Cultural Awareness via Advisory Board Diversity

Several years ago, while I was running the North American subsidiary of a multi-national company, a senior engineer from our headquarters site (where English was the second language) reached out to my team about a potential temporary assignment in the U.S. In his resume he noted his interest in "mind games" to which I and my team, noting we had enough "mind games" to deal with already, passed on his offer without further consideration. As I thought about this episode some time later I realized the employee's "mind game" reference was quite literal, i.e. solving rubix cube, versus our instant and more nuanced interpretation. Unfortunately for the employee and my team an excellent opportunity was not given its proper consideration.

The simple example above plays out daily in cross cultural dealings between geographically dispersed corporate operations or in the execution of global go-to-market situations and, potentially, with much more serious consequences . As noted by Frank Brown, Dean of INSEAD (the international business school), in a recent article titled Cultural Capital in the C-Suite in the April/May 2008 issue of Chief Executive magazine most U.S. corporations do not have representative cultural diversity on their Boards, creating a potential disadvantage for their overseas expansion.

As part of our service offerings at BitInsight we establish and manage local Advisory Boards for international subsidiaries to provide feedback and governance to both the local team as well as the overseas parent. These Advisory Boards are typically sponsored and financed by the parent organization. Providing a dispassionate sounding board in-country that services both the local team and overseas management is one mechanism to help bridge this cultural divide.