SOCIAL-CULTURAL FACTORS IN STRATEGY

Culture, whether in firms and societies, develops slowly over time and is hard to change. Societal ways of doing things are also very stable and hard to change. Discuss how this reality impacts business strategy development on two levels:

1) Mergers and acquisitions (Can you successfully merge with or acquire entities with very different cultures? Give examples) and

2) Strategically going to other countries with their different cultures and societal ways of doing things. What usually happens when your culture and way of doing things meets those of another country? Give examples).

The point here is that Temple students typically talk about globalization in VERY intellectually primitive terms - As if saying you are going "global" were some magical fix to any problem - when it is a hugely complex strategic intellectual and practical problem. Most firms are very bad at doing this and many mergers, acquisitions and moves overseas fail because they get it so wrong.

You need first to learn what culture is, how it works and changes and understand it on several levels, apply it to one of two specific issues and embed it into a process - globalization - that most people thought was far simpler to do than it turns out to be.

I have been lecturing and writing on the complexities (and downside impacts) of global change for three decades; way before many of the issues you now see in the press arose. Guess how that came about?

You will notice that the prior DB (political, legal, regulatory) intersects with this discussion board. Guess what? To do strategy you need to integrate constantly. Have fun and challenge each other = learn something that can save your career.