Understanding Cultural Dimensions in Business Expansion

Thanks for taking the time to come for this guest speaking session. Okay, for those of you who hasn't taken your attendance, you'll do it probably after class, look for your respective lecturers and then remember to scan the MPGo, okay? Okay, so today's, okay, I mean, I hope you are enjoying your IO psychology classes. We are already into our fourth week and our first assignment is due when? Next Friday on 23rd of May. So I believe your lecturer will brief you on what is required for this assignment. There will be two parts to it. It's a 500 word reflection. The first part, 250 words, is about today's sharing, what you learned from it. Using two Hofstede's dimensions and trying to apply what the guest speaker, myself, is sharing. And then the second part is actually your own reflection on an experience that you have encountered in relation to cultural differences and practices linking Hofstede's theory. So today, I'm sharing about this case study of a company in Singapore called Benjamin Parker. So I am one of the co-founder of Benjamin Parker and I thought I would be the best person here to explain and share with you my experiences using this Hofstede's dimension in perspective in relation to what y'all have been studying. So a little bit about myself. Okay before we go into the presentation proper, I would like to share that the sharing today is only for educational purpose. Reason is because I have stepped down from the organization three years ago. So I'm still a shareholder of the company, but what I'm sharing today does not represent the company's voice. I'm sharing based on my experience when I was running the company of what happened in Australia. And so basically, after today's sharing, I would actually share the slides with your lecturers and they would actually share with you via MS Teams. Okay, so a little bit about me. So I was the COO. I was also, okay, I wear multiple hats in the company. I was a co-founder, I was a COO, I was a CTO and I was a shareholder. So I wear four hats in the company. and As you know Benjamin Barker is a lifestyle and retail company in the in the F&B retail trade. So we are actually a lifestyle and design company. We are not really a retail or F&B company per se. So for us, we run retail and F&B shops. So before I started this company together with a business partner, I was an FSD student here in Nei Yan from 1997 to year 2000. So 21 years ago, I was like you sitting behind the desk like this and having the blast and time of my life. So in fact, the experience was so enriching that I came back to teach in Nian in 2011 to 2013. So I was part of the faculty of HMS before it was HMIS. And I spent two years here teaching business management, public relations. non-profit organizations. After 2013, I left and I went to join my business partner in setting up the company. At that time, we had only three stores in 2013. So today, this is our store presence internationally. Today's topic I'm sharing specifically with relation to our Australia expansion are and Australia is a very interesting country for us because it was a country that we went and it was very difficult for us. It was very difficult, very challenging and I will share with you more what happened later on. So in 2016, three years after I joined, we opened our first store in Melbourne and in that same year we all opened another. I think in 2016 we opened three stores, but 2017 we had to close two. Till today, we only have one store left and it's a very interesting case study and I'm here to share with you perhaps what were our blind spots. Why didn't we? Why didn't we expand it to more stores in Australia? Even though we were very confident at the start. So using this hostess dimension, if I had learned this much earlier, perhaps we didn't have to close that two stores. Why Australia? First, Australia had a very strong and vibrant retail scene. So the retail scene is like Singapore, it's very exciting. there are very interesting concepts, there are new stores popping up every day. And we thought, wow, perhaps our brand could add value to the consumers over there. Second, it was high urban influence. It wasn't like Adelaide, it wasn't like Cairns, it wasn't like Canberra, it wasn't like Perth, right? Melbourne is a city, it's a vibrant city. There's life, there are many people looking for new concepts to buy into. And that's why I see it in Melbourne, right? It's really one of the fashion lifestyle capital in the world. It was actually also close to Singapore. It's only a seven-hour flight, you know, apart from Europe. And cultural familiarity, you know, for me and my business partner, we actually studied there. We lived there for some time and we thought we knew the culture. And that's why that was our first foray into a foreign country. Not even Malaysia, right? We thought Malaysia would be a natural extension for us, or extension because it's just next to us, but Australia was our very very first store that we opened out of Singapore and perhaps that is perhaps why maybe it was a big lesson for us. And our growing Asian diaspora. So for those of you who are familiar with Melbourne, you understand that there are many Asians in Australia. In fact, if you go to the city of Melbourne itself right, you will see actually more Asians than Caucasians and our products are specifically tailored for Asians. That's why we are so well received in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Our specialty is the fit. So for example, many of you might have bought foreign shirts, for example, brands from overseas