In many industries, a key component of strategy is speed.
When speed is strategy, quality and cost are secondary considerations; getting to the market fast takes priority. This is illustrated humorous in Gloria Ramsbottom’s Immature Product Division; their next release is sold and installed before it is developed!
When speed is strategy, communication needs to be open, transparent and expedient between people of different nationalities. There is limited time for face saving if needed, scarce time to build relationships between people with very different values.
What type of organizations can move quickly? Well, it appear that “size” counts (start-ups), the tolerance for risk counts (risk aversive cultures move slowly), and homogeneity of the culture assists greatly because there are less communication obstacles.
Yet, often large very diverse and heterogeneous global organizations need to move quickly.
In such cases, the challenge for the global OD practitioner is enormous, since speed as a major component of strategy is enabled by of the behaviours promulgated by western OD: risk taking in a safe environment, decision making on-the-fly as per situational need, trade-off between process and teamwork, surfacing bad news without loss of face, empowerment of the individual to take initiatives.
In further posts, we will examine how a global OD practitioner can deal with a diverse and large work force, when speed is strategy, without becoming a cultural imperialist.