Blog Entry 01

(1) Your names, pictures of yourselves or a group picture, and brief introductions of your individual identities.

See video.

(2) An introduction to your group name that explains why and how your group chooses the particular group name

 “It takes two to tango” is an idiom that expresses a situation in which more than one party or entity are required to pair up in an intimate and dynamic way in order to achieve a common objective or perform the same activity.  During negative situations, both people and entities are responsible for the liability.  In positive circumstances, it could not occur without the other party or entities.

The tango originates in South America.  Cultural differences in different parts of South America influenced the expansion of Tango.  Tango requires a pair or more than a pair of partners to move in relation to each other; not necessarily in the same direction, but also in tandem and opposition.

(3) A LOGO for your group that symbolizes your group name, and an explanation for your LOGO

The logo is made up of a silhouette of a couple collaborating on dancing tango, the group name Tango and the course name.

The silhouette can easily be anyone of us – no one can escape collaboration these days. The collage of the many different pictures of couple dancing tango together shows various cultural influences on the dance. It resembles the fact that globalization brings people from different backgrounds to together. Collaboration can take any forms and adaptation. It also goes on to show that collaboration may happen with more than a pair of persons.

The straight lines on the group name Tango can embody the same overall stance or purpose every team member tries to achieve in collaboration even though their background, expertise, experience and their role in the team may be vastly different.

(4) Your group goals for this class in relation to work and life

Knowledge & Insights Sharing - Our group is diverse in our cultural exposure, e.g. Italian, Danish, American, Australian and Chinese; and our disciplines, such as Economics, Marketing, Information System, Law, Psychology & Human Resources. We can easily share our knowledge & insights from different cultures and disciplines with one another when we collaborate in this project. This can broaden our horizons and challenge our intellectual boundaries.

Diversity Adaptability – The diversity of our group members provides a golden opportunity for us to learn from each other. No group member is more brilliant than the other.  Therefore, each of us brings different value to the group. With differences in our personalities and values in work and life, we expect to have intense intellectual discussion & confrontation. We believe communication, trust and respect will carry us through in our collaboration.

(5) An explanation on what excites the group most about the weekly topics and what additional topics your group would like to learn in this class

The most exciting thing about the weekly topics is that it provides: -

- A fast-track crash course on dealing with the most common and up-to-date issues many face in workplace – managing diversity and inclusivity so as to create synergy and maximize performance

- Resourceful insights about different facets of collaboration drawing from research and experience of different scholars and practitioners’

- Comprehensive tools to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals

- Crisis Management if and when issues arise

- The combination of the above 4 items creates a very solid way to understand and improve on a seemingly abstract but important skill in life.

Addition topics the group like to learn in class includes collaboration across different generations given Gen-Y is slowly and steadily joining the workforce.

(6) One Myth you have about COLLABORATION that wants confirmation or disconfirmation. Describe and explain the myth; analyze and speculate why our culture and society has kept the myth vibrant and alive in spite of its dubious verity; and confirm or disconfirm the myth with evidence.

Myth: Diversity always brings values in collaboration.

People tend to assume that diversity offers more perspectives and that this wider perspective can get more ground covered, bring more values and thus better results, be it in a collaboration among diverse individuals or even companies.

For example, a sports equipment product management team in a consumer electronics company is always comprised of specialists from different backgrounds, e.g. sports science, engineering, marketing, art and design. The company always assumes that the diversity in their background can enable them to bring different kinds of expertise & perspectives together to come up with products with quality design, functionality and user-friendliness that can enable them to satisfy and even create markets needs. 

Let’s take a look at collaboration between two companies and they even merged in the end.

Lenovo and IBM Acquisition

In December 2004 Lenovo announced acquisition of IBM Personal Computer Division.  Both companies focused on different consumer groups and different geographical markets; the focus of IBM was on corporate consumers in western countries and the focus of Lenovo was on small enterprises in China (Quelch, 2006).  Despite the difference, both companies shared the same set of values and goal - integration.