and you realize that you can't fit you very well because they are more tailored towards the the Caucasian people. Bigger, broader, taller. So our feed was very unique and we thought that we could actually make it in Australia. But what happened right? What happened was that sometimes we did our research, we collected data but we didn't look at culture, we didn't look at actually what, how did the people behave, how would they respond to a new brand. Okay so we did. We thought we did everything right, but in fact we overlooked something. We did not look at culture. How culture would affect the buying of our product, the purchase of our product. Okay, so what is culture? Hostet defines it as a collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Which means culture is actually a very subconscious component in us. So for example, we are brought up in Singapore. And if you were brought up in a different culture, let's say a Western culture, we would behave very, very, very differently. And why do I say that? For example, if I go into a lecture theatre and I'm teaching Caucasians, most of the time, they will actually look at me and their laptops will all be dumb. That's Western, you know, Western culture. context. So in Asian culture we understand that. So when I was teaching in IAN 2011, I had a culture shock because I thought that when I was in Australia when our laptops were open, the lecturer would at least rebuke us. So I had a culture shock. And then my colleagues said, eh, Dana is normal because they are actually taking our notes, which I hope you are. So I used this comparison tool to look at the different scores between Singapore and Australia. And let me start with individualism and collectivism. Okay, so what happened in Australia? Okay, so Singapore is a very highly strongly collectivistic culture, which means, you know, we work in teams. We usually don't reward individual performers. But in Australia, it's very, very different. The employees there, they want the clarity on their roles. They wanted to know what their individual commissions were and they wanted to know how can we help them grow in their professional career. And this is something that we overlook because in Singapore, you know when you hire somebody, you do not actually necessarily tell them that okay this is your career progression, this is what. We just give them the hygiene factors which is your salary, your annual day's leave and that's it. But in Australia, they really really wanted to know how can the company help them grow as a professional. So the thing is that, and so interestingly is that they wanted autonomy. For my class TA1, TA2, I shared with you all something called the magic formula which is MAGIC. The A stands for autonomy. They wanted to make sense. they felt were right for the customers. So we brought over this team, relational team approach. We said, no, we're all family here. We do things together. And I think that kind of backfired. So the lesson we learned, I mean, this was a very big lesson to us is that we have to adapt to the country's context of how they were behaving and how they behave in a way that they related to even customers. For example, in Singapore, most of the time whenever there was a customer complaint, a major complaint, management would be informed first. So for example, let me give you this example. In one of the year that I was working, I had a call at about 7 pm on a Sunday night. On a Sunday night, I had a call. from one of my store managers and you know what happened? A full-size mirror fell on a child. Thank god the child was safe but the full-size mirror fell on the child and I had to rush down to the store in the middle of my dinner and I had to placate the parents. The parents were Caucasian, they were very demanding but eventually we resolved the issue. In Australia if such a thing were to happen right, most of the time the employees right because they have the autonomy they will actually deal with the situation themselves and after they have dealt with the situation then they will actually update you uh what they have done know what happened and what they have done okay so you see the culture is very very different here we want to know for for them they want to take autonomy and own the situation they want to take ownership but in singapore no that's why straight away the the manager called me and after this incident right i had a briefing with the team, all the managers, that time we had about 14 stores and I told them something. I said that in the future, you only call Damien when there's fire in the shop or when someone dies. This is the only time you can call me, otherwise please deal with it. Of course we equip them with what to do in such situations, the different cases. But in Australia they really just want to take ownership so we saw okay that's a good thing but Is that really a good thing? So that was one of our oversight, individualism, collectivism. So power distance, power distance is a very very interesting dimension in our Hofstede's theory. In Singapore, our power distance score is very very very high. Australia is very very very low. What does it mean? It means that the hierarchy If you look at the professional hierarchy, organizational hierarchy, in Australia it's very flat. Which means that the bosses, the owners, the leaders, the managers are almost at equal level as their employees. Which means that after work, you can actually go out with your bosses and they treat you like friends. In Singapore, it's a bit different. between us and our leaders, sometimes we are a bit distant. Why? Because in Asian context, we