Cross-Border Supervision

Having returned from Asia two days ago, the Leading Creatives crew is definitely feeling the jet lag. The 30 hours of travel to get home, though, offered plenty of opportunities for reflecting upon what we saw and heard.

Monday night in Bangkok I had dinner with an old friend who's in marketing, and who just started a new job with a domestic airline (among other things, he's responsible for the in-flight magazine, which I think is pretty cool). In his last job, in marketing for a popular international chain of gyms, he ran into a problem that Southeast Asia is going to need to deal with: cross-border supervision.

Here in the US we might think twice about having a firm being directly controlled by someone in another country, but it wouldn't surprise us if our boss was a few states away. After all, many large companies have regional directors, and there really aren't too many problems associated with that other than the lack of face-to-face conversation (and plenty of people see that as a plus!).

What we're seeing in Southeast Asia, as companies grow and spread into neighboring countries, is that the home office is keeping pretty tight control over operations elsewhere. This might not be much of a surprise if you think about it in terms of distance; flying time from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, for instance, is about the same as flying from New York to Washington DC, and it takes less time to fly between Singapore and Bangkok as it does to go from Chicago to San Francisco.

But while the distances between these places might be pretty small, the cultural differences between them can be pretty big. We don't think much about cultural differences between Chicago and New York, but there can be some pretty significant differences in business styles and customer behavior between countries. My friend pointed out that his boss was in Singapore, and "she didn't understand how we do things here." Gym clients in Singapore have different goals and expectations than do many gym clients in Bangkok, when you consider a typical client. The employees also have different styles of work and expectations about their own objectives. And then there's the language issue: "she expects all of us to speak English as well as she thinks she does, which isn't all that good anyway," despite the fact that, while English is commonly spoken in Singapore (which after all was a British colony less than 50 years ago), it's less prevalent in Thailand (whose residents will proudly tell you has never been anyone's colony).

This might not have much of an impact if we're talking about something like manufacturing, where techniques are simply repeated ad nauseum and once the employees know them they can pretty much function on autopilot. It has more of an impact, though, in knowledge-based work, and Creatives will certainly suffer if their bosses don't understand them. Cultural differences and lack of understanding affect your boss' ability to guide you and to understand the content or concept you produce. A product or outcome appropriate for one setting may not be right in another environment.

The solution really boils down to one of two things: greater cultural understanding, or decentralized control. Neither of these will be easy. Understanding the intricacies of one other culture is tough enough, and trying to really understand five or six or more is a real challenge. Loosening the reins of control will also be hard, as one common element across many Asian cultures is the expectation of strong centralized authority.

Tough though it may be to overcome some of the problems of being supervised from another country, the truth is that as firms grow beyond borders and as creative firms increase their economic power, something needs to change for Creatives to achieve their full potential. Being limited in your abilities because the person setting your goals doesn't understand you culture is sure to be frustrating, and frustrated Creatives don't create very well.