Cross Cultural Implications of Corporate Social Responsibility, continued

Dear friends,

I am picking up the above topic today by introducing the First Best Practice for Minimizing Risk in Managing Cross Cultural Concerns in Global Contracting as found in THE ABA GUIDE TO INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS, Third Edition, May 2009. As I said in my initial blog entry on Corporate Social Responsibility, as found in the Winter 2010 edition of the INTERNATIONA LAW NEWS, my thoughts shed light on how corporate social responsibility has clear, natural, cross cultural implications.

The First Best Practice asks that for all global contracting situations, all participants in the global operation create within themselves an awareness of what is a cross cultural concern. Every time that a multinational corporation or a national corporation invests in a business opportunity that will bring individuals from many different cultures together to work and to live in close proximity, in a nation that is outside of the national headquarters of the founding corporation, cross cultural concerns exist. The culture of the multinational will be that of the nation in which the multinational has its headquarters. Then the question arises, what are the cultural backgrounds of those who will be working at the foreign location, and what is the culture of each person who will be supporting the multinational operation? The necessary awareness begins with each participant learning what his/her national culture is, meaning learning the practices ( as discussed in the earlier blog entry on this topic) and the core values (as discussed in the earlier blog entry on this topic) of his/her native culture. Each participant must enter the First Best Practice, creating the necessary awareness of what is a cross cultural concern, by building a knowledge of the cultural core values that each perticipant carries within him/herself.

Tomorrow I will begin the discussion of how to use the knowledge of one's own cultural core values as the beginning step in minimizing the risk in the exposure that a muntilnational experiences when investing outside of its native country.

Warm regards,

Jane

Jane E. Smith, Esq.
LiSimba consulting Services, Inc.
Building Relationships for International Business Relationships
www.lisimba.com
jsmith@lisimba.com