kind of give respect to our leaders. In Australia, they kind of look at you as, yes, you are my boss, but technically speaking, we are kind of equal still. You are only higher level than me because of your professional status, but as an individual status, you are the same as me. So we went there and the thing is that we brought down this top-down approach from Singapore. expecting them to listen to instructions. But it's so interesting, you know in Australia, they want you to actually consult them on every matter. Like you know, what kind of policies, what kind of directives, everything they want to be consulted. They are very, is this consultative factor that they are very, very... I think they okay. Personally if you ask me, this is something that I felt. we could have done better because if I've learned this half step, this power distance right, I would have understand that okay in Australia I would have gone with a more consultative, collaborative approach than if I were to enforce or even impose our directive. So you see, in Singapore, we have this SOP manual which we developed. It's about 80 pages. Later I'll go into it when we talk about the other dimensions. But we shared with them, this is how we do banks. But they said, no, no, no. I think in Australia, this we could have done this, we could have done it this way. Now let me give you this example okay. In Singapore, do you call your parents by their names? Yes or no? Do you call your parents by their first name? Okay let me give you this interesting example. My niece and my sister and my brother-in-law is living in Adelaide, Australia and do you know that my two-year-old niece calls her father by his first name? You know I was a bit perplexed, I was a bit shocked. She's two years old, she called her dad by her first name. Hey Aaron, Aaron can you get for me this, Aaron can you get for me that. I was a bit perplexed but that is the culture. That is the culture. So if I had learned this earlier on, I would have done things differently. Like I would have allowed my Australian teammates to actually do things that they felt were right in their own way. They also wanted a lot of transparency around this decision making. So in Singapore, whenever you tell your employees what they need to do, they will do it. But then they'll question every single thing. So sometimes it takes us very long to even execute something. Because they keep questioning, questioning, questioning. And they don't question because they want to know something. They question because they want to be involved in decision-making processes. So for us, leadership in lower power distance cultures like Australia, we have to be very participative. okay and we are supposed to be treating them as collaborators not as subordinates okay so next uncertainty avoidance okay singapore you see our score is eight we are have we are very high uncertainty avoidance which means we have very low tolerance for ambiguity that's singapore but in australia right they are very receptive to ambiguity maybe not maybe not a lot but you look at 51 and 8 that's very very very high okay so we okay this is where i told you right we designed we have this standard operational procedure manual and everything in the manual we expect our australian team members to follow to it for example when customers come into a shop we have a script for them to say like hey hi good afternoon no ma'am Sir, how can we help you? Are you looking for something? event or for an occasion blah blah blah so everything is scripted by an australian so so then and then uh even this hang spacing it has to be one one uh fist spacing between the shirts but they didn't follow right they didn't they didn't follow let me give you example okay so for this scripts right for service uh they say can we not abide by this script because we want to adapt to the context where the client is coming from for For example, If the client replies with something, I have to reply in a way that answers the question, not according to the script. Why did our Singaporean members want a script? So this was something that they actually requested for when I came to board. They said that we do not know what to say when customers come into the store. If you look at culture, we come from a culture where we... We are not very expressive, we are not very verbal. But in Australia, it comes naturally for them. It comes through these greetings. Yes. Authentic. Absolutely agree with you. But when we shared with our Singaporean colleagues that hey, you know, this is what you're supposed to be doing, right? You can just, I can just give you a generic one-liner and then you take it from there. They are so afraid of saying the wrong things. I think it's a cultural thing. For example, if you go into a local store in Singapore, do they greet you most of the time? Perhaps yes, sometimes no. But they don't go further than that, right? So the thing is that in Australia, they really really have a conversation and it's normal. Yes, exactly. But in Asia, because we are more reserved, we are not outgoing, we are not flamboyant. And because of that, we kind of dial down and tone down in our conversations with our customers. And I think that's where we need to improve in Singapore. So we assume that with the script, it would help the Australian teammates overcome some of these challenges. Right. What? I think we were wrong because Australians, they are really, really expressive. They're very verbal. And when they actually really, you know, you come into the store, you know, it's so natural. Hey, good day, sir, good day. You know, how are you? The