Business Management Skills

The idea that the national cultural aspects of the two partners were overwhelmingly different was central in their early days, and the two companies that the alliance comprised acknowledged it and worked on it too. Furthermore, at the beginning the usual cultural clichés of French eccentricities frightened the Chinese company, whereas the same involuntary biases of their Chinese counterparts equally challenged the employees of the French LaFever and made them feel uneasy. In order to overcome this cultural crisis, a team of consultant psychologists was hired, including a Chinese Translation company, that advised them to recognize and acknowledge the resistance of such negative emotions without being censored. If the two parties were to succeed, first they had to acquire a sense of the other and also of the self, which would also involve not trying to conquer the other culture and instead identify the positive features of the other party when they made an attempt to reach this inner frontier. The metaphor was one of the means for the creation of the emotional climate for success, which was the result of paying special attention to the linguistic, cultural and language issues that were a crucial element in achieving this goal.

The new company LaFever-Quan Dong amounts to an effective takeover of the latter by the former, viewed from a strictly financial perspective. A major role in portraying the transaction as an alliance has been played by LaFever’s insistence on continuing to use the LaFever-Quan Dong Alliance metaphor, but in spite of these realities LaFever has continued to place enormous importance on portraying the transaction as an alliance. The first point that stands out is the use of the hyphen between the words LaFever and Quan Dong, which is used to show both organizations as a single entity. When Quan Dong hired a French Translation corporation for the negotiations, he reflected on his experience by saying that it is a legal relationship that the union between two people is based on, whereas in the army, it presents a united front to stand out against the opposition as two parties agree to join their efforts to face a common enemy. Thirdly, in business terms, it designates a partnership based on conviction, parity and justice, while in religion it refers to the treaty concluded between God and the Hebrew people and in rhetoric, it refers to the meeting of two different group concepts.

The alliance LaFever-Quan Dong evokes various other images and some of them are: competition between the European market and the Asian market; two competing car manufacturers for a position in the Asian market; the strengths of each party involved, their creative design and manufacturing innovativeness; as well as the juxtaposition between two different cultures, the West and the East, French and Chinese. In order to encourage this process, the alliance raised the concept of a global citizenship, which claims to complement the identities of all parties involved, which was to be realized through the notion of a global citizenship. A Korean mediator was hired in order to overcome the cross-cultural challenges. He suggested that the concept of the alliance was to be strengthened and communication within the alliance maximized, a strategic metaphor was to be developed. Finally, as the conclusion of the negotiations was approaching, the Korean Translator association who assisted the mediator suggested that the new organization had to adopt English as the lingua franca.