CORPORATE CULTURE AND LOCAL CULTURE, THE PRELUDE TO EXCELLENT EXECUTION

We live in a world of acceleration, of immediacy, in which boards of directors and their executives run the risk of looking at their businesses from a very short-term perspective and focusing on three priorities: execution, execution and execution. Execution is indeed key, but it is also the result of many other things. Sports is a good example to understand this.?

To win a soccer game you must defend, control the ball, attack and score. You can't win if you focus only on what happens in the opponent's area. Our vision must be peripheral, perimetric and focused. How does this translate into the business world? First, we must create a team, develop a culture that helps generate value and create winning strategies to finally execute with brilliance and excellence. All of these ingredients are not worked on sequentially, but rather continuously and with iterations that allow us to adjust and improve. But of them, culture is surely the least analyzed ingredient and for me the most important, especially in times of change and transformation. It is what makes a company unique, much more than its strategy, it is impossible to copy and, by definition, difficult to change. It is the culture that has helped us get to where we are, so why should we change it, employees will ask when a new leader wants to change the way things are done.?

The culture of an organization can be defined as the set of attitudes, behaviors and values, ways of communicating and deciding that are shared by a group of people, be it a family, a company, or a country. Leaders must understand their company's culture and intentionally shape it so that it adapts and generates positive change and growth. The CEO is its first curator. When a culture is already defined and permeates all members of a company, it is considered an important foundation for success, a key element in going international. But what happens when a company scales up and has to reconcile its own culture with that of the destination country? Undoubtedly, tensions and conflicts arise that can have an impact on the execution of the strategy.

Team behaviors are different depending on the local culture. For example, in the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, there are no major social differences, and everyone is considered equal regardless of the hierarchical level they occupy in their professional environment. This means that discussions in the workplace take place on a one-to-one basis, with open dialogue, and constructive criticism is welcome. The situation is very different in Eastern and Southeastern European countries. In Turkey, for example, hierarchy generates respect and social distance, which impacts on decision-making processes and leads to different forms of collaboration.

Managers must ensure that the company's culture is dominant, but they must also seek to understand and respect local cultures, their social norms, values, and practices, and find ways to integrate the two. This requires leaders with effective communication skills, adaptive cross-cultural leadership and multicultural teams, the only way to foster creativity, innovation and problem solving from different perspectives. Therefore, the leader must pay special attention to attracting new talent. Finding professionals who understand the corporate culture and have the flexibility to adapt to it is key to the success of that business unit.

Therefore, the leader's ability to be flexible and adaptable and, above all, to be willing to adjust strategies according to changing cultural needs and dynamics, both globally and locally, is vital. Integrating these principles into strategy will create an environment where corporate culture and local culture can coexist harmoniously, which will contribute to long-term success in international markets.

When Boards and executives think of execution, the first thing that comes to mind is the list of actions that teams must implement to win. It would be like soccer coaches thinking about how and who should score the goal. Good coaches, before this, define a game strategy that in soccer we would call a unique style of play. In business it would be a unique style of competing, with unique competitive advantages, different and difficult to copy, which becomes a commercial strategy with a focus on distribution channels, product ranges and different geographic regions. All this, developed by teams with a shared way of working, with the same values, behaviors, and rituals, i.e., a culture that generates trust because they know that everyone is aligned. This is the only way to ensure proper execution because it will be the result and consequence of everything else.