jacket looks nice on you. Whether they mean it or not is a different thing. But they are so expressive. So in Singapore, we do not have that kind of culture where the customer comes in and treat them like friends. But there, it's really personable. So we found our be very very rigid they say we cannot follow we cannot follow it okay we cannot follow it we have to express it in a way that we are comfortable with right and i and and so again we went back to the autonomy right they wanted the autonomy to be able to you know to have some leeway in how they approach customers and how they interact with customers okay so but why did we have this SOP because we wanted to avoid uncertainty, ambiguity. In Singapore, especially, we were brought up in a culture that everything has to work to a T. Let's say for example, if everyone breaks down, everybody is worried. You see the telegram message on social media, everybody is complaining. My good friend was in France and Spain in the recent, and there was a blackout for one day. You know what the Spanish were doing? He said, Damien, the stopwaves were down, the internet were down, they did not even complain. complete. It just went to the field, play soccer, have barbecue. But in Singapore, will that ever happen? Will we? Our ministers get flooded with messages saying, why is all this breaking down? So you see, the thing is that for us, we are not comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. Everything has to be... I mean, okay, let's take the context of your students. You all have to prepare for your exams, prepare for your assignments. In Australia, when I was studying there, I did my undergrad in Australia. All the homework by my Australian classmates only done the night before. They did not, you know they can take like two hours and then they can pump up a 2000 watt assay without blinking an eye. And that was before even JetGPT even existed. So they are very comfortable with all this ambiguity, right, but we are not. Singaporeans, we are conditioned in a way that everything has to work according to this, right. Everything, the structure, the processes, systems have to always be in order. okay So for us, what's the biggest lesson? Don't over-engineer and export our model thinking that they will adapt it and they will use it. So in Singapore, yes we manage every detail. From the type of music, we had a Spotify playlist that each store has to use, the scent, the smell, it was carefully curated, the store layout, the hangers, right? I mean, the thing was a bit painful for the Australians because You know sometimes you want to display more shirts right? How can each space between the shirts be one fist space? So you know they wanted to cram more so we allowed that okay? So next masculinity and femininity. This is a very very interesting dimension right? You look at between Australia and Singapore, we are actually not that far apart. And what does this really mean in the context of our brand? Okay so when we look at masculinity and femininity, Australians, they really like very bold colours, they like loud designs, very masculine. But in Singapore, our brand is very understated. We don't like to shout a lot of what we do. So if you have bought our shirts before, you'll realise that there are many indiscreet details in the shirt. For example, you look at, we have maybe On our shirts we have maybe about 12 buttons. One of the buttonholes may be a different colour from the rest of the buttonholes. And that's very minor details that we don't usually shout out to customers. So for men, especially Asian men, we don't like to wear very loud colours, bold colours. Although sometimes when we hit 50 years old, I realise that men have started to wear more colourful shirts. When we go to work, we still wear very muted colours. But we realized that our Australian counterparts, they really like bold, loud colors, which we didn't really have actually. So we marketed what we call heritage, hoping that our brand story would resonate. But for them, they wanted to see, I want just loud, bold colors. Shirts, apparels that speaks to my personality, that showcases my personality. And this is something that I think we overlooked. Singapore is a very interesting space. If you look at Japan, for example, you look at their workwear, for example, everyone is wearing a white shirt, black pants, black suit. It's uniform. When I was in Japan, we had some business dealings over there. So one day I just put on a jacket that is slightly more colourful. It was a light blue jacket. And they were shocked. because if you can't wear that in a formal meeting, you have to wear just black and white. That's conformity. But in Australia, they really, really want, they treasure that individualism. That's why they are a highly individualistic society. You look at their score just now earlier, it was 90. Only one more country has a higher score in the world and that's the America, 91. So because of that, we kind of design clothes for the wrong country actually. because our shirts are all very muted in color they are all uh they don't shout you know so for them it's the style isn't about looking good but signaling confidence and achievement personality it has to speak to that personality okay uh so that's where we kind of overlooked also we saw aspiration but in australia it had to be practical and it had to really be personable okay so long-term orientation and short-term orientation. You look at Singapore, right? We did a very long-term approach to building a business. I will share this in the context of building the business. Benjamin Barker was started