Preliminary position paper 10

The premiminary position paper that we are studying is A meeting of minds? From the chapter

16 of the textbook Working with international teams. The Indian owners of an agricultural

machine company with an increasing amount of sister companies around the world were

largely decided to increase the productivity of their European operations. To that end, they

dispatched a chief executive (MD) from its Bombay command center to lead its recently

acquired company in Italy and to spearhead changes in the European operations. Prior to

actually leaving, the MD convinced the owners that a cross-subsidiary team of management

staff was needed to harmonise the decisions made by the two European companies they

owned (one of those in Italy and another one in Lithuania). This group would ultimately serve

as a basis for integrating decision-making across all of the company's European and Asian

operations. The MD from Bombay saw their first appointment as a possible chance for them

to get to know each other and share information about day-to-day operations. He left his

Italian management team to organize the meeting after explaining his goals to them. The

initial team would be made up of managers from the Italian and Lithuanian subsidiaries'

technical, production, quality control, and client relations departments. The team would hold

its first meeting in Rome, followed by meetings in Vilnius and Bombay. The infrastructure of

the company would be upgraded to allow for this. the team to meet virtually in between their

regular face-to-face meetings products ('we're wondering if the company will keep producing

tractors').

Being unable speak up, one or two Lithuanians in the team occasionally asked the MD if they

could contribute to the discussion, but their requests were frequently drowned out by the loud

comments of the Italian participants. The Lithuanians only managed to ask a few questions

about certain products that they were also producing.

After that, while the team members were enjoying a hors d'oeuvre before dinner, the MD

went around the room, asking the rather quiet Lithuanians on one side of the room how they

thought the negotiations went. When he asked one of the managers about the meeting, he was

inundated with feedback from everyone in the hallway.

One Italian respondent expressed his countrymen and women feelings: 'I don't understand

why the visitors are so cold; they really didn't want to know anything about us and told us

nothing about themselves.' They said " After all, we speak the same technical language, so it

should have gone much better"