The key success factors in this collaboration lie in the fact that both parties are willing and focused on building a common ground to start, respecting each other’s different perspectives, having the overall interest at heart instead of individual ones, meeting half-way as and when needed and joining forces to enhance their competitive advantages to outperform competitors.

Does diversity always automatically bring values & thus better results in collaboration? Or does it increase differences and introduce complexity in it?

The DaimlerChrysler Merger 

In 1998 there was an important merger between two big automotive company in the world: The American Chrysler which produced vehicles suitable for mass market and Daimler-Benz, a German manufacturer of automobiles, motor vehicles and internal combustion engines for luxury consumers.

This merger failure mainly attributed to the clash between American and German values in business kept them away from adopting the same set of values and also reaching a common strategic mission and a unified brand image. While Americans appreciated originality & adaptability, Germans preferred structure & hierarchy (Weber-Camerer, 2003). 
This also resulted in their difference in management styles and thus reduced the possibility of creating synergy (Finkelstei, 2002).

Why our culture and society has kept the myth vibrant and alive

Globalization has become a popular topic in recent years with the advancement of Internet technology and the increasing accessibility of knowledge and information. The world has become a “level playing field” (Friedman, 2007). in business. In order to succeed in this globalized business environment, many corporations rely on hiring local people and employing local intelligence from them to outperform their competitors in different markets all over the world. This results in a diversified staff body and probably a view that diversity can help enhance competitive advantages in a corporation. HSBC is one of the corporations which embrace the belief that diversity always brings values to business. This is reflected in their marketing slogan - the world’s local bank. Globalization plays a very crucial role in keeping this myth alive.

Moreover, one of the ways to enhance competitive advantage is to introduce differentiation to the product or service of the company.  For instance, innovation is one of strategic moves to achieve differentiation.  Diversity in ethnicity, demographics and expertise enable a company to bring new ideas and effective brainstorming to the solution (Anderson, 2011). According to a survey, 85 percent of respondents agreed that diversity is crucial to gaining the perspectives and ideas that foster innovation (Mulvey, 2011).

Reference:

Anderson, T. (2011, 09 May), “Is diversity good for business? CSC think so”, Washington Technology, US.

Friedman, T. L. (2007). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (First ed.). New York, NY: Picador.

Mulvey, J., (2011, 14 Jul), “Why diversity is good for business”, Business New Daily

Quelch, J., Knoop C. (2006), Lenovo: Building a Global Brand, Harvard Business School

Sydney Finkelstein (2002).The DaimlerChrysler Merger. Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth.

Weber Roberto A., Camerer Colin F. (2003, April). Cultural Conflict and Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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BLOG EXTENSION

Myth: Diversity always brings values in collaboration.

This blog extension will refine its argument on what keeps the myth vibrant.

As mentioned before, the phenomenon globalization can bring about diversity in staff members as companies hire local people to obtain local intelligence such as market conditions, political scenario, cultural and legal requirements to outcompete in local markets. Companies that hire staff this way are said to have a polycentric approach to its human resources.

Others comment that globalization may only bring homogeneity. This happens when a company follows the approach will choose only the citizens of the parent country to work in host nations; as such higher-level foreign positions are filled with expatriate employees from the parent country. The general rationale behind this approach is that the staff from the parent country would represent the interests of the headquarters effectively and link well with the parent country. This creates a photocopy of the HQs for local offices and hence homogeneity. But then again it may change depends on how far the expat is willing to adopt its local office to local environment.

In short, to reconcile these two opposing views, we have to look into the organization’s international staff recruitment strategy which in turn reflects the organization’s business values. This shapes whether globalization facilitates diversity or homogeneity.

In addition to globalization, what plays a very crucial role in keeping this myth alive is the ideology of being a world citizen who always establish a common ground with other people by advocating the greater good of the world before any nations’ and putting the best interests of the world at heart. As a result, in collaboration, the world citizens will strive to fit themselves into and contribute towards the bigger picture as the world. This is exactly what the myth is about.

Reference:

http://www.whatishumanresource.com/international-recruitment