March 13, 2014 Influence of Cultural Differences on Business Processes — How to Improve Performance

The seventh presentation of our Succeeding in a Japanese Company telesummit is Claudia Romberg talking about Influence of Cultural Differences on Business Processes — How to Improve Performance. The presentation will be posted at 9 am Pacific on March 13th. To listen, please register at www.JapanInterculturalTelesummit.com.

Claudia lived in Japan for seven years, where she worked as a marketing consultant for Dentsu and other Japanese companies. Since returning to Europe she has worked as consultant, trainer and coach with more than forty companies, joint ventures and M&As in different industries (automotive, electronics, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, consumer products, etc.) and countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, China and Japan). Claudia specifically focuses on the question of how cultural backgrounds influence a company’s performance system and helps cross-cultural teams to improve and align their processes accordingly.

Teamwork is never simple even within the same culture, and when people from different cultures work together on teams, things can become even more complicated. It’s easy to blame “miscommunication” for all problems, but Claudia will help us become aware of how unexamined differences in business practices are often at the root of the challenges that teams experience. We’ll cover things that companies need to address in order to increase the performance of multicultural teams, and important assumptions about business practices that Japanese bring to the team environment.

During Claudia’s call you will discover…

• Communication is key but it’s not enough when improving performance. Here’s what else you need to know and do
• Factors other than communication that can lead to problems when people of different cultural backgrounds work together
• How Japanese methods of getting work done differ from those used in other countries
• Beware – what might look like a communication problem can actually be something altogether different
• How deep differences in the approach to business processes can be used to improve performance