The Middle East’s lure for business entrepreneurs is strong since it currently holds four of the most promising emerging markets for the period 2012-2017 (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 295). While the potential for phenomenal success exists, there are cautionary approaches that must be measured. The region prominently practices Islam as a form of religion (except Israel), which introduces additional considerations when conducting business in the area. Couple that with a history of instability and misinformation; multi-national firms must tread carefully in order to maximize capital investments and limit liabilities. Let’s look at three different companies’ foray into the Middle East: Souq, Arla and Fleurieu Milk and Yoghurt Company.

“To capture opportunities and generate profitable growth in the Middle East and Africa, companies need to adapt their businesses to changing customer needs” which is exactly what Ronaldo Mouchawar did with his company “Souq”. (Bozadzhieva, 2017).  Mouchawar, born in Syria, but schooled at Northeastern in the United States, joined Maktoob (a middle Eastern web portal) which “held enormous promise because it was the only portal around that didn’t require users to be fluent in English (just a small percentage of Arabic-speakers are comfortable using English), which meant it could scale up” (Mouchawar, 2017). Initially Maktoob was used for social networking, but Mouchawar decided to create an e-commerce website (initially auction then retail), then an app that was named “Souq” (market). He had to overcome obstacles unique to the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates widely used credit cards; Saudi Arabia did not typically use them on line and most in Egypt did not qualify for credit cards (Mouchawar, 2017). Another hurdle was that most countries in the Middle East do not have zip codes, which makes deliveries onerous. Adjusting to these “local” obstacles and understanding the market in which he was doing business, Mouchawar was able to design applications to overcome these issues and became a highly successful company.

Arla Foods, Scandinavia’s largest manufacturer of dairy products, had been doing business in the Middle East for about 40 years, dominating the market for butter, cheese and cream, with sales hitting a high point of $550 million in 2005 (Mahajan, 2013). By all accounts, Arla had done their due diligence in understanding and adapting to cultural differences and were flourishing in the market. Then something happened, that no company could prepare for, that sent Arla reeling – a cartoon. “On September 30, 2005, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published an article titled “The Face of Muhammad” along with a dozen cartoons that depicted Islam’s prophet unflatteringly. Muslims the world over were incensed, and in January 2006 Saudi Arabian clerics called for a boycott of Danish goods. Within days, most retailers in the Arab world had pulled Arla’s products off their shelves” (Mahajan, 2013).  This boycott cut Arla’s sales in half even after the cleric’s lifted the ban. The Islamic religion holds Muhammad in such reverence that disparaging him is a most serious offense and Arla was guilty by association just by being Danish. “In 2008, just when Arla’s sales had nearly recovered, 17 Danish newspapers republished one of the controversial cartoons. Sales plummeted again, costing the company around $274 million. Arla fought back, but its revenues didn’t rebound until 2010—an indication of how powerfully Islam affects Arab markets” (Mahajan, 2013).

Many people around the world have dangerous preconceptions about The Middle East: terrorists, militants, jihad, hate of the West, etc. Fleurieu Milk and Yoghurt Company (FMYC), an Australian company found this out the hard way: cyber bullying. Halal designates a product or action that the Islamic faith deems permissible (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 303). For a business that wants to have a footprint in the Middle East, it is extremely important to follow the halal rules. FMYC paid $1,000 for a halal certification so they could enter into a lucrative $50,000 business deal with Dubai based Emirates Airline (Dyett, 2014). Unbeknownst to FMYC at the time, there are a number of anti-halal websites and organizations that believe the certification money directly supports terrorism. “Halal Choices” and “Boycott Halal” groups bombarded FMYC with condemnation on social media causing them to drop the halal certification and lose the contract with Emirates (Dyett, 2014). FMYC marketing manager Nick Hutchinson commented about the decision to cave: “We’ve now received a lot of backlash for making this call about giving in to minority groups and so forth and we understand that, and I guess unless you’re in the position where you’re copping the abuse and sitting there, its a hard one” (Dyett, 2014).

