It may appear well defined corporate culture can serve as a bridge over the stormy waters of acutely different cultures in the global organization. This is not necessarily the case.

Now let’s get this straight. There is a lot to be said for providing a shared context, shared values and a common set of behavioural guidelines. However, in order to ensure that this culture is not administered inappropriately, it is critical to ensure that the limitations of the culture are acknowledged. Paradoxically, it is only when these limitations are recognized that the corporate culture is most effective.

Here are some examples of behaviours which cannot be changed by one shared culture.

• When a culture prefers discretion to transparency, discretion will reign.
• When age dictates seniority, younger managers will not be respected.
• When delegation is seen as abdication, managers will be centralistic.
• Where loyalty to boss reigns supreme, teamwork in the western sense will falter.
• When people prefer relationships to process, process will remain “on paper”

Even if elevators, screen savers, bulletin boards, management training sessions, and other “enablers” push and promulgate such artifacts as transparency, teamwork, delegation,  process adherence, the impact of these efforts may be negative, because the culture quickly becomes a theocratic dictate. How does this happen?

Instead of acknowledging the limitations  of corporate culture, the corporate culture is often positioned like tenets of a religious creed by over-zealous HR managers and training staff, and then shoved down (or up) the appropriate body orifice of the staff with the passion of a CFO making budget cuts. This breeds deep scepticism and cynicism.

I work in the most acute diversity one can imagine and come from a very diverse personal background. My experience has taught me that deep relationships, cultural humility and a global mindset are as important if not more, than a set of artifacts in addressing the cultural differences in global organizing.

Follow me @AllonShevat

At the outset of the week,  I related to a lack of systematic initiation into organizational politics, resulting in talented and motivated people losing out to folks with more political acumen.

Then, I began a series of five short posts illustrating how to initiate managers for more political awareness in the post 2008 zoo.

The goal of these posts is not to prescribe behaviour, rather to illustrate a gamut of frequently observed political behaviours, both positive and negative. It is my belief that in the same way that young kids should not learn sex from watching porn stars, neither should young managers learn organizational politics by being screwed, or by listening to some idealistic consultant or coach describe organizational life as it “should” be.

The first example dealt with committment management in over committed organizations

The second example related to managing your boss.

Once again today, I will provide illustrative examples about how managers can be politically sensitized. We will look a a few particularly Machiavellian tactics in goal setting!

1) At face value, a manager should set reasonable goals and achieve them. If the results are outstanding, he should be rewarded and if the results are not achieved, lesson should be learned and corrective action should be taken. Easy stuff.

2) Yet goal setting can first and foremost a political process and a negotiated process of managing a boss’ and the organization’s expectations of its managers.

3) In highly political organizations, goal setting probably has a political script which is quite different from the real and more “functional” script. For example, the budget “exercise” from Oct-December may be a political script written for the “street” or for worried investors and nosy analysts. The “more realistic” goals become apparent based on the real world, which often is very “detached” from the budget exercise.

4) Politically astute managers either under promise and over-deliver, or under promise-then-negotiate rather than being too realistic upfront (to prevent undue pressure), or “throw out” promises to calm the budget planners and the CEO, only to gradually slip and provide excuses.

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In my previous post, I suggested that potential clients of OD be  “beware of optimistic, cheery consultants exuding “wow-wow we can do it”.  While there are times when optimism is useful,  a good organizational diagnosis and a solid implementation plan must factor in a lot of not-so-optimistic assumptions about human nature. Wearing “a smile you can see a mile”, is important for the trainers of the world, but not for an organizational consultant who you must trust to tell things as they are.”

In this post I want to spell out 4 more advantages of hiring pessimistic consultants.

1) It is very hard to change organizations.

I am 65 (now 71) years old and I have been “at it” for the longest time. The state of our practice is imperfect and there are many reasons for the massive resistance that change efforts encounter.

A more pessimistic consultant  is aware of the difficulties & will carefully chose where to apply pressure and where to back off. A cheery optimistic “yes we can” consultant will set unrealistic goals and either fail, or wallpaper over a serious problems in order to look good and display apparent effectiveness.

