These days, every employee here gets a birthday gift, something a multinational company might be expected to do in this age of feel-good corporate management.

The problem is that people in China do not traditionally celebrate birthdays.

But that is changing. And so is Lenovo. It is trying to become a global company with its purchase of I.B.M’s personal computer business for $1.75 billion, and handing out birthday cakes is just part of the process of evolving into a multinational corporation.

To further globalize the company, however, Lenovo will do something even bolder: it will move its headquarters to Armonk, N.Y., where I.B.M. is based, and essentially hand over management of what will become the world’s third-largest computer maker, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to a group of senior I.B.M. executives.

American multinational companies outsource manufacturing to China. Why can’t a Chinese company outsource management to the United States?

Preparations are already under way in Beijing. For the last few months, all vice presidents have been required to study English for at least one hour a day. The chairman says he has read books about Bill Gates and Andrew Grove. And the chief executive of Lenovo has agreed to give up day-to-day management of the company to assume the role of chairman.

Lenovo’s challenge will be to meld radically different corporate cultures.

“Neither culture should be the de facto culture,” said Martin Gilliland, an analyst at Gartner Research. “They have to start a new one. Can they develop a new Lenovo business culture? That’s one of the keys to success.”

And the new language for the company is English, company officials say.

Lenovo officials say they are studying American business history, and the chief executive lists The Harvard Business Review as part of his regular reading.

Read more

Hat tip: Going Global

In many parts of Latin America, resistance to cultural domination by the United States is often synonymous with a reluctance to learn or speak English. But here, where Salvador Allende was once a beacon for the left, the current Socialist-led national government has begun a sweeping effort to make this country bilingual.

Chile already has the most open, market-friendly economy in Latin America, and the language plan is seen as advancing that process.

The initial phase of the 18-month-old program, officially known as “English Opens Doors,” calls for all Chilean elementary and high school students to be able to pass a standardized listening and reading test a decade from now. But the more ambitious long-term goal is to make all 15 million of Chile’s people fluent in English within a generation.

Read more

Hat tip: Going Global

Christmas is definitely in the air around the globe. And the Christmas buzz has been increasingly welcomed by Chinese people, as internationalization continues to transform the landscape.

Indulging in mouth-watering delights while being swept away by an array of cultural holiday entertainment has become a bit of a rage in big cities such as Beijing now. For many Chinese, the novel idea of “Christmas” has arrived, becoming another welcome and pleasant way to celebrate the country’s “opening up” and development.

Read more

While relief workers rushing to Asia to help deal with the aftermath of the tsunamis will have little time to interact with locals, aid workers who spend more time abroad require special intercultural skills.

…future development workers are taught to change their perspective, to see their own behavior from the perspective of the culture they’ll be working in.

Read more

The Chinese-language Web site of fast food giant McDonald’s Corp. was broken into twice on Christmas by a hacker protesting against its listing of Taiwan as a separate country, the Beijing Youth Daily said Monday.

Read more

Hat tip: Going Global

In a land of magic and mystics, beyond the waves of the Arabian Sea, lives a hero whose soul will forever remain American. But in body and form he now belongs to India, where his story unravels in the tale of a wall-crawling do-gooder.

Spider-Man, they call him. But the next time he unmasks, an Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar will be revealed.

Peter Parker may be America’s Spider-Man, swinging among the skyscrapers and contemplating his urban angst. But in India, he’s Pavitr, with his own comic book for young Indians eager to embrace their own superhero.

Readers will find Spider-Man living in Bombay, a seaside city flush with gangsters, movie stars and some of the world’s largest slums. It’s a city with a generous supply of good and evil, fragrant with riches and smelling of poverty, where small-town Indians go to make it big and ill-meaning men lurk in every corner.

Read more

For Sanjay Saxena, it was his first assignment abroad when the multi-national firm that he worked for sent him to Europe. Given a tight deadline to complete his first project, he briskly called for a day-long team meeting on Saturday, to kick off the project.

Half an hour after he had sent out the communication, he got a call from his Western boss. Five minutes later, a chastened Saxena was back in his workplace recalling his email, after being soundly rebuked for being insensitive to other people.

It took a while for Saxena to internalise that working on Saturday (an off day), which was a sign of commitment to the job in India , was perceived as intruding into others’ personal space in the European office of the same company.

As India integrates into a more seamless world, the ability to work in a cross-cultural environment is a valuable asset for any ambitious executive.