Business in the Middle East can be very rewarding and fruitful if companies take the time to understand the culture, the religion and the people. It is however fraught with pitfalls unlike other markets in the world. Businesses must score low on the uncertainty avoidance scale in order to stomach the uniqueness of the region. Even the best laid plans can go awry by outside sources that have nothing to do with the business or the customer. However, if you have the courage, the Middle East can be a very rewarding venture.

References

Bozadzhieva, M. (2017, April 20). How multinationals can grow in the Middle East and Africa. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-multinationals-can-grow-in-the-middle-east-and-africa

Dyett, G. (2014, November 12). Australian company caves to Halal boycott pressure. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from SBS: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/11/12/australian-company-caves-halal-boycott-pressure

Mahajan, V. (2013, May). Understanding the Arab consumer. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2013/05/understanding-the-arab-consumer

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing cultural differences (9th ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Mouchawar, R. (2017, September-October). Souq.com’s CEO on building an e-commerce powerhouse in the Middle East. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/09/souq-coms-ceo-on-building-an-e-commerce-powerhouse-in-the-middle-east

There are two types of funeral homes in the United States: Corporate and Independent (Family Owned). Independent firms have limited resources and they are usually more culturally in touch with the community they serve. Corporate firms, having an obligation to shareholders, will place a higher priority on cost savings than service. Corporate firms usually focus on business synergy by centralizing preparation and cremation of bodies and the types of merchandise they offer at the expense of cultural synergy of the local employees and the families they serve. “Synergy” is the focus of a team, allowing individual contributions to collaborate for a greater common cause (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 266). Unfortunately from my experience, the greater common cause for the corporate firms was profit.

I believe in the ability for a company to maximize profits as long as they don’t minimize quality. The corporate firm had contracts with casket, urn, embalming fluid and sundry companies to take full advantage of bulk-buying discounts. This approach created national homogeny, as their belief was to make the company similar to McDonalds: the menu is the same and wherever you buy a burger and fries they look the same and taste the same. Management’s gamble that every American in every part of the country wanted exactly the same “menu” of options to honor their loved one sacrificed the long-term orientation for short-term earnings potential (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 282). Families on the coasts were more likely to choose cremation over burial, families in Pennsylvania preferred full couch caskets to the half couch versions found in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia, and there is a growing movement for “green” funerals that were not addressed at all.

“Most corporate executives, whether or not they have any special insight into synergy opportunities or aptitude for nurturing collaboration, feel they ought to be creating synergy” (Goold & Campbell, 1998). This was the case in the shift to sameness in the corporate firms. The finger on the pulse of the industry was the licensed funeral director sitting in the arrangement conferences with families; yet they were never consulted. If they had been, suggestions of what approaches were working and which options were meaningful to the families they served, would have been bountiful. The excuse for not incorporating this valuable information was that the local funeral homes were too busy to share and did not have the “whole picture” in mind if input was requested. They were also reluctant to garner information to make a change because that would have tipped their hat that a corporate transformation was in the works; knowing the funeral directors believed the funeral homes were successful and did not need to change. “Assuming that unit managers are naturally resistant to cooperation, executives conclude that synergy can be achieved only through the intervention of the parent.  Because the parenting bias encourages corporate executives to discount unit managers’ objections, it often leads them to interfere excessively, doing more harm than good” (Goold & Campbell, 1998).

As you could imagine, the rollout of the business synergy plan caused much conflict with the culture synergy of various firms in the company. “Conflict comes from seeing the world from a different perspective than someone else or competing for resources. This is particularly true in cross-cultural scenarios because the chance for conflict increases as each culture encourages its members to see the world from its own point of view and to obtain resources in a specific way” (Penn State World Campus, n.d.).  Funeral homes all said that they were unique and the “one menu” option wouldn’t work at their locations. Management’s response was that the plan was sound and the only way it could fail was at the hands of reluctant managers and staff at the various locations. There were signs that the new direction was not going to be successful: “few opportunities exist for inexpensive, low-commitment testing and leaders are convinced they have the answer and not willing to change course” (McGrath, 2015). They completely ignored the fact that they never considered other problem solving viewpoints- if a problem existed at all. This laid the success or failure squarely at the local location managers, which caused a tremendous amount of stress.

