or financial analyst to make sense of the numbers. There are a wide range of articles on the web and various books available about how to read financial statements and annual reports.

If a company is privately held, it is not required to disclose its financial results, however, few companies keep their success a state secret and there may be press releases or newsletters available that share the information.

Sharing the wealth. Few companies take the opportunity to talk about what they do for employees, apart from discussions about funding pensions or other required disclosures. This is a mistake. Job seekers are potential stakeholders who want to know what's in it for them, too.

Talent Management. In General Electric Co's annual report, Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman & CEO, devotes considerable space to human capital initiatives. "We don't want thematic leaders who move from subject to subject," Immelt writes. "They can't build. All of our compensation and succession planning values long-term commitment." I don't think you have to be a Kremlinologist to read between the lines: GE wants depth, rather than breadth, in its leaders.

Home grown preference. Honeywell states in its annual report that 65% of its top positions are filled with internal candidates. As an outsider entering the organization, would you have a harder time than a long-time Honeywell employee of jumping to the next higher level within the organization?

Global Strategy. If the company lacks offices, customers or suppliers beyond its home country, it lacks a global strategy. A company that boasts of growing international revenue is committed to sustaining a global presence. Both Honeywell and GE, for instance, will see nearly half of corporate revenue come from outside of the U.S. this year.

Global Diversity. While GE is one of the standard-bearers for global growth and human capital investment, Pepsico is unrivaled for its commitment to global diversity. From its Indian CEO Indra Nooyi, to its "Ethnic Advisory Boards," to its discussion of diversity and ownership culture, Pepsi 's commitment is more than skin deep. Does the potential employer simply talk a good game?

Good Citizenship. Baxter touts its place on a list of "100 Best Corporate Citizens" by Corporate Responsibility Officer magazine. A wide range of employers engage in innovative philanthropic initiatives. Aflac, for instance, established a children's cancer center in Atlanta and sells 'plush' ducks to raise money for hospitals that treat children with cancer. Again, does the employer have anything to tout and if not, why not?

While you could ask a hiring manager or a recruiter many of these questions, assuming you're granted an interview, you might be better served to kick the tires first. If the company is committed to talent management - it's in the annual report. If it's not there, perhaps that should tell you something about the company.

Of course, annual reports are just one tool among many. Paul Zellner, Managing Director of Russell Reynolds, a recruiting firm in Chicago, recommends listening to replays of quarterly analyst calls for a discussion of key business issues facing the company. If you want to impress a hiring manager or recruiter, Zellner says, prepare yourself to express this idea: "This appears to be your [company's business] issues ... Here's where I have been helpful in solving these kinds of problems."

Reading annual statements, which are typically available in the investor section of a corporate website, is a bit drier than surfing business articles or corporate brochures. But, in effect, job seekers should view themselves as investors -potentially investing the best years of their lives in this company.

Blog courtesy of My Global Career.

Working Abroad is Less Foreign to Women

By Rusty Weston

Will working abroad fast-track your career? The answer has often been yes for men, but a question mark for women who used to be passed over for foreign assignments.

In the book Get Ahead by Going Abroad authors C. Perry Yeatman and Stacie Berdan contend that women are better suited for foreign assignments than men - and they have the results to prove it.

"It comes down to a couple of personality traits as well as skills," says Berdan. "Women have great communication skills, team building, and adaptability - the things we have noticed successful women overseas have." According to their research, "The success rate is 15-to-20 percent higher for women as opposed to men. That's pretty astounding."

A former media executive, Berdan says that her career blossomed as a result of a successful overseas assignment that began in her late 20s. Berdan, who consults multinationals on how to prepare employees for overseas assignments, moved to Hong Kong the day after she was married. Her "trailing spouse" to use the vernacular of globe-trotting executives, is a writer who could work from anywhere. Often it's the trailing spouse - particularly those that don't work - who torpedoes an otherwise invaluable career and life experience.

Berdan and Yeatman say that their personal experiences, combined with several hundred interviews in preparation for the book, revealed to them that women possess soft skills that can make a foreign assignment successful.  It's also true that these two network with a lot of successful people. Berdan's co-author, C. Perry Yeatman is a SVP of Kraft Foods, who had the experience of working in Singapore, Moscow, and London.  

In researching the book, "83% of the people said [their foreign assignment] was successful," says Berdan.  "Everyone said it was hard and had their share of failures along the way. Many were very personal stories a lot to do with gender stereotyping and female roles around the world. "

Berdan's former employer, WPP is an example of a company that understands how to manage globally-distributed employees. "They have 70,000 employees all over the place and they treat them like global employees, not expats," she explains.  She says that unfortunately many companies have HR departments that lack empathy for workers on foreign assignments. "If you have never been in the situation," of working overseas, she says, "It's hard to understand how crazy" life abroad can be.

How do you know if you're ready to embark on a global career or a foreign assignment? The authors suggest that you ask yourself these questions first - if you can answer yes or even "somewhat" to most of them,  you may have right aptitude to succeed.