in 2009, but it was really only in 2016 that we gained traction. Okay, what do I mean by that? Between 2009 to 2015, not many people knew of us or they have heard of us, but they... did not really support the brand. It was only really in 2016 that the brand signed kind of game traction, attracted more customers and that's where we expanded to more stores and countries. But the prior between 2006 to 2015, we were very very quiet and muted and why we purposely took this approach where we did not want to over expand. We wanted to build a strong base. a strong foundation, getting our systems and process right before we expanded. So we took this approach to Australia. We took this slow and steady approach to Australia, believing that our brand would over time, through community engagement, attract customers. But in Australia, we realized that they just wanted quick wins. They wanted you to say that, what does your brand stand for? Why are you here? What value are you giving me? and from there they judge whether they will support you or they will not support you. So you see the approach was very very different. In Singapore, we took a slow steady approach. But in Australia, they just wanted it quick. They wanted to know what you have for me, what value are you adding to me? And from there they determine whether or not they will support your brand. So that was something that we also overlooked and we were not prepared. We were frankly, we were not prepared. In short-term cultures, we have to build momentum very very very quickly. But in Singapore, we took the approach that we felt was right and I believe it's still a right decision and that's why today we can expand so quickly because our processes, systems, our formulation was strong. So the last one is indulgence versus restraint. So if you understand, Australia is a very interesting country. They are in the Asia Pacific. And if you look at the Australian culture in perspective, Australia isn't a... Who were the original inhabitants of Australia? It wasn't Australians, it was the Aboriginals. They were living in the bushes. And then after World War II, there was a huge migration from the United Kingdom. A lot of British. And that's why British and Australians, they kind of share. They are under the Commonwealth nations, they share the same queen, monarchy. And you look at that, the culture did not just develop overnight, it was kind of imported. And if you look at Western countries as compared to Asian countries, right? Asian countries, we really, really live to work. In Western countries, they work to live, right? They really treasured their work-life balance, right? When I was, so when I'm teaching TO1, TO2, right? Our very first lesson, I actually asked these two classes to indicate in the workforce, if they were to go out to the workforce today, what were the non-negotiables, what were the things that they endeared to. And they said something, work-life balance was very consistent among all the groups and classes, work-life balance. And I think that is something that we overlooked in Australia back in 2016. We are a very hard-driving culture, which means that the stores have to open at 11 o'clock sharp and has to close at 8pm. So that is the stipulated requirement by the malls. So our brands are in 16-17 malls in Singapore and the malls only allow you to close two days a year which is the first two days of Chinese New Year. If you are closed any day apart from these two days, you are fine okay? They impose a fine on you okay? So the thing is that regardless in Singapore, our stores have to open from 11am to 10pm. which means that it's very very tough on our retail employees, our retail colleagues. In Australia, for them, they really respect their personal time, which means that during the weekdays, we only open from 11 to 7. So it's very short operating hours, which means that we can't actually generate much revenue because the store opening hours is so short. Yes, they have Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Fridays, Saturdays, weekends, extended hours but relatively the hours are still very short as compared to Singapore. Okay so we brought over that in Australia you have to open from 11 to 10, 11 to 10, 11 to 10. Do you know what happened? Do you know there was one day when I flew into Australia, I did not inform the team that I was going there and I went to the store, the store was closed because I didn't know that in the Australian culture Mondays to Thursday they close at 7 pm right so I went about after dinner and the store was closed and I was a bit frustrated and I called the manager and said what happened I'm here and the store is closed they said no we close on 7 p.m on a weekday and I think because of that you know there was a lot of tension because expectations we have very different expectations we thought that they would be putting the hours right but it's not about who's right who's wrong this was because we did not adapt to the context right and we weren't relevant you know in the country that we were right so in indulgent cultures downtime is sacred and non-negotiable but in singapore we are really kind of you know driven in the red race that we have to put in these hours so that we can so in singapore we really work very hard so that we can rest for them the rest is non-negotiable they won't rest regardless okay so In Singapore, we work hard to earn rest. In Australia, rest is part of working well. So that kind of ends my sharing, 40 minutes, hard and over just nice. I'm actually opening the next 20 minutes to questions because I think that is even more important than the