A Global Challenge

By Mr Dominique Lion

A global challenge
In time, it's probably inevitable that your organization will grow more culturally diverse, and this reality calls for a change of attitudes, strategies and methods. When we think about multi-cultural issues in the 21st century, we're not talking about non-discrimination or equal opportunity. We're talking about using multiple cultural backgrounds as competitive tools.

People's culture, age, and gender make them see the world in different ways. These perspectives are a key to creative thinking, and that, in turn, is the key to successful R&D.

We must stop seeing diversity as a problem, and start seeing it as an advantage. To succeed, organisations must understand and use the skills, traditions and backgrounds of a diverse workforce.
In reality, diversity gives businesses a key advantage in the world marketplace. Our wider range of viewpoints offers a spectrum of talents—meticulous craftsmanship, for example—which can improve many aspects of product and process research.

Most of us have weathered economic storms before, but nobody has ever seen anything like this. Forget the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, the dot-com implosion of 2000-2001, the blistering financial scandals of 2002 (Enron, WorldCom, etc), and the three-year, post 9/11 global recession that finally abated in 2003. Sure, plenty of shirts –and trillions of dollars – were lost back then. But the current financial crisis makes all these other episodes look like storms in a tea-cup. With seemingly invincible financial institutions crumbling into dust, share indexes the world over in a freefall of historic proportions, and the global economy in the emergency room, what exactly are we supposed to do?

New markets are being created out there, with a very different culture to the one of greed and power, a market that believes in the value of a long term customer. Let’s embrace variety and gain from it.