Footwear International Study

Introduction: Cross-cultural management is to help you develop an understanding of the practice and the doing of global business and management. Different cultures have different orientations. Also, different culture not suit for every country. Disney failed to understand cross-management in Paris. So it made a large financial lose due to the culture errors. As our case of Footwear international is another case about International Corporation make a cultural error. Footwear international is a multinational shoes company. Footwear Bangladesh starts doing business in Bangladesh in 1930. In 1989, footwear international had a trouble with a wrong decision when they put a similar name of "Allah" logo on the insoles of sandals. Culture issues: Language: 95% of population speaking Bengali and 5% specking Arabic. Religion: 85% of population is Moslem and Islam. And Moslem and Islam is the official state religion. Political environment: the political system in Bangladesh is very unstable. Global Managers (global mindset) In the case study we also identified Carlson's lack of global mindset. Global mindset is how the managers see certain things that others are not able to see. In this case, Carlson was not able to see the impact of the design of the sandal to the Moslem people. For a global manager, he should have the abilities of manage uncertainty and balance tensions in the company. Communication: Language is the one of the most important way of communication in international management. In this case, all of the people working in the design department of Footwear International do not speak and read Arabic, thus, they do not know that the Chinese temple bells they used in the design of the insoles is very similar to the Arabic spelling of the word "Allah". Culture theories: According to Schein three levels of cultures, The artifact is the sandal with the "Allah" logo. It is visible. This design was based from Chinese bells.