How do multinational companies establish cooperative advantages?

For multinational companies, it is increasingly difficult to rely on the scale of the traditional economic era and the competitive advantage based on cross-regional operations. The competitive advantage in the future will depend more on promoting and supporting cross-business collaboration, thus distributing the scattered resources of multinational companies. In recent years, multinational companies have gained competitive advantages through the breadth of business scope and the ability to seize market opportunities, or through the global allocation of resources such as labor and capital markets. But these competitive advantages, which once brought huge profits to multinational companies, are no longer in sight. In many industries, the competitors faced by multinational companies also have international resources and occupy a place in the global market. Therefore, multinational companies must seek new competitive advantage resources. Through successful cooperation between business departments, sharing knowledge and developing new products/services, we can better allocate scattered resources and mobilize the potential of global subsidiaries and branches. From this perspective, cooperation is an important source of competitive advantage for multinational corporations. But cross-business collaboration is not only very difficult to achieve, but also difficult to understand and accept. In order to overcome these obstacles, enterprises must cultivate unique organizational capabilities that are difficult to replicate, build an organizational framework that links management behavior with cross-departmental collaboration, effectively weaken the four obstacles that affect collaboration, and realize value creation (see Framework for Creating Value through Cross-departmental Collaboration). The four obstacles to cross-departmental cooperation are multinational companies, and cooperation will not happen by itself. According to our survey of 107 enterprise managers, there are four obstacles to cross-business cooperation of multinational companies. The first obstacle: unwilling to ask for help and learn from others. There are several reasons. The employees in the organization are very closed and almost isolated from the outside world. On the other hand, formal and informal compensation systems will unconsciously encourage employees to pursue individual heroism instead of collaboration. Over time, employees have formed what social psychologists call "group bias": overestimating themselves and the team and underestimating other colleagues. The group with them as the core naturally excludes foreign knowledge and innovation. An effective way to solve this obstacle is for executives to pay close attention to the heads of business departments. If you don't take the initiative to seek assistance, you should intervene in time. In addition, look for employees who are willing to seek help and communicate with other employees, rather than those who try to solve problems and pursue heroism alone. The second obstacle: unable to seek and find assistance. Even if employees are willing to seek help from colleagues in other branches/subsidiaries abroad, they may not be able to get help efficiently. Some employees in foreign subsidiaries often know the answer to the question, but they can't get in touch with their colleagues in subsidiaries in other countries who are in urgent need of professional advice. The effective ways to solve this problem are database and electronic search system. In most management consulting companies, consultants upload their completed work to the database. Other colleagues will contact consultants with specific experience after accessing and reading database documents. Another method is to establish a transparent reference system after determining the best practices. However, technology has its limitations, the list of experts will expire, and it is impossible to accurately grasp what professional knowledge each employee has. More importantly, these methods can not promote the integration of creative views and personal views. Therefore, enterprises need to cultivate "connectors". Contacts are often employees who have served in many countries and have a very extensive interpersonal network. These people can give very professional advice. The third obstacle: unwillingness to help. In some cases, the responsibility of the problem lies with the potential helper, not the person who asks for help. Some employees are very reluctant to share what they know with colleagues, or simply refuse to help. When both branches sell products and develop similar technologies in the same market, employees will hesitate to help colleagues in competing branches. Under the pressure of performance, employees may feel that they have no time to help others, or that their colleagues don't need to care at all. John? When Mike took over Morgan Stanley in the early 1990s, he announced that he would establish a culture of extensive cooperation and adjusted the promotion criteria. A star employee who has achieved great success without helping other colleagues has little chance of promotion. Therefore, Morgan's behavior has changed greatly, and cooperation within the company has become very common. The fourth obstacle: can't work together, can't transform knowledge. Sometimes even if employees are willing to work together, they can't easily pass on their knowledge to others. At this time, it requires close contact between people in order to reach mutual understanding. If the two sides establish a close relationship in knowledge transformation, such as establishing a framework for sharing information, the problem will be improved. Under this framework, it is easy for both parties to understand how others interpret and use the concept of raw. Without this framework, employees often find it difficult to cooperate effectively with strangers. In the investigation of the new product development project team of a global high-tech enterprise, we found that it would take 20%-30% more time to complete the project if the project engineer had no close personal relationship with colleagues at the same level from branches/subsidiaries. Executives can establish relationships between employees in different branches/subsidiaries, but this must be completed before specific collaboration events are started. One of the most effective methods is to let employees rotate between different organizations and departments. Employees are temporarily transferred