sharing itself. Questions that you may want to ask with regards to any of those six dimensions because it will really really help you in your first assignment which is your reflection. due on next Friday, 23rd. Okay? So any questions that you have, I think I'm very happy to answer them. Otherwise, I'm going to ask you questions, okay? Yeah, any questions? Sorry I didn't get your name just now. Clarissa. Okay, so Clarissa, just now you were mentioning that the scripts may not be a very good idea especially in the context of Australia because of the script, it will not be very questionable, it may feel very robotic, very cold. In the context of Singapore, do you think it's required and why would you quit? I'm going to go to the hospital. Okay. I would like to just maybe paraphrase what Clarissa shared just now because I think it's very, very important and I think it's very insightful. She mentioned that if she was given a script by a retail employee, she would quit the next day. And then she shared with me She went even further. Why she would quit? Because she would be just doing the work itself. It would be very robotic. It would not be personal and there may not even be a connection between her and the customer. So the thing is that in Australia, that was something that we may have overlooked. Because in that culture, it's highly individualistic. They want autonomy. right which today I believe your demographic, your generation, autonomy is something that you treasure and value a lot. You all do not like to be constrained within a certain framework. You all like to freely express yourself, but of course within certain guidelines. So the thing is that it's really about giving and taking. It's about giving and taking. And I think that is something that we have to bear in mind if we want to open stores in countries out of Singapore. because cultures are very different. So there is no right, there's no wrong. Hofstede developed this cultural dimension back in the 70s when he was working for IBM. So he kind of interviewed 100 over 1000 employees from IBM and looking at the kind of values that they espoused because they wanted to communicate. He wanted communication to be better in the organization. right the biggest challenge today's world is communication, right? You know, countries, you know, we go to wars, we have all this fallout because of miscommunication. And Hofstede was looking at, so he did not develop these dimensions to help to teach us about countries and cultures. He was actually specifically looking at the cultures of organizations. And that's why I think it's very apt and important that I put it into perspective. Today's sharing is about the context of the Horsetag dimension in an organisation. I'm using Benjamin Barker as a life case study because I felt that if we understood what Horsetag was actually teaching all along, we could have actually grew in Australia. But because of that, we were very afraid after that biggest failure. Because it was a big failure to us, right? Because it was the first country that we expanded out of Singapore and we were very confident, right? And because of that, you know, our confidence took a hit. And it was a few years later, in about 2020, that we started expanding out of Singapore again. So this was kind of, personally speaking, from my own experience, it was very hard on us. It was very hard on us. Okay, thank you so much, Clarissa. Any questions? I'm sure you have. right otherwise we would expect an a for your assignment okay any questions pertaining to those six dimensions okay you don't have that i would have to yes yes Okay, thank you very much for the question. Can I have your name please? Claire. Okay, so Claire asked what did we do to perhaps incentivize our individual teammates in Australia? Okay, so for us we have, apart from the hygiene factors which is their basic salary, we have commission for our sales team, right? And they have the two-tiered commission actually, right? Prior to, we have always had an individual component and a team component, which means that there's individual sales and then there's a group sales target and then they will get two tiers if they manage to achieve both targets. In Singapore, this individual tiered one was sometimes, if you ask me, it didn't work very well for us, the individual one. Why I say that? Because I have managers telling me that, you see, there's this salesperson, every sale she wanted to grab money. She didn't care about the... So in Singapore, right, I'm talking about Singapore, she wanted all the sales. She did not care whether her colleagues got the sale or not, she just wanted as much individual sales as possible. So she wasn't... So in Singapore context, although we are collectivistic, she wasn't Singaporean. She came from a country that was highly individualistic, right? And then I felt that, okay, something must be wrong here because if this individual just wants to grab all the sales and disregard her other colleagues, the other colleagues may not be able to get the sales, so they may not be able to get an individual commission, which means that sometimes they may not even hit the team target because everybody was relying on one individual. So in Singapore, we said that, okay, we really, really have to re-look at how we design our commission structure. So in Australia, it's very simple because they didn't care. They didn't really, not really, I shouldn't use the word didn't care. They wanted a higher proportion of individual targets than team targets. And then we design accordingly, which means that if you hit your individual target of X