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SEPTEMBER 22, 2003
It's Not Easy Going Stateless Creating cohesive organizations that span long distances and different cultures is a challenge companies meet in different ways For the tech industy's transnationals, the biggest challenges lie in bridging the gaps created by time, space, and cultures. Start with the headaches brought on by spreading a company's decision makers across the world's time zones. Steve Humphreys, CEO of ActivCard (ACTI ), an identity-management software company that this year relocated its main headquarters from France to the U.S., typically starts his day at 4:30 a.m., coordinating between his office in Fremont, Calif., and the R&D headquarters in France. He stays plugged in until late in the evening, when the Hyderabad, India, programming operations come on line. "You have to be available real time," he says. One radical solution is to make all of a company's manager's rootless -- operating on a sort of Central Global Time. At Touchbase Group a British-based systems integrator for call centers, none of the executives has a permanent office. When they land in one of the $75 million company's eight country subsidiaries, they plunk down at any empty cubicle among the rest of the employees and tap into the company's information systems via the Web. It creates a new frame of mind. They're always available for discussions and decisions. An added benefit: The arrangement breaks down the division between headquarters and branch offices. "The big driver was to try to avoid creating a headquarters," says Riordan Maynard, Touchbase's CEO. "People lose reality when they move into a headquarters." "TWO-HEADED." Melding the diverse cultures in a transnational creates a double-edged sword. Although employees from different countries may use English as their lingua franca, they don't always speak the same language. "The challenge for the company is to maintain its sense of corporate identity," says Allen Morrison, J. Armand Bombardier Chair in Global Management at Western Ontario University's Richard Ivey Business School. "To do it, you need really strong managers. The natural reaction for humans is to be clannish." Indeed, rivalries can easily crop up between national factions. Before Guerrino De Luca became CEO of computer peripherals maker Logitech International (LOGI ) five years ago, "the company was two-headed," he says, split between its dual headquarters in Switzerland and Fremont, Calif. Early on, the two executive teams couldn't even agree on the name for their primary mouse product. The Europeans called it Pilot Mouse and, the Americans, First Mouse. Neither side would give in, even after the press and customers became confused. "There was continuous fighting. Each region wanted to assert dominance over the other," De Luca recalls. The solution: To hire a European CEO, De Luca, but have him run the company from California. ROUGHING IT. It's tough to foster a spirit of collaboration when people are so widely scattered. Far-flung folks tend to feel disconnected or even misunderstood. At Wipro Technologies (WIT ), the tech-services company with dual headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., and Bangalore, India, Sangita Singh, vice-president for worldwide marketing, last year set up a core team of 17 marketing people in the Indian offices and put just one person each in North America, Japan, and Britain. To encourage bonding, Singh last October arranged for the team members to spend a weekend camping in India's Bandipur jungle. Singh's U.S. and British marketers hadn't understood how much they would be roughing it when they set out for India and refused to take part when they found out. And, ultimately, one of them quit -- Kim Miller, a Canadian who had run U.S. marketing out of Dallas. Her biggest complaint was the 80-hour work weeks. But she also felt isolated. Singh offered to spend a month working alongside her in the U.S., but, says Miller, "I just couldn't take it anymore." For Steve Chang, CEO of antivirus software maker Trend Micro (TMIC ), bringing people together has become one of his primary roles as CEO. Last winter, he created something he calls the Paramount Project with the goal of teaching a common set of values that transcend national cultures. In one month, he made the rounds to 17 of Trend Micro's offices, from Munich to Taipei, spending a whole day running team-building exercises with employees at each location. CASUAL DRESS. As a follow-up, Chang and his lieutenants organized an event focused on product development. When 80 staffers from the engineering and product-marketing teams arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Manila on Feb. 22, they were issued pajamas to wear over their clothing. (When these people normally meet via conference calls, one or more of them is usually in their pajamas.) The engineers, most of whom are Asian, wore red tops and black pants. The marketers, mostly from North America and Europe, wore green on top. The two factions were standoffish at first. And no wonder. Tensions were high. In January, Trend Micro's top engineering managers, all of them Taiwanese, had protested Chief Technology Officer Eva Chen's decision to grant the marketing department the power over what features will go into future products. It took weeks of persuasion for her to win them over. In Manila, the breakthrough came for a second tier of managers after the marketers sat down for discussions with customers. Chen arranged for the engineering managers to watch remotely on closed-circuit TV. Before long, they started passing messages into the room to help answer customers's questions. "They were really working together," says Chen. DESTINATION: UNKNOWN. But, soon, things got complicated again. Chang, dissatisfied with the company's single-digit revenue growth, decided to rejigger his command structure. He placed the product-marketing function under Chen, taking it away from marketing chief David Rowe, an American. Rowe ultimately left the company. "This is a new way of running a business," says Chang, a Taiwan native who started Trend Micro in 1988 in a California garage. "Will it work or not? I don't know yet." For Chang and the rest of the transnational CEOs, finding just the right global strategy is still a journey of exploration.  By Steve Hamm in New York
BW MALL
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