3 ms·

Work culuture is very different in the many countries and are in line with the gernal culture. Based in Europe, Germany, we had this when we had meetings with

Work culuture is very different in the many countries and are in line with the gernal culture. Based in Europe, Germany, we had this when we had meetings with chipmanufacturers in Japan vs. USA. So when a company comes from one culture into another another it always has a learning curve. Even when you employ local people helping you to adopt to the local culture. Because you have still managers in the other cultur with their expectations. I learned that also from Daimler/Mercedes Benz. When they startet to copy their manufacturing plant from Germany into the USA, they had many quality problems and all kind of problems. Over the years there was a learning curve to adopt to the US work culture. So they still don't have only about a 2/3 output compared to the very same manufcaturing plants based in Germany. While Asian companies have much higher working culture than Germany, I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers.

bob1029 5y ago
> I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers. When I worked at Samsung, there was virtually always friction between the Korean and American stakeholders. It was something we learned to tolerate though and eventually these differences did bring a lot of combined value. The general theme was something like - Korea uses American talent to shake up processes and innovate in ways they would be difficult to approach on cultural grounds. For instance, directly challenging an incorrect idea from your manager's manager. This would be a standard Monday morning activity for any native Texan/American working at SAS. It may initially cause an uproar (why didn't you notify xyz first... etc.), but it always got the ball rolling on a quick resolution and left an implicit obligation to review why certain management chain links were skipped over in the first place. On the other hand, Korea brought a degree of consistency/discipline in their process engineering that staggered many of us. Virtually everyone balked at this stuff initially, but we grew to understand the value over time. The language barrier was the hardest thing from the American perspective. I feel like many of us would have had an easier time if all of the documentation wasn't originally developed in Korean. Automatic translation tech was not able to help back in the day, so your next best bet was to find a Korean who worked in your office area to help you out. Needless to say, ad-hoc human translation services were hard to come by, especially if one didn't want to feel abusive about it.

bob1029 5y ago

> I assume the experience at first is horrible for the Asian managers. When I worked at Samsung, there was virtually always friction between the Korean and American stakeholders. It was something we learned to tolerate though and eventually these differences did bring a lot of combined value. The general theme was something like - Korea uses American talent to shake up processes and innovate in ways they would be difficult to approach on cultural grounds. For instance, directly challenging an incorrect idea from your manager's manager. This would be a standard Monday morning activity for any native Texan/American working at SAS. It may initially cause an uproar (why didn't you notify xyz first... etc.), but it always got the ball rolling on a quick resolution and left an implicit obligation to review why certain management chain links were skipped over in the first place. On the other hand, Korea brought a degree of consistency/discipline in their process engineering that staggered many of us. Virtually everyone balked at this stuff initially, but we grew to understand the value over time. The language barrier was the hardest thing from the American perspective. I feel like many of us would have had an easier time if all of the documentation wasn't originally developed in Korean. Automatic translation tech was not able to help back in the day, so your next best bet was to find a Korean who worked in your office area to help you out. Needless to say, ad-hoc human translation services were hard to come by, especially if one didn't want to feel abusive about it.