From her office, Eunice catches a glimpse of the 11.45 A380 bound for Singapore; needless to say, it’s on time – a typical Swiss cliché. Like the Singapore Airlines campaign slogan, no detail is too small, Cybot, a leading cybersecurity firm, is committed to innovation. Eunice is new in her role as Project Manager at Cybot, one of the big four leaders in the European marketplace with over 50 cybersecurity specialists staffing thousands of client engagements around Europe. She accepted the job in Zurich because it offered great professional opportunities. She relished the challenge of starting in a new city on her own, even though it was difficult saying goodbye to family and friends in Singapore. Four years ago, she moved to San Francisco to do a master’s in cybercrime at the University of Southern California.

Now, Eunice is experiencing homesickness for the first time and she is not sure why this move is proving so complicated.

“The meeting is about to start, Eunice.”

Her assistant’s voice snapped her out of her daydream. This morning’s emergency meeting was called in the aftermath of a cyberattack on one of their biggest clients. The massive cyberattack brought down multiple sites and business units from government offices to shopping centres, even local banks. Andreas and Sam were huddled together in deep conversation when she entered the meeting room. Perhaps sensing her hesitation, Andreas, the CEO of Cybot, motioned to her to take a seat.

“DeltX has been hacked with personal details and credit card numbers at risk. We are not sure yet, but it looks like accounts from in excess of 500 customers were potentially accessed by hackers in the last few hours.”

“This is the second such attack in four months; it’s serious,”

said Sam, Cybot’s Swiss COO, who shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

She sensed Sam’s anxiety, which added to her own. Sam was distant, which made her nervous around him. On the other hand, Andreas liked her; he hired her because of her experience in the cybercrime industry, and her knowledge of the Asian market and her fluency in Chinese. Andreas has long-term plans to open a new office in Singapore but had not shared this information with anyone on his team. He offered Eunice a fair relocation package, including a generous salary. Tim, another member of staff, had applied for Eunice’s job but had been turned down; Andreas wanted someone who spoke Chinese.
Andreas was stressed. “DeltX, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies in Europe, is our biggest customer;
they will go public with this information in an hour and we need to come up with a plan quickly.”

Andreas added, “Information security and privacy have become board-level challenges as well as issues; we need to act now.”
Andreas had James Wu, Head of the IT at DeltX, on a teleconference.
“Hi James, the team are all gathered this morning,”
Andreas reassured. “The information systems and the cyber defense teams need to work closer together and pay more attention to the situation to contain it, especially as attacks are becoming more frequent and causing more damage.”
James admitted, “The virus is believed to be ransomware –
one of these pieces of software that shut down a computer system, and the perpetrators have already demanded a huge sum of money to fix the problem. We need to act quickly.”
Eunice asked, “Do we know who is behind the latest attack?
Our American and British analysts believe the attack earlier this month was carried out by North Korea.” Andreas said, “We don’t know yet, but one thing is for sure: we need to come up with a smart solution.”
After an hour, the team, which was made up of software experts mostly Eunice’s age, had come up with a solution to prevent the cyber thieves siphoning off any more personal information and they were able to put the new measures in place.
The problem was fixed for now.
Andreas was not convinced. “Our promise is to deliver real lasting benefits for our clients, so we need to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.........”

Question 1. Choosing the right person in the first place is key to the success of an overseas assignment. Does Eunice have a global mindset? Use the list of leadership competencies by Bird and Osland (2004) as a basis for your answer.
2. Identify and evaluate the effectiveness of some of the diversity and inclusion tools mentioned in the case.
3. Roche CEO Severin Schwan said about diversity and inclusion, “I believe that diversity of people enhances innovation. The different ways of thinking foster creativity.
But just having diversity is not enough. We have to embrace and appreciate each other’s diversity to translate it into novel ideas – that’s why inclusion of people is so important.” Comment.
4. Apply the Mapping Bridging Integrating (MBI) Framework by Professor J. DiStefano and Prof. M. Maznevski to the case.
5. What advice would you give Eunice? Should she give Switzerland another chance or return home to Singapore?