Managing to understand, appreciate and perhaps even exploit the nuances of these cultural differences, could spell all the difference between success and failure in some business situations.

Read more

Christmas isn’t just a festival, it’s a cross-cultural global celebration. Variants there may be, but certain customs are common…

Read more

Managers at Cary Towne Center say a growing number of shoppers speak Spanish so it’s critical Santa can connect with all the children.

“It makes a big difference to see a child wandering…standing there, wishing to be close to Santa and before you know it he’s sitting on Santa’s lap and Santa is speaking Spanish to him,” Santa added. “That’s his language [and] he does not question it.”

Whether it’s in English, Spanish or French, Santa listens carefully to each request. While Barbie and Spiderman top the list of most young children, Santa says most of the older children ask for something bigger.

“This year, more than any other year, I’ve got more requests for peace on earth,” he said.

It’s a gift all of us could ask for this Christmas, no matter what language you speak.

Read more

Note: In the words of former South African president Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to someone in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

The Peel District School Board has produced “Welcome to School Kits” in 26 foreign languages. The kits are available at all elementary schools and contain basic information for newcomer families enrolling their children in school.

The languages were selected in an attempt to reflect Peel region’s cultural diversity. Kits are available in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Croatian, Farsi/Persian, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Urdu and Vietnamese

Read more

It’s hard to tell now, but in the future, 2004 could be seen as one of the pivotal years in the history of Japanese cinema. This is not necessarily because of the quality of films released–and there were a number of great films–but because of hints of fundamental shifts in the industry and its relation to the global marketplace.

It is significant that the most successful film with Japanese actors in the domestic market this year was not even a Japanese-made film, but The Last Samurai. That was only one of a number of foreign-made films–most released in 2003 in the United States–that underlined the strong interest that exists in Japanese pop culture on a global scale

Heterogeneity and cultural border crossings can be a good thing, especially for a Japan that was long an exclusionary nation, but this trend is not exactly new. Independent filmmakers have been deconstructing the myth of Japanese homogeneity for over a decade…

What is different about the current internationalization is not just the watering down, the turning of cultural difference into commodities to consume, but–and this is probably the origin of those side effects–the fact it’s now taking place in the major studios. What these global institutional moves threaten to do is further distance the majors from the minors and further undermine an already unfairly hampered independent industry through the force of big capital, especially in television.

Read more

Italy has taken another step forward in fostering good relations with emerging economic superpower China via a new program for academic cooperation, Italian media reported on Wednesday.

The Marco Polo program, sponsored by Italy’s powerful industrial employers’ association Confindustria, sets up a system for “stable relations” between Chinese and Italian universities.

The agreement is the fruit of Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi’s trip to the oriental country earlier in the month, which was aimed at promoting economic and cultural ties between the countries.

Marco Polo will provide a platform for the management of joint research projects.

Offices in both countries will also be set up for the coordination of academic exchanges involving researchers and lecturers – all of which will be supported by intensive foreign language instruction programs.

Read more

IBMers sip spring water, wear suits and go on low-carb diets.

Workers at Lenovo, China’s biggest PC maker, favor fish head soup, open-collar shirts and smoking.

Lenovo on Dec. 7 agreed to buy Big Blue’s PC, laptop and notebook unit in a $1.75 billion deal. But in acquiring the unit — and 10,000 U.S. IBM (IBM) employees — Lenovo also is acquiring a very different corporate culture.

There’s been a growing number of Chinese giants buying key business units from Western firms.

Most analysts say such East-West marriages can work if parties address cultural or managerial issues quickly. And in a rapidly globalizing world, fusions between giants on opposite ends of the world may be the only way to go, they say.

Read more

Lexicon Marketing, developer and marketer of Inglés sin Barreras, a video-based English learning program, has increased its advertising investment from $12.56 to $75.00 million in little over a year, and is now challenging the venerable Procter & Gamble for the top [advertiser in the Hispanic market] position.

Read more

MTV Tuesday announced plans to add three new multicultural TV channels aimed at “super-serving” specific ethnic populations in the U.S.

MTV said its research shows ethnic populations in the U.S. are currently: “underserved by the media and there is a great appetite for local language channels amongst these groups. Many of these ethnic groups prefer speaking their home language, and are hungry for music and culture from their country of origin.” Additional ethnic channels are expected to follow.

Read more