amount, actually you kind of got more commission than if you were in Singapore. Because in Singapore, we had to rely on the teams rather than individuals. So for example, if in Singapore, my individual commission, if you hit $20,000 in sales a month, you get let's say $400. In Australia, maybe you get $600. You get more. And they are perfectly fine with it. They were perfectly fine with it. But in Singapore, you see, people started to talk, people started to get jealous, and people started to say that, you see, she's stealing all our sales. We are unable to hit our target because of her. But in Australia, it was perfectly fine. Because they just say, okay, if this person really, really worked very hard, they deserve it. So did I answer your question? So we really have to design the structure. We call it motivating factor in IO psychology, hygiene factors and motivating factor. This commission, we really have to design it in the context of where we work. So in Singapore, in Australia, in Philippines, in Cambodia. It's all different structures. Maybe I'll just want to share with you, because this is an enclosed room, what we are sharing, we don't share with the public. I'll share you something, why we were so successful going internationally. It was because of Australia that we realized that maybe our strength isn't in expansion. What do I mean by that? The thing is that we felt that if we were to go into a foreign country, country that we have no knowledge of, we will have a very hard time. So we started to look for potential franchisees. So if you look at all the countries that were stated, right, all the countries that were right at the beginning, the only country that we really, that we manage is Singapore and Malaysia only. The rest, Australia, Cambodia. Philippines and Vietnam are all franchisees. Because we knew that if we were to go into these countries on our own, it would take us a very very long time to understand the culture and then perhaps to gain momentum. So the only countries here that you see that we operate by ourselves is Singapore and Malaysia only. The rest are all, we work with franchise partners. Because we realized that if we were to do it ourselves, we may not be successful because why? It takes very long to understand the culture of a new country right you know it's not overnight that you go into a country and you expect to be successful because you have a good product they don't care whether you're a good product they care whether your product is fit for them it appeals to them it adds value to them okay thank you Claire any other questions? So the thing is that in order to be successful in any country, it has to be contextually driven. What may work in Singapore may not and will not work out of Singapore. I think that's why learning this theory is very important as you walk into the workforce because eventually you'll be in the workforce, you'll be working with colleagues who may not be Singaporeans, right? They may be from other cultures. What makes an organization successful is not like what Clarissa said just now. The organization itself is just a shell. There's no life. What gives life to any organization is the people that's working in it. And every individual has a personality. And every personality is different. But how do we... But what separates us actually, what is actually very... The differences that separates us actually, it's because of our cultural upbringing. But if we can understand where that individual is coming from, why do they behave in such a certain manner? The world, I mean the organisation, I always like to say that it always starts at the organisational level. It will be a better place. So if we can understand our colleagues better, if they come from different cultures, if we understand why are they communicating like that, why are they behaving like that. we will actually be happier, much happier in the workplace. Yes? Oh, okay. I didn't know. Okay, so if I had understood Hostet's dimension, right, we would have approached our entry to Australia very differently. I would have actually hired managers in advance or maybe a CEO there and then I would empower them to run the operations in Australia and not us. Because we were actually managing the operations, we were managing everything there. So I thought I had enough lived experience in Australia because I studied there and I lived there. four or five years wasn't enough. I didn't think like them, I didn't behave like them, and I'm still imbibed with the Asian context. We are a collectivistic society, which means that when we make decisions, we make it as a team. We don't make it by ourselves because the decision may impact the team, not the individual. But in Australia, it's not about who is right, who is wrong, but how they see their self is I, not we. So in that context, I would have hired an Australian to manage the team and operations over there. So that's what I would have done differently. Yes, exactly. And so I think that was where we kind of, that was our blind spot. We did not anticipate that. Yeah. Thanks, thanks Stephen. Yes, Larissa. Yes, so exactly. So Clarissa, you brought up a very good point because that person who was actually trying to get all the sales was in fact a manager of the store. So the thing is that she's in a leadership position but she's doing that. So the thing is that for us it's about educating them. why was this person behaving like that? Why did she want all the sales? Because if you just looked at that from an outside perspective, you think that she's very selfish. But in fact, she wants to earn money so that she can send