is to do an interview. However, Chinese people, in particular the older generations, rarely speak English, so the language barrier prevents a Danish project team from having direct verbal contact to Chinese customers. An obvious solution is to use a translator or to turn over the complete interviewing task to a Chinese speaking person. Another solution is to use non-verbal approaches like questionnaires, where a translator can support in the creation and analysis of the questionnaire. However, all these solutions suffer from creat- ing a distance to customers, where essential information may be lost. market, and the project team considered presenting the initial ideas to some of their existing customers as well as asking the customers to test some pro- totypes. However, in this company, the customers were "owned" by the sales organization and the project team was not allowed access to the customers. The reason given by the sales organization was that the company had only a few, but very large customers in China and sales feared that such experi- mentation could damage these precious relations. The sales company argued that they already had sufficient market insights and no further investigation was needed. The project team had to blindly trust sales and they never got documented market insight. focusing on sourcing, but also with some sales to local Chinese companies. Initially, the Danish General Manager for the Chinese subsidiary didn't allow the Chinese employees to have direct contact to Chinese customers as the manager was afraid that the employees would take over the customers and start their own business. ness, the employees closest to the customer in the value chain, e.g. the sales people, will quickly realize their position of power, and they may not be willing to give away this power to others in the company. This is obviously not optimal for the organization as a whole; nevertheless, it happens in companies all the time. ary, since their cultural values and beliefs are more similar to the Chinese customers'. However, Chinese employees introduce a new barrier on the matter of getting close to the customers as exemplified with the case below. wearing pajamas in public, a comfortable habit, which goes back to the 1970's when having a pair of pajamas was considered a status symbol. |