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TSMC has had brilliant success, but this kind of work culture tends to negatively affect creativity and agility. TSMC seems to have found some way to either avo
by trashtester 2y ago
TSMC has had brilliant success, but this kind of work culture tends to negatively affect creativity and agility. TSMC seems to have found some way to either avoid that or compensate for it, possibly by having the ability to hire only the top technical talent in the territory/country.
And moving forward, people are starting to realize the risk of having TSMC manufacture everything in Taiwan, given how little competition they have. If TSMC wouldn't start to move some of their production abroad, they would risk facing import restrictions to western countries or (as already happened) government subsidies to local fabs.
To retain their market share, they were probably forced to set up some fabs abroad.
In the end, I think it's really good for those new countries to have TSMC set up fabs in their countries, both since it guarantees that some production stays available in the case of a war, but also because the TSMC workers will gradually naturalize in the US or Europe and start to work for companies like Intel or ASML and contribute to crosspollination of ideas abilities.
Short term though, cultural conflicts is exactly what one would expect. It's probably very similar to what Western companies experienced when first setting up shops in China or India.
In the beginning Western managers would try to have the locals behave like Western employees when it came to initiative and willingness to "say it as it is" when managers were giving impossible orders.
Over time many would learn that finding really good local managers able to bridge the east/west culture gap could be really helpful.
I'm guessing TSMC will need to do the same thing. Find Western managers (for instance second generation Asians) able to understand both cultures, so they can deal with local employees the way they're used to while also able to work productively with upper management (who would presumably still be Taiwanese).