Scott Driggers is a master at
finding different roads that
lead to the same destination, something he’s had to do
as he’s opened offices in other
countries.
In 2001, the co-founder and
CEO of Gemini Mobile
Technologies Inc. established his
company in Silicon Valley and
Japan, and the wireless software
company has since added a
third office in China. His greatest
challenge with those locations is
getting 150 employees across
three cultures to achieve a common vision to move the company forward, and he frequently
meets with the company’s leaders in each region to discuss the
specific challenges they face.
“You have to be frank and
honest and create an environment where the senior management team feels comfortable
talking about that,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with
Driggers about how to use different methods to achieve the
same goal and how to know
which method to use when.
Q. How do you plan a strategy that works across different cultures?
One of the key points would
be, ‘Where’s the starting point?’
If you start with collaborative
management — soliciting ideas
from the other senior managers
— you need to start at a point
that is relevant to them and the
context of their environment.
In the U.S., we might come up
with a list of draft ideas. The
CEO might come to his team and
say, ‘Here are five goals we’re
thinking about for this year. Let’s
brainstorm around that.’
In Japan, you would collaborate from the bottom up. You
would let the managers know,
‘Get together with your team.
Bring to me what you think the
top challenges or goals are for
the upcoming year.’ So the managers there would go to their junior team members, who would
solicit ideas. And when it comes
back down in Japan, people have
all felt they have participated.
In the U.S., it would be OK for
the senior managers to come up
with some specific ideas, then
explain that to the team members and allow them to have
their buy-in.
Q. How do you execute the strategy in each culture?
We may have a goal in
Japan, which would be
very similar to the goal in
the U.S. The way we
might approach that in
the U.S. is ask a junior
person to write up a strategy on paper, some targets, get together at a
meeting, logically go
through A, B, C, D, then
call the meeting closed
and everybody goes out
and executes.
In Japan, we would
spend a lot more time
upfront. There would be
a larger meeting; there might be
20 to 25 people involved
depending on the size of the
project. You might bring a vendor or a partner or a customer
to the meeting. You might have
to go through a number of these
meetings. It’s not a linear
process to reach consensus; it’s
a very circular process.
It would seem very frustrating,
but the value system in Japan is,
we spend more time upfront,
but then the execution is a lot
faster on the back end because
there are fewer unknowns to
resolve along the way.
But as an American, you just
say, ‘Hey, let’s just get the idea;
we’ll solve things as we go
along.’
Both approaches are OK; you
just need to recognize what’s
going to work in that environment. You would create a lot of
stress if you tried to fit one of
those processes into the other
location.
