The globalization of business has affected the role of the manager significantly. Companies were not of the scale they are today. Prior to globalization, managers usually only had to worry about one, local culture when doing marketing. With a global company, managers must consider multiple cultures, languages, and value systems. With different cultures come different laws, including tax codes and accounting practices. Managers must now deal with all of these. They must also master the various, ever-changing technologies that enable them to manage people and production worldwide. In short, managers in the global age must deal with a much wider range of people and cultures, and they …show more content…
There are cultural norms that exist that may make a product or service undesirable in another. It is impossible to take a company global successfully with out first doing your due diligence and research about the culture. This is something that early managers mostly never had to worry about. Is your product something the people will want or need? For a company to do well in a global market place it is vital to travel to the country you are expanding to and get real boots on the ground sense of how your business will do there. You have to explore the culture, do market research and really get that first hand knowledge and experience, to be able to really understand how your product will fare.
Marketing is a whole new head of the beast of managing globally. Again, it involves knowing your customer, understanding the language, and being familiar with cultural norms that are not a part of the puzzle when dealt with in your own environment. The old stand-by story of marketing the Chevy Nova in Mexico, for instance; the problem was, “nova” means “doesn’t run” in Spanish, so it was a bit hard to market the car. Though this anecdote is untrue it makes the …show more content…
Additionally there are taxes, accounting issues, codes, and exchange rates in the foreign country that make managing globally a tough undertaking. There are export and import requirements that earlier managers never had to deal with. And you have to think about the packaging of these goods. Having the instructions printed in different languages is now something that I see in most items I buy. The cost to produce and manufacture these goods may be quite different as well, in a foreign company. Take for example the Swiss banking laws changing in response to American pressure to, perhaps, the Google tax wrangles in Ireland, China, and