I was appointed by corporate to be a rollout-training liaison for my territory that included D.C., Maryland Virginia and West Virginia. The funeral homes local to me all had the same reaction: they sensed failure because of the diversity of the families they served even considering our geographical proximity. The eye-opening moment for me was when I travelled to West Virginia to train those firms. On my way to the first session, I swung by McDonald’s for breakfast and lo and behold on the menu was something I have never seen before: biscuits and gravy. Even McDonald’s acknowledges that even though there are cultural similarities in the United States, people still enjoy their cultural uniqueness. That is why they have served over one billion customers and are still going strong.

(Cowbag, 2009).

 

Works Cited

Cowbag. (2009, March 19). Twisted takes on pop culture icons; burger boxes as coffins. Retrieved         September 28, 2017, from Trend Hunter: https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/ronald-mcdonalds-funeral-refreshingly-different-t-shirt-designs-from-glennz

Goold, M., & Campbell, A. (1998, September/October). Desperately seeking synergy. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/1998/09/desperately-seeking-synergy

McGrath, R. G. (2015, January 10). 15 years later, lessons from the failed AOL-Time Warner merger. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from Fortune: http://fortune.com/2015/01/10/15-years-later-lessons-from-the-failed-aol-time-warner-merger/

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing cultural differences (9th ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

State World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 06: Cultural synergy. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from OLEAD 410: Leadership in global context: https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1867265/modules/items/22824741

 

In the progression of studying how to hone my leadership skills in a global context, my course has arrived at intercultural communication. As one would imagine, this area is rife with pitfalls and hazards because being a proficient communicator is not always enough. You must also take the time and energy to understand the culture you are interacting with and to not allow egocentrism to cause your inability to take on other people’s perspectives (Penn State World Campus, n.d.). However it is more common today than in any point in our shared history, that people from many cultures communicate on a daily basis (via electronic media). “Out of the world’s estimated 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to mobile phones. Far fewer – only 4.5 billion people – have access to working toilets. Of the 2.5 billion who don’t have proper sanitation, 1.1 billion defecate in the open (Wang, 2013). These numbers suggest that a person who owns a cell phone could be considered a member of a global electronic culture. Culture “includes all the distinct ways in which people in different geographic locations classify and represent their experience and act creatively” (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 40). Today, one of the most common ways people represent their experiences electronically is through emoji.

Emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita and are a product of Japanese cultural obsession of communicating with images. When asked about what inspired him to work on an image-based form of communication, Kurita said: “Everything was shown by text. Even the weather forecast was displayed as ‘fine’. When I saw it, I found it difficult to understand. Japanese TV weather forecasts have always included pictures or symbols to describe the weather – for example, a picture of sun meant ‘sunny’. I’d rather see a picture of the sun, instead of a text saying ‘fine’.” (Schenker, 2016). He experienced a hindrance to communication and instead of seeing a problem, he created a solution so simple it would make a caveman proud; painting pictures on a digital wall that tell a story without need for interpreters. His pictorial electronic language is so pervasive, that you can see Tweets, Facebook posts and text messages that convey a complete message without using a single traditional character from any language.

The word “emoji” is a combination of two Japanese words that literally translates to “picture” (e) and “character” (moji) (Schenker, 2016). Emoji are becoming so mainstream, that the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2015 wasn’t word at all; it was the most commonly used emoji in that year:

(Steinmetz, 2015).

