Your Role as ‘Leaders’

[The photo is of our erstwhile UHA President: Mme Gangloff, by the way!]

OK, your leadership on this project might not get you so many ‘gongs‘ (medals), but:

1. Your classmates will certainly see your role and value and, at the end, will thoroughly appreciate your effort.
2. You will have a privileged perspective upon the entire consultancy product and process.  Others may have more ‘nano-micro’ detail, but you will have the ‘macro’.

So, let’s look at your role(s):

• Getting off and running.   This is about thoroughly understanding the strategy: ends and means, if you like, – where you are all going and how you are going to get there.  This means you need a real clarity of vision as to what the task is that is facing the consultancy group so that you can constantly share this vision with those wo ‘don’t get it’.  They have to make a considerable effort to read, re-read and understand.  So let’s see how quickly the group can seize the vision.

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• Getting the Successes and Failures research underway immediately and delivered PDQ.They should already know the points below from reading the brief – but BEWARE, once they have got their ‘case-study-hunting-hats‘ on, they are likely to forget why they are doing it and just bring back ‘description’ without having thought at all critically about it!  So you can help make sure they are:-
  • establishing the split E&M’s TD1  and TD2 (plus sharing out evenly between them any ERASMUS students that don’t do E&M’s English class).
  • Getting them to sort themselves out into pairs.
  • Getting them to re-read the brief concerning successes and failures so they really understand what they are doing and why and can start work with  confidence.
  • Ensuring there is no duplication of choices of cases between the pairs and that the cases selected have some small, medium and large companies in them wherever possible.
  • Ensuring that they understand that this task is not just: ‘Look I’ve found one’ and describing it – rather it is about analysing and evaluating the material to see whether it is ‘good stuff‘ which offers an insight into how, why and at precisely what point in the process of internationalisation decision-making things began to go wrong and why nobody saw it, corrected it or stopped the entire process [it is easy to think: « It went wrong when they didn’t sell very many »… but that is a symptom of earlier failure(s) – maybe lack of cultural understanding leading to poor product design… lack of initial research…lack of product testing]. What we are after are the root causes – and there are often more than one! The pairs will need to really analyse and evaluate the case studies deeply to pinpoint the causes AND to consider how they could have been avoided.  Same for successes: where were the ‘hallmarks‘ of success evident – what made it all go ‘right‘ [and avoid failure causes creeping in] … where, when and by whom were the correct critical ‘calls‘ made?
  • The pairs in each TD team will need a way of sharing their case studies and their analyses and evaluations of them: Google Drive(s) maybe.
  • The next step will be for each TD group to SYNTHESISE their findings: « OK, so what have we learned from the causes of success / failure that we can perhaps put in a chronological set of phases, so that COCI businesses can cldarly see the Anatomy of Success and the Anatomy of Failure?  Putting those things together can we put together principles for a process set for success and the avoidance of failure? »  Bringing the two TD groups’ work and findings together in whole promo brainstorm / synthesising process will be the next step… and guess what …. that will need Leading!  You can of course, co-opt people to help!

NB.  You will notice that you are not doing the case study research as Leaders – rather you are making sure it gets done!  That is task enough!

• Scoping and planning the rest of the project.   Once you are sure the TD teams have seized the vision and are underway with their pair-research, then you can let them run on and take a while to look at the ‘landmarks‘ in the process to come:
  • you’ll need a retro-planning approach once you have fully scoped all the tasks that need doing.
    • The end point is the written report and presentation to the client on 16th November … some observations:
      • What needs to be in the report (cover with logo…contents page…executive summary …  The Action Programme with all the Action Points … the case studies and analyses/evaluations,  etc etc). Then it will need assembling and proof-reading….
      • Clearly the presenters (… and how will these be chosen…?) will need the Report before they can develop a presentation … and that will need a back-up like PPt or Prezi (as you see fit).
      • Who will manage the client presentation … organise a suitable room (maybe with more elbow-room)  .. oh, and you’ll need to factor in time to rehearse…..

NB. To get to the Action Programme (made up of numerous Action Points) which will be the basis of the report and presentation to client,you will need to think (with me as boss/tutor) of how one leaps from a great understanding of the principles of ensuring success and avoiding failure coming out of our research to converting this into a logical/chronological/phased step-by-step set of Action Points capable of being followed by managers.  [I will lead that session to get the entire class involved and energised in the production of the Action Programme outline and the Action point headings]. These will need to be fully developed and teams will have to be constituted again to do so.  Lets say we have 19/20 action points to develop: we have 40 people, so we could be back to pairs again….  Your call.  We might only have 10 big Action points – you can do the division!  Don’t forget, the client has also asked for  Job Description and Person Specification for an individual who can lead this Intercultural Management and Marketing initiative.  One can’t just copy one verbatim from somewhere online – it will need to be tailored 100% to YOUR Action Programme implementation.   I haven’t given you and A-Z of all this, because you are free to make and take decisions based upon how the task develops and subject to your constraints (you have a lot of labour resources, but relatively little time…!).

I promise I won’t let you get into difficulty with this – we will be bouncing ideas off each other all the time and I will be bringing in theory and practice to help as and when needed.