2) Within organizations, the chances are that  both the management team members and a perky HR business partner are promulgating good news, bombarding various management forums with optimistic forecasts/assessments.

The last thing a change program needs is an OD consultant, motivated by fear, to bullshit and play down the challenges that management and HR are ignoring.

3) Optimistic “yes we can” consultants come to be associated with the existing power structure and chances are that the troops will learn to mistrust them. Pessimistic consultants are more cynical, more pragmatic and may been seen as more trustworthy, which is a powerful asset to leverage.

4) Optimistic consultants tend to use “tools”, products and religious dogmas (in the organizational sense) to storm forward. Pessimistic consults generally are more eclectic and use whatever works; they are not in love with tools because in general, they have less rigid “belief” systems.

Here is a link for tips to manage pessimistic staff.

It is very common especially (but not only) in software development for the following dynamic to occur:

   1) A client goes shopping looking for a product that will vastly jump start competitiveness in a very short time frame.

   2) The clients “procurement department” pushes for very aggressive commitments from possible vendors, knowing full well that while vendors will “apparently” comply with what they asking for in order to win the business, there will be slips in delivery, quality and price of the what they have purchased.

   3) The vendors, competing to win the bid, over promise and under charge. They know full well that once they have their foot in the client’s door, they can ”manage the client” and renegotiate both the deliverables and the price (phased delivery).

Now, let us look what happens within the vendor organization. The Head of R&D (let’s call him Willie)  is given this commitment by Sales or the CEO; Willie sees his yearly bonus and perhaps his career depending upon the delivery of this “promise” to the client.

Willie puts massive pressure on his “engineering leads” to commit and the pressure gets “transferred” down to the trenches where the coders get even more pressure, because each layer has sandbagged. And the coders know full well that this commitment ain’t gonna happen.

Here culture comes into play.

• The folks who come from cultures where authority can be confronted will start pushing the obstacles, the hallucinatory  nature of the commitments and the bad news “up” to management.
• The folks who come from cultures where obedience is the norm will “feign” obedience, and drop discrete hints about what is going, and not going to be delivered.
• Folks who come from cultures where planning is a ritual will plan, plan and plan again.
• Folks who come from a culture of improvisation will start working without a clear spec.

When delivery dates approach and as the ugly truth surfaces that the promise to the client is going to be missed, there is a massive rupture of trust, caused both  by the aggressive promises themselves, severely exacerbated by the different ways that people from different cultures react.

The goal of this short post is to put the term under a magnifying glass for a few short minutes. Many Asian and Middle Eastern based people view North American based managers as overly “expedient”. In some language such as Hebrew,  the word expediency does not exist. Expediency is not universally valued.

I will define “expediency” as functional to the purpose at hand,adhered to for the sense of practicality.

Examples of Expediency:

Corporate declares 20% downsizing within a month. Many managers push back really hard. Steve says, “Come on guys, this whining is not going to get us anywhere-let’s talk about how to do it”.

Samuel believes that a customer request is very destructive to the product road map. His boss Tony says, “Sam, the customer is the customer. Just do it”.

The folks in the newly acquired Helsinki site believe that corporate wants to transfer their technology to Harbin, China and they are fighting tooth and nail. Their manager Fred tells them not to fight city hall and ensures them that they “will get new and exciting stuff to do.”

How do “others” often view  North American expediency?

1) As untrustworthy because of the willingness to compromise too early

2) As an unwillingness to stand up up for important things; lacking principles

3) As weak

If you add to this expediency the perceived willingness of North American managers to move on to promote their careers (and share this motive so freely), one can understand that the background for a lot of trust issues-which lead to feelings of uncertainty in remote sites, causing a lot of political maneuvering “to find someone in HQ who we can rely on”.

Very innovate Israel based companies deploy projects and products in a very aggressive time frame, often months before competing development centres manage to do so.