Emoji did have some hurdles to pass before becoming a planetary phenomenon. With so many different cell phone network carriers and different operating systems on those phones, the pictures literally didn’t always translate from phone to phone. With the decision by Apple in 2011 to install the emoji keyboard and The Unicode Standard, “a computing industry standard meant to ensure the consistent handling and encoding of text expressed in a majority of the globe’s writing systems”, emoji became a household item (Schenker, 2016).

Emoji are not an official language for conducting business, however they do offer a unique way for individuals to express feelings and innuendo without having it misinterpreted. It allows a global culture to communicate without having to master a shared spoken language and has brought lightheartedness and enjoyment to the sharing of experiences. As it has been said: a picture is worth a thousand words.

The United States of Emoji

(Shenker, 2016)

 

References

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing cultural differences (9th ed.). London: Routledge.

Penn State World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 04: Global Communication. Retrieved September 12, 2017, from OLEAD 410: Leadership in Global Context: https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1867265/modules/items/22824722

Schenker, M. (2016, October 11). The surprising history of emojis. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from Webdesignerdepot.com: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/10/the-surprising-history-of-emojis/

Steinmetz, K. (2015, November 16). Oxford’s 2015 word of the year is this emoji. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from Time.com: http://time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

Wang, Y. (2013, March 25). More people have cell phones than toilets, U.N. study shows. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from Time.com: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/more-people-have-cell-phones-than-toilets-u-n-study-shows/

 

 

 

 

Being an American has always called to mind those visualizations that have traditionally been shared by all citizens: democracy, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, the President all the way to apple pie and baseball. Yet today I sense a shift in what being an American means to large groups of people living here and it is causing a cultural rift in the country. To be more specific, I am referring to Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right or whatever new label may be applied to either side of these diametrically opposed groups. What I believe to be the biggest driving factor is that individuals in these groups are confounding organizational culture for national culture.

National culture is the imprinting of ideas from the time we are born until we reach puberty where most of the imprinting of ideas is done unconsciously of the individual and is also the most permanent (Hofstede, 2011). Since this indoctrination occurs when the brain is the most receptive to developing lasting patterns of thought, I believe it is fair to say that the national culture could be heavily influenced by organizational culture doctrine if the influencers all share a deeply held political or social belief. People can and will switch their organizational culture throughout life as they switch jobs, go to new schools or even join new churches; however, changing your national culture is viewed as traitorous (Pennsylvania State University World Campus, n.d.).

Deeply ingrained mindsets held by both sides that their version of America is the more truthful national culture has created ethnocentric sentiments. Not only is there a “belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own group…it may be accompanied by a feeling of contempt for those considered as foreign” (Moran, Abramson, & Moran, 2014, p. 25). There is evidence with elected officials calling for impeachment of the sitting President representing the other party; the inability to put aside differences to pass a budget resulting in government shutdowns and the desire to only support partisan policies and politics as to not give an iota of credit to the other party. These steadfast attitudes are being fed bilaterally between the constituency and the elected, further strengthening the ethnocentrisms. Instead of doing what is best for the most people, these groups are myopically concerned with doing what is “best” according to their own visions which are often very heavily skewed.

National culture imprinting without bias would allow for individuals to look past party or organizational differences to ensure that the best possible results are achieved that will benefit the largest percentage of the population regardless of affiliation. The strength of that foundation should never vacillate. Organizational culture should always be secondary which is where it gets muddled for a large number of the members of these political parties. As these secondary cultures take a firm, primary root in our society, I do not see this trend shifting back to a more neutral, communal national culture.

 

References

Hofstede, G. (2011, October 22). Geert Hofstede on Culture. Retrieved September 1, 2017, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdh40kgyYOY

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Maaging Cultural Differences (9th ed.). London: Routledge.

Pennsylvania State University World Campus. (n.d.). Lesson 2 Introduction to Culture. Retrieved September 1, 2017, from OLEAD 410: Leadership in Global Context: https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1867265/modules/items/22824704