to other branches for a period of time to establish close cooperation with local colleagues. Improve the management methods of cooperation and reduce the influence of these four obstacles on cooperation, including strengthening leadership, values and goals; Improve the human resources process; Horizontal inter-departmental mechanism, etc. Among them, the horizontal cross-departmental mechanism is divided into information system, informal network and formal horizontal organizational structure in turn. Enterprises must carefully choose and implement these management methods, especially enterprises with multiple obstacles need to use multiple management methods at the same time to promote cross-departmental/branch/subsidiary cooperation. Leadership, values and goals can reduce the possibility that employees are unwilling to seek or provide help. When leaders work with employees and signal the importance of cooperation, employees will be more motivated to seek and provide help. However, leaders encouraging cooperation can motivate employees, but it can't just stay in words. They should help employees find experts or create conditions for employees to work happily together. Leadership and clear values and goals are indispensable, but they are not sufficient conditions for multinational companies to cooperate efficiently. Recruitment and promotion criteria in human resources procedures can also reduce reluctance to seek or provide assistance. When selecting candidates, pay attention to those who are willing to ask for help. If there are a group of employees in the organization who are willing to seek/provide help, a good cooperative atmosphere will be formed. Similarly, cooperative behavior as a promotion standard also helps to promote cooperation. Over time, executives are made up of people with a good sense of cooperation. Such promotion standards also send a strong signal to employees: to compete for executive positions, we must learn to cooperate! Finally, it is also effective to give some compensation to those employees who have performed well in cooperation. In order to make these promotion and compensation methods play an effective role, enterprises need to change the annual performance appraisal standards. IntuitInc, the leader of financial software, has two such questions in its annual employee evaluation system: What goals have been achieved? How are these goals achieved? The "How to Complete" part here is to evaluate the cooperation ability of employees by evaluating the cooperation of employees across functions/business departments to achieve goals. Horizontal cross-business organization/department mechanism. If the problem is that you can't find help, the most effective methods are as follows: cultivating "connectors", making electronic yellow pages of expert directories, formulating evaluation systems, and determining best practices within the organization. If the problem is that we can't work together and transfer knowledge, we need to cultivate strong professional communication relationships among employees in various organizational units, and form cross-business organizational groups or informal organizations, so that these organizations can communicate and exchange irregularly. In fact, these four obstacles are not universal in multinational companies, and some enterprises may only face one or two. Therefore, the organization must first diagnose which obstacle caused the problem. For example, if the problem is that we can't find help, we should start to build a knowledge management or standard evaluation system. On the contrary, if the problem is a general aversion to innovation syndrome, adjusting the human resources process can solve this problem, but the new knowledge management system will not have any effect. Potential disadvantages of collaboration Although collaboration can bring real value, it also has some inherent disadvantages. An obvious disadvantage of collaboration is that it is easy to go too far in the implementation process. Encouraged by the need for cooperation, employees may attend various meetings or exchanges that have nothing to do with actual value. These unprofitable cooperation will destroy the performance of the whole enterprise. For example, when the top management of BP Petroleum started to initiate collaborative behavior, employees actively participated in the interpersonal network of cross-business organizations. According to an employee of BP, "employees fly all over the world just to share their views, lacking a topic of common concern as the bottom line." In the end, the top management of BP had to drastically cut down these interpersonal networks, and made certain restrictions on cross-business meetings and communication, demanding more attention to specific results. The management method of establishing cooperative organizations must strike a balance between the performance management of each employee and the business organization, including a clear job description. In BP, every manager has a "T-shaped" role-the first responsibility is to deliver results for his business organization/branch, which is the vertical part of the letter "T", and the other responsibility is to ask for help or help others, which is the horizontal part of the letter "T". This dual role is difficult to carry out and it is also an important source of pressure for these managers. However, excellent T-type managers often have the opportunity to become the heads of business departments/branches. The following tools can help managers identify the obstacles to collaboration in the current enterprise and make appropriate choices in specific situations. Any organizational unit (the whole enterprise, business department, foreign subsidiaries, functional department) can choose to evaluate and analyze obstacles. 1. What are the obstacles to collaboration in the organization? From 1 to 100 as a score, check the total score of each obstacle and evaluate it according to the most relevant situation of the enterprise. The following table shows the obstacle level of your organization (based on 107 enterprise). 2. What management method should you adopt to reduce the obstacles of cooperation? Your above score shows what obstacles your organization needs to reduce, and the following table suggests the most appropriate management method for each obstacle (marked with √). The fall 2004 issue of MIT Si Long Business School Management Review has been closed. Hansen, an assistant professor at the European School of Management in Fontainebleau, France, said.