About five years ago, a foreign born CEO whose name is Mr. Hans (Editor’s note The name has been changed) joined our company. He is a very typical German. And he had several years’ sales experience in auto industry. So he is a man who pursued strict standards for everything. But our company is a very flexible home decoration trade company. We always change the product design according to customer requirements. Frankly speaking, Mr. Hans is very kind person, but in our company, for us, it is disaster when he was coming. In generally, between Mr. Hans and us, the most serious problem is industry discrepancy and thought way. Due to little knowledge of home decoration, he always asked us some very weird questions. He considered all question based on his automobile company experience which is different from our design company; moreover, because of different culture background, we had totally different thought.

Whatever culture or industry background, communication was very serious problem. He do a lot of work to improve our efficiency, however, the result was not good as he imagined. In addition to our daily work, we had to deal with his homework. Everybody thought he do nothing but waste our time. The was proved because our sales decreased for successive months. At finally, some sales managers could not endure it, we ask boss: ”If Mr. Hans is still in our company, we will go.” Finally Mr. Hans left.

From this case, we have some lessens about foreign manager:

• Firstly, however excellent you are in past or an industry, it means the past, and may not apply in a different industry or culture. Maybe the manager have very good management experience or method, but anyway, it should be also based on familiarity with the product and industry.

• Second, the local culture is very important for foreign manager deal with local company. Foreign managers need to listen and adapt.

About the author
Daisy CHEN Yang is an international MBA student in Lingnan (University) College at Sun Yat-sen University. Before enrolling in the program, she worked for seven years in foreign trade.