My Way or No Way

  Career Development  

About a year ago, our company sent Jim to our Asian headquarters to lead the deployment of our brand-new global knowledge management project. Working overseas is one of the most coveted project assignments in our organization, so it was a no-brainer that he would have accepted the assignment. It was a critical assignment, coming at a delicate moment for the company, but we were confident that he had the right stuff to deliver the goods.

"Right after I arrived at our Asian headquarters," recalled Jim, "I immediately took charge of things and the project kicked off to a good start."

However, a couple of weeks later, we began receiving strange e-mails from Jim with horror stories of maggot-infested food, hostile natives and slow Internet access from home. We began to suspect that something was amiss when the project began to miss milestones and our Asian colleagues began to complain about how rude and irritable Jim had suddenly become. "Things became so bad that I couldn't take it anymore," said Jim. "I just had to take the next flight home." We realized that we had a potential disaster on our hands.

What went wrong? We learned the hard way that the hardest part of the overseas project wasn't making sure that Jim had a nice place to stay or that he could speak the language. No, the hardest thing was dealing with the culture shock of living and working in a foreign …

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