Question

Case Study: Amanda goes to China

Here is the story of Amanda, an entrepreneur who went to China with a dream of expanding her business overseas. She expressed to me how challenging and frustrating it was to get things done on time and to get feedback from her local team. She said she would ask her Chinese staff to do certain tasks and they would always agree only to disappoint her by not meeting her expectations and deadlines.

When I asked Amanda about her interactions with staff outside of work, she said that she refused to mix work with pleasure. She normally grabbed lunch alone and ate it at her desk so that she could continue working. After listening to Amanda, it was clear to me that she had no idea how different her American cultural behaviors were from the Chinese and how it was deterring her from launching a successful business in China. After 18 months, Amanda called it quits and returned to San Francisco.

I stayed in touch with Amanda and asked her if she would do anything differently. She paused for a while. Then I proceeded to ask her if she would dive into the ocean without learning how to swim? She said, “Of course not. But what does swimming have to do with my Chinese business?” I told her that it was my analogy for why she would go to China without first understanding the Chinese language and culture, prior to launching her business there.

Q1. Keeping in view the essentials of cross cultural communication, how would you transform business failure to success in an alien culture if you were in place of Amanda?

Q2. Did Amanda overlook non-verbal aspect of communication? If yes, how would the knowledge of non-verbal communication have benefitted Amanda?​

Answer 1

Explanation:

Answer to Q1

To transform failure into success, it is important to first learn about the culture and the nature of your team with which you are working or leading. Have general discussions with them to know about the cultural and work ethics differences and build trust on team by spending more time with them

Q2. Despite of language barrier, one can use non verbal communication to get along well with the other people. This gets more important when there is language barrier so it should be used effectively