1. How did each recipient interpret the email(s)?
2. What cultural assumptions underlie Foster's email and the phone call and email from Hassan?
3. How should Foster respond to Hassan?

Professor Henry W. Lane prepared this case solely to provide material for class discussion. The author does not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The author may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality. Ivey Management Services is the exclusive representative of the copyright holder and prohibits any form of reproduction, storage or transmittal without its written permission. Reproduction of this material is not covered under authorization by any reproduction rights organization. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materia1s, contact Ivey Publishing, Ivey Management Services, c/o Richard Ivey School of Business, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 3K7; phone (519) 661-3208; fax (519) 661-3882; e-mail cases@ivey, uwo. ca. Copyright 02005 , Northeastern University, College of Business AdministrationVersion: (A) 2009-09-28 Charles Foster was a U.S. national sales manager for a large multinational technology company headquartered in France. He was concerned about the availability of an important new disk drive that was selling better than anticipated. If he could obtain more of these drives, he was sure that they would sell. Since the product had just been launched with the company' s various sales forces and distributors, Foster was worried about losing momentum. The sales force and distributors had 1iterally thousands of products to se11 and an availability problem could prove fatal to the product line, as the company's sales efforts were redirected to other products or customers chose to purchase from the competition. The situation was complicated by the fact that the design and manufacturing of the drive had been assigned to a new Franco-Japanese joint venture (JV) 1ocated in France. Not only was the joint venture adapting to a new manufacturing system that had been introduced to produce the drive, it was also adapting to the joint venture' s new organizational structure. As it tried to adapt, the joint venture encountered numerous comp1ications, particularly those involving logistics. Over the previous months, several attempts had been made to resolve the availability issue at 1ower 1eve1s but with no success. Foster decided that the problem had become serious enough to warrant the attention of his supervisor, Richard Howe, vice-president of sales for High Technology Products. Because Foster had a good, informal relationship with Howe, he decided to send him an email explaining the situation. Howe forwarded Foster' s email to Maurice LeBlanc, the head of the Strategic Business Unit (SBU) headquartered in France. In turn, LeBlanc, who previously had been head of new product development for the SBU, forwarded the email to Ahmed Hassan, president of the JV. Hassan, raised in the Middle East, had lived most of his adult life in France (see Exhibit 1). The Phone Call A couple of days after sending his email, Foster was in his office completing some sales reports when the phone rang. After he answered the phone, he immediately recognized the accented, emotion-laden voice that spilled out into the room. This is Ahmed Hassan. Why are you writing such things to my boss in an email? Why are you saying so many negative things about my business? Why didn' t you call me? Foster was stunned. He did not know what Hassan was talking about or what to say. He recalled: Ahmed was absolutely livid. And he continued yelling at me for what seemed like an eternity. Exhibit 1 Email String 1. Email to Richard Howe To: Richard Howe/Techco@USHQ Subject: Drives Availability - Further info on XD19 Dick, I wanted to give you some further info on the XD19 stock situation. I feel strongly that this is a precursor to what we are going to face when all of our manufacturing goes to the JV. I' m including my thoughts on what is going on and I would like your opinion on what we should do in the organization to get a handle on this before it gets too far out of hand. The issues we are facing seem to be driven by two main factors: - Marketing is asking for forecasts on product use. Manufacturing does not believe them and makes their own forecasts based on run-rates and then ends up shipping even below that. I think that this is being driven by an inappropriately high emphasis on reducing inventory. The manufacturing for the XD19 is done in batches. It is often three to five months between batch runs for a specific drive. With such long lead-times, we are unable to respond to sudden swings in the market or new opportunities. Our issues right now are magnified by a problem with the firmware 1 on the XD19. This issue is also illustrative of the types of problems that we need to prevent from happening with the JV: - We have been using Version 07 firmware, but the JV is current1y converting all of their stock to Version 08. The Version 08 firmware has a bug that does not provide true three-wire control in a keypad mode, which we consider a major safety issue. 2 - The JV does not consider this to be a safety issue and has released this firmware for use outside of the U.S. We are going to have to live off of the remaining stock of Version 07 until the release of Version 09 next year. This problem is magnified by the use of masked firmware instead of flashable. When there is a mistake, as there is in this case, we are stuck with it until the next set of masks is made. (There is a cost savings in using masked units, but I would be willing to bet that we have never realized it since we are always giving customers new drives and new control boards to cover our bugs.) - The JV does not fully test functionality like we do, resulting in a huge 1ist of bugs with each firmware release once we test it. We then have to live with these bugs until the next release and the next set of bugs. Since these releases are normally masked before we do our testing, the fixes can' t be done on the fly. We are currently expediting Version 07 units from France to cover the shortfalls, but there are six catalog numbers that will need to be ordered from Japan. It is also likely that we will completely exhaust the remaining supply of Version 07 masks for all of the other sizes before production of the Version 09 firmware begins. With the batch lead times, I expect this to absolutely kill the XD19 launch and it will be a big hit on us for Core Product. This is SCARY! If an opportunity comes along, forget about it, because we are still filling backlog. I already have OEM salespeople giving up on selling the XD19 because it is not in stock. It is particularly frustrating being told that we are not meeting top-line objectives when we cannot even ship to the current level of sales. Charles 2. Email to Maurice LeBlanc To: Maurice LeBlanc/TechcoInt@HQFrance Subject: Drives Availability - Further info on XD19 Maurice, We are having an inventory problem with the XD19 (V07). The issue as I understand it is France does not have the inventory and we have to wait on the JV to build its next batch. In the meantime, we are losing orders due to lack of inventory. I would like to see if you could talk with JV to expedite its manufacturing process as we need drives now. The list below contains the key part numbers that we need with Version 07. Please see some other concerns identified by our Drives National Sales Manager - Charles Foster - in the attached email. Thank you for any help you can provide. Dick 3. Email to Ahmed Hassan To: Ahmed Hassan/TechcoInt@JVFrance Subject: Attached emails Ahmed, Is this correct what the emails from the U.S. say? Why aren' t you following our Standard Protocol SPQ that dictates that we safety test products to the safety standards in the U.S.? I am concerned that the JV is not following our normal engineering review practice. Maurice 1 Firmware is a software program that is loaded onto a chip and cannot be modified. "Masked" firmware is etched onto the chip. "Flashable" firmware is not etched on a chip, and new versions can be downloaded onto the chip. 2 Three-way wire control was "fail-safe" circuitry required in the United States but not required or used in the rest of the world