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The Conference Board Review® Article
Missed Connections
Why are companies so myopic when it comes to global business?
By E.J. Heresniak
I taught the senior strategy course at James Madison University as an adjunct professor a couple of years ago. I recommended to my students that they get offshore experience early in their careers if they could because of the importance of understanding a global economy. Not a few students told me that other JMU professors discouraged that, encouraging them to stay in the United States to help America.
I thought that was pretty stupid advice. Now that I'm in China, I still think that was pretty stupid advice.
I've been in the country for almost six months so far. I left the States before the DMV in Virginia implemented a new, stricter law about antique license plates. A few months ago, the DMV sent me a letter saying that I had to verify that I didn't use my old jeep or '42 Dodge regularly or else I'd lose my antique plates. I had to complete a form for each vehicle, get my signature notarized, and mail it in by December. Normally, this would have been no problem, but these days, things can be a little more difficult — even though everybody is connected to everybody and e-commerce prevails.
The problem was not on the Chinese end but with Virginia's inability to have a rational policy for traveling citizens of its Commonwealth. Since I sold my regular, everyday car before leaving for China, DMV records could indicate I was tooling around in a canvas-topped jeep making a mockery of my special antique plates. It makes me wonder where some of the DMV people might have gone to college.
I e-mailed the DMV explaining that a Virginia notary is hard to find in China and asked them to wait. They were also adamant about not accepting a Chinese notary — until I e-mailed the governor about the matter. It was then that a kindly DMV boss agreed to flag my account until I get back to the States. Had the governor's office not intervened, the DMV might have followed through on its threats to revoke my plates and charge me fifty bucks per vehicle to reinstate them.
With so much federal government in Virginia, one wonders just how far Richmond really is from D.C. Maybe people here in the foreign service or military don't keep old cars with antique plates.
On the other hand, Amazon recently shipped a book to me for just a few bucks more and a couple of extra weeks in transit. Some of the extra transit time involved finding a guy in the Chinese postal service who translates the Amazon mailing label into Chinese characters and writes them on the box. When the brown-uniformed UPS man showed up at my door, he looked like a regular UPS guy, down to the electronic, wireless clipboard that I signed.
UPS takes global seriously, but other companies have a blind side when it comes to international commerce, particularly in China, where there are 1.3 billion potential customers. A number of websites, including MySpace, the community-networking site known to people all over the world, show up on my computer in Japanese. You can trick it to give you a U.S. version, but it's not easy. Sometimes even Amazon puts up a little blurb on its welcome page asking if I am in Japan. I'm in China. The Chinese still have hard feelings about the Japanese stemming from what they call the Japanese War. Their bottom line is that while the Germans said they were sorry for their part in those times, the Japanese have been more circumspect in retrospect, and that pisses off the Chinese. So putting up Japanese stuff for people actually in China — including English speakers — is a little stupid.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart doesn't know I'm here. The company, concerned about music piracy, says that nobody outside the United States can download songs from its site, but I can testify that nobody tested that rule very well. I hope certain people in Bentonville don't read this: I like getting songs over here for 88 cents each.
Then there's Nordstrom. It has a terrific reputation for customer service, so much so that the company got dinged for overdoing it: A few years back, they gave a free shot to union organizers when they instilled customer service so strongly in salespeople that their folks were still helping customers off the clock. Nordstrom people doing favors that delighted customers probably skirted the rules a little, but the company is blind as a brick when it comes to global retail.
Stuff from Nordstrom is expensive. I get a little carried away on occasion when I am near a Nordstrom with a good-paying gig; it's intoxicating to bask in the attention of a Nordstrom salesperson who knows your name, what you like, and what you buy. I started buying Façonnable shirts, which are pretty nice shirts but ridiculously expensive. Façonnable works out of Nice, France, where I spent some quality time when I was at IBM. The late Bob Evans, a big boss at IBM when I was there, thought the IBM lab near Nice should have been closed and converted into a resort.
Even with international offices, IBM had a hard time with being really global when I worked there. Maybe it's better now since the global-services business, where most of their profits come from, can't really be run by product engineers in Armonk or Somers. IBM country managers, the marketing guys responsible for product sales in various foreign countries, had a hell of a time getting anything into U.S.-developed product plans. Almost all of the escalations that took place as part of aligning people in support of a product's release would be about things like national language support, so the poor slob trying to sell a machine in Germany or Japan had instructions and sales collateral materials printed in German or Japanese. Americans can be singularly myopic when it comes to recognizing that there's a world out there.
Anyway, between my self-indulgence and Nordstrom's customer care, I got addicted to those Façonnable shirts. Like getting one last IBM Thinkpad laptop before the product changed too much under its new Lenovo label, I figured I'd get a couple of overpriced shirts before they went away, too. With the closest Nordstrom being in Taiwan, I went directly to the company's website. After filling my shopping basket online, I went to check out. I almost made it — until I got a message telling me that Nordstrom, champion of customer service, could not ship online orders to China.
So I'm in stinking China (no offense, China — it's a figure of speech), my billing address is in the States; I've got a thirteen-hour time difference, international phone calls are expensive, and Nordstrom recommends that I either ship my order to a friend in the States and have him re-ship it to me in China, call the company with my order, or fax it. This means that the company can ship to China — it just couldn't figure out how to ship if I ordered online. Still, if its website isn't set up to mail to China, how come I could pick China as the destination on the drop-down menu when ordering?
Nordstrom never gave me a reason for this glitch, but all through my exchanges with the company and its fancy customer-management systems and well-trained people, the company couldn't see the problem from the China side. Not to mention that it's myopic and a little crazy to accept an offshore billing address but then make me ship to someone in the United States who could re-ship the package to me.
Nordstrom is not alone in its shortcomings. When I ordered stuff from Lands' End online, its IT designers thought it was smart to limit shipping addresses to eighty characters. Trying to live within that makes for some innovative abbreviating. Overseas addresses, particularly in China, are long and are usually translated and written on the box in Chinese. No Chinese translator understands the innovative English abbreviations needed to fit my complete address into the Lands' End system, and I asked the company for some flexibility. Nonetheless, my order was delayed by a couple of e-mail exchanges and by having a person physically rewrite the address on their end — probably because the company's IT guy had been told by one of his college professors to never leave the country. I understand that thinking out of the box can be tough, but thinking out of the country ought not to be.
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Return to the January/February 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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