ket in the beginning of 2011, but it never caught the attention of the Danish
headquarters. Later in 2011, the company signed up for the SfG project with
a team of two Danish employees from HQ. The two Danish participants went
to boot camps in China and later teamed up with a Chinese participant from
the subsidiary to get insights into the Chinese market.
China was ignored by HQ because of a low level of trust towards the subsidi-
ary. It remains to be seen if top management will listen more now that the
two respected Danes from headquarters that were sent to China are involved.
resources or maybe the subsidiary has a few non-allocated resources in reserve to
prevent such stalemate situations. But if not, the subsidiary must mature the idea in a
skunk works project, where the employees invest their personal spare time or by clev-
erly tapping into existing resources as exemplified by the previous and following case.
face another barrier. They need to build sufficient trust at HQ both in the business
opportunities of the project and in the local teams' ability to carry out the plan.
when setting up a team for a new business development project is whether to reprior-
itize employees' time and tasks, wait until existing employees become available to join
the project or to hire new resources into the company.
resources is smaller than larger companies. Furthermore, hiring new resources is pro-
portionally a bigger task for SME's than larger companies, since SME's may not have
dedicated human resource departments, training programs, job rotation procedures,
etc.
An alternative approach to hiring new resources is to rely on external resources and
consultants for well-defined tasks that don't require extensive company knowledge, e.g.
an analysis of the Chinese mid-market. SME's rarely have the budget to hire consult-
ants, so most often, they have to "make do with what they've got". However, there are
a limited number of tasks any employee can solve efficiently, so management cannot
make-believe with resources and naively add new business development projects on top
of existing projects without reprioritizing.
ment project, the subsidiary of a Danish SME may have difficulties attracting talented
Chinese people. If working for a foreign company, Chinese prefer to work for large
multinational companies, since a well-known company looks good on a resume and
can lead to more career opportunities than a smaller company. Another issue, although
general and not particularly related to SME´s, is the loyalty of Chinese employees, who
tend to change jobs more often than Danes and are driven by opportunities. In spite of
this, several Danish SME's have in fact managed to develop good retention rates among
their Chinese employees by introducing incentive systems and career opportunities with
many small steps including training programs at the HQ in Denmark.