Do You Have the Right Stuff?
(From Get Ahead By Going Abroad - Harper Collins)

• Do you have a real sense of adventure? Do you enjoy the unknown, the different, and the unexpected?
• Do you operate well outside your comfort zone, even if you are feeling alone and isolated from all things normal for you?
• Do you thrive on diversity - language, ethnicity, religion, currency, culture, social norms, foods, politics - lots of it and all at the same time?
• Do you consider yourself extremely flexible?
• Can you build relationships - even if you have to communicate in your or someone else's second language?
• Do you know how to really listen? Can you read between the lines and understand what is being said even if the faces you're reading look like blank pages - and vice versa, i.e., when the facial expressions are clear but the words are confusing?
• Can you handle failure and learn from it?  Can you keep it in perspective?  Do you have a sense of humor about it?

Blog courtesy of My Global Career.

Global Ready in Just One Day

By Rusty Weston

If you work in high-tech or pharma and collaborate with co-workers, customers, suppliers or partners located in other countries, there's an increasing likelihood that your company will offer you some form of training to help you master cross-cultural or virtual work challenges.

Beyond those two fields, however, it's hit-and-miss, according to top cultural trainers. Without the insights of cross-cultural training, many American managers - who often lack international travel or global business experience - face a heightened risk of project failure.

The return on investment in training global workers isn't always evident to senior management, many of whom have never played a globally collaborative role in the organization. "What I have learned is that it's extremely difficult to [initiate] formal training," says Natasha Crundwell, President of People Going Global, a Washington-D.C. cultural consulting firm. "In many cases executives may not see the need for structured training."

Yet, companies that hire third-party trainers typically approve group classes that last just one half day up to two days at most. Is some training better than none at all? Absolutely - I went through Berlitz training shortly before assuming a cross-cultural editorial management role in the fall of 2005. I came out of it with a better understanding of Indian culture, which improved my ability to absorb other information later. However, I felt eight hours was just scratching the surface.

"I would love two days of building and bonding and making it work but we're not given that," concedes Lu Ellen Schafer, president of Global Savvy in Palo Alto, Calif. She says the key takeaway, after eight hours, is this: "Most important is to get over the hump of not being able to communicate across cross-cultural or distance barriers. Once you get over that barrier than you can figure things out with international colleagues. "

The training sessions are typically jam-packed with interactive discussions, study guides, videos, and thick training manuals. "We look at whole thing from contrast and compare perspective," explains Crundwell. "By the end of eight hours we come up with a global communication protocol. It's just how to become a more aware communicator in a global workplace."

Even if senior executives don't see the ROI, the executives engaged in cross-culturally collaborative roles certainly value the information, says Crundwell. "There's a lot of awareness that they need this skill and there's an awareness that if they want to stay competitive that they have to work with cross-cultural peers."

Considering what's at stake for workers engaged in globally-collaborative roles, the wisest course of action is to start with one of these courses and then dive into the additional reading list to deepen your skills as needed.

Blog courtesy of My Global Career.

Bridging Cultural Gaps - Worth the Trouble?

By Rusty Weston

Ask anyone who has sourced or managed a globally distributed project. Collaborating with a customer, supplier, or co-worker located in another country typically brings more than you bargained for - a multicultural learning experience.

You can muddle through on your own or get help. Specialized trainers can heighten your cultural awareness and teach you about the tendencies and work styles of one culture compared to another. But there's a catch: Fostering multicultural awareness usually involves perpetuating generalizations.

Let's face it, cultural stereotypes often have more than grain of truth to them, but they also tend to rub people the wrong way. Is it possible to educate globally-collaborative workers about different cultures without making generalizations?

"People don't like to be generalized about," concedes Craig Storti, one of the leading cultural consultants. "And they especially don't like somebody from another culture doing it. What I say in my book and in my workshops is I'm describing how Indians come across to westerners - it's not how Indians see themselves."

Storti, the author of Figuring Foreigners Out, wrote that "a generalization can tell you at best how people from a particular culture may behave in a given situation but necessarily how they will behave ..."

Storti has written a book called Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap Between India and the West. While useful for westerners seeking to distribute work to India, the insights may vex Indian outsourcers - especially the ones contending that no such gap exists.

Naturally, the communication gap is unintentional. Take it from someone who misses his share of cultural cues, especially when I'm tired or under stress. "When Americans hear questions [from Indian citizens] they just answer them because they don't realize that they're polite ways of saying something," says Storti. "When an Indian asks 'Does that work for you'? It's not a question - it's a polite way of saying it doesn't work for me."

Storti explains that stereotyping is "what higher-order intelligence does - we have to put things into boxes or it doesn't make sense. And as long as you realize you're never going to meet the [stereo]type. In the end you have to listen to the person in front of you."

Are you better off knowing how people from other cultures view your culturally-driven communication style or behavior? Arguably yes. Then you have the possibility of anticipating gaps and meeting one another in the middle.

Blog courtesy of My Global Career.

Inviting Contributors

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- Atul Vashistha, Founder, Best Outsourcing Jobs Inc.