The speed of development and deployment  is enabled by “speed as strategy”,  a developed work ethic (there is no work life balance in Israel in the high tech sector),  flexibility, high tolerance for risk,  and less importance attached to the formalism of planning and documentation

Wouldn’t you know it, but often these newly released products and releases are often buggy and need to be cleansed and purified on the customer site once deployed.

So, while the customer gets the competitive value he asked for quickly, the customer is furious what is perceived as the “sloppiness” and “poor finish”, the very attributes which enabled the Israeli vendor to deploy so quickly.

With well known thick skin stemming from the entrepreneurial  spirit, augmented by Israeli chutzpah (gall/cheek), the Israeli developers can take the heat well and fix the bugs quickly. However, a problem can arise when the Israeli supplier is asked to apologize, especially in SEA and Japan.

There is an expectation in many parts of SEA and Japan that an apology will express humility and remorse. The client wants to see that the vendor is truly sorry and ashamed.

The Israel vendor will apologize in a matter of fact statement and then, the Israeli will get to the perceived important part: explain the root causes and what will be done. Example: “I am sorry about bug 240. However, it is not revenue impacting. The bug stems the difference between the R&D development environment and the environment in tyour  site, and engineer Itai (m) will do 9000 hours of testing and stay here for a month; it should be fine; don’t worry.”

This explanation is seen as remorse-free ; it often aggravates the client even more than the bug itself.

The Israeli wants to apologize for the deficiency  itself and explain the cause, and the client wants to see the pain of remorse and regret!

I have spent hundreds of hours explaining this to Israeli vendors. It is an uphill run, because the essence of the innovative personality is generally numb about such matters.

One client of mine was forced by his distributor to hire someone (me) to “improve apology skills”.

1 Goal of this post:

The goal of the case is to illustrate how people from different cultures approach the issue of dealing with making an aggressive commitment to demanding customers.

2 The customer:

The customer is a utility provider in Asia. The customer is requesting a feature which will allow households to monitor the air pollution in their home using a cell phone application, and send the data to a central data bank, enabling corrective action by the authorities.

The president of the utility has demanded that “go-live” day is in 6 months, to coincide with the Provincial Premier’s visit to the capital city of a certain province.

If everything goes well and deployment happens in 6 months, the  CEO of this utility will look very good, and more important, the Premier will  look even better.

3-The potential vendors:

Fred is the CEO of Freddy and Sons, a US based firm, which develops software for Green Environments.

Gal is the CEO of Gal and Sons, a Tel Aviv based firm, which develops software for Green Environments.

4-How does Fred handle the situation?

Fred has devoted over 400 hours analysing the contingencies.Fred has learned that even in the best case scenario, the software will be 3 months late.

Fred will now put together a very detailed plan, and then meet with the customer and try to change the timetable, or reduce the scope of what can be delivered, all this will be done in a spirit of transparency.

Fred does not want to surprise the customer and he certainly does not want an unhappy customer.

This utility is in a very large country, and the last thing Fred wants to do is tarnish his firms’ reputation.

4-How does Gal handle the situation?

Gal met with the customer and said: “we can do it”. “We can start tomorrow”, said Gal to the elated customer, who was waiting for a dithering Fred.

Gal’s “plan” is to push his people hard and see what can be done.

Gal believes the client knows he is “over-buying” (asking for something that cannot be done) and Gal believes that the client knows that Gal is “over selling”, ie, making impossible commitments.

Gal plans to build a very close relationship with the client, and if and when Gal cannot deliver what he promised, “something” will be improvised that will ensure everyone looks good. Gal has in mind three or four pyrotechnical displays which will titillate the Premier on his visit. Gal believes that the time to plan is when the crisis is upon him, NOT now as work gets underway.

5-What are Fred’s assumptions?

Customers need to be satisfied; plans enable control; transparency pays off; long term more important that short term.

6-What are Gal’s assumptions?

Customers need to be managed; plans may cripple survival, transparency can be counterproductive or idiotic; short term survival more important than the “long term”.