Question 1:

Oliver Yu was a second-generation immigrant in England. Born to Chinese parents, Oliver had lived all his life in London, going through their public schools and then graduating from London Business School with an MBA. After graduation, he joined Nextrom (a leading manufacturer of fine industrial instruments such as industrial thermometers, and other fine machine tools) and thought he had really come to a firm that valued performance. Due to his charming personality and very analytical mind, Oliver became the quick favorite of the top management. He also showed some great early initiative that saved the firm thousands of pounds by designing an alternative solution to a significant problem faced by Nextrom. It was widely accepted that he had a great career ahead of him within the firm, and with some quick promotions he had reached senior middle management in a very short time. After a while, Oliver was asked by their Marketing Director, Paul to start getting prepared for a new joint venture in Japan. Paul indicated that with Olivers Asian roots, he would make a great choice to oversee the beginning of the joint venture and lead it to a certain level of profitability in this new market. Oliver was excited to take charge for an operation all by himself since he knew that success in this would mean really big things in the future.

Oliver sat down with the Director who oversaw the formation of the joint venture to get an overview of the opportunity. He said that while Nextrom was very keen on making this joint venture work, their Japanese partner Akani was coming in with a lot of issues. First, Akani had been losing market share for a while across Asia. They were a big firm from the 1970s that has, in the last 10 years, not kept up their innovation with robotics and other technology that has been introduced in the field of industrial instrumentation. One of the reasons for this was that the firm had always operated with a very traditional hierarchical manner, with a slow decision-making process due to the number of people who are involved for even minor decisions. Employees who were brought in were selected carefully and then trained systematically to follow orders and processes. The firm claimed they were very high on their process quality and therefore everyone should first think if they have followed the steps required in each role within the organization. The top management team in Akani was also divided between the traditional Japanese managers who wanted the process focus, and the newer Korean and American managers who were hired in early 2000s to bring in the needed innovative practices that the firm realized they needed to keep pace in the industry. However, the new team of managers could not change the long-standing ways of doing things. Instead, there seemed to emerge a deep mistrust in the top management along national and ethnic lines.

Oliver Yu knew he had to work on establishing an organizational culture that would be more in line with Nextroms high performing and innovative culture. Yet, he also knew that as an outsider in Japan he would not succeed in trying to make changes quickly the American and Korean managers did not see much success when they tried. Oliver felt unsure about his own competencies he had been in Nextrom for about 10 years now and, while he had a fantastic rise in the firm, he had never been responsible for an operation as big as this completely by himself. However, if he refused, he knew he would not get another opportunity like this for a really long time, if ever again.

Questions for the case above:

1. What are some of the challenges faced by Oliver in this new joint venture? (20pts)
2. What are some of the things he should do to address each of these challenges? (20pts)
3. What kind of leadership skills will be needed for Oliver to be successful in this venture? (10pts)