it back, she can send it home. So you see, if we didn't understand her, we didn't understand the culture that she was coming from, we would have misinterpreted her true intention. And so when we gathered and then we talked about it and then we educated our managers They kind of saw that she wasn't being selfish, she just wanted to earn more so that she can send the money back home for her children. So if we look at it from that perspective, we all have our blind spots. Especially when it comes to dealing with individuals of different cultures, we always are very biased. And because she comes from a country that is highly individualistic, we overlook that. So again, if I had understood Hofstede's culture, I would have asked her, can we work together better? How do you think we can work better? How would you like to go about doing? So I won't tell her what she should be doing, she should be telling me what she should be doing. So in individualistic culture, they want to be part of the decision-making process. They do not want you to impose them. So I've learned that in individualistic culture, it's not about imposing, it's about influencing. How do you influence them so that they will do what you want them to do? Whereas in Asia, it's always about impose. I tell you what I tell you what to do. You know in students, I tell you how to do this, do that, otherwise you all will fail. But in individualistic culture, like in Australia, if you were to tell them how we will treat you, they will just turn off. They'll turn off and they'll just walk away. So they really wanted to be treated like adults. They wanted to be treated to for them to believe that they are actually helping you and giving you value also. So thanks for sharing Clarissa. So that's what we did. We asked her for perspective, opinions, how do you think we can do it better? And she actually gave us suggestions and then as a team we talked, we discussed and then we to see how we can move things forward. Because such an incident right... was actually brewing on the ground. And you could see that because in Singapore, most of our retail staff, most of them are not from Singapore. And so we had to learn and understand the culture before we can even approach them. And I think, and instead of, so for me, I thought that would kind of open a can of worms because then I said, wow, then it's, I think it's very hard to deal with because I can't be, no, we can't be fair to everybody actually. But how can we do it in a way that is, that is fair to each individual also, right? Singapore, yes, we are a collectivistic society. Singapore is, actually if you look at it, we are highly collectivistic. But because we have a lot of influences from the West, we are also kind of individualistic. So one of the, what host that, right, is this theory, right? I mean, there are a lot of, we always look at how, we always look at what can be improved, right? Because if we take his theory wholesale, we are only looking at cultures. We're not looking at individuals. And that's why I'm very glad you brought this up because if we were to apply this at an individual level, you'll realize that the scores would be very, very different. Because this is only measuring countries. If it cascades out to the individual level, it would be very, very different already how we look at it. Because all of us are very different in terms of personality and everything. You can be highly individualistic in this context, in school, but at home, you're collectivistic, for example. So it's really different. Then on context again. Thanks, Larissa. Thank you so much. Any other questions? So all clear? Okay. The slides will be given to your lecturers and they'll clear up in your MS team. So basically, everything that you need for your first assignment is actually on the slides already. Okay? So for those of you who have taken pictures, good, you can go back and revise early. start doing your, please, please, on behalf of all the lecturers, this module is a PLP, it's a Personalized Learning Pathway, which means that you chose it, you chose this module, it's not a compulsory module. So I always believe that students who sign up for a PLP, they are very interested in this module, which means that you should be more motivated. to do your assignments and submit them on time. Okay? Yeah. So any questions? If not, then I think we can dismiss the class. But really no questions. I thought, when I share this with my uni students, the question Q&A is one hour, as long as the lecture. Okay. So for those who did not take the attendance, please... look for your respective lecturers and scan the QR code. Thank you very much.

We are already into our fourth week and our first assignment is due when? Next Friday on 23rd of May. So I believe your lecturer will brief you on what is required for this assignment. There will be two parts to it.

It's a 500 word reflection. The first part, 250 words, is about today's sharing, what you learned from it. Using two Hofstede's dimensions and trying to apply what the guest speaker, myself, is sharing.

And then the second part is actually your own reflection on an experience that you have encountered in relation to cultural differences and practices linking Hofstede's theory. So today, I'm sharing about this case study of a company in Singapore called Benjamin Parker. So I am one of the co-founder of Benjamin Parker and I thought I would be the best person here to explain and share with you my experiences using this Hofstede's dimension in perspective in relation to what y'all have been studying.

So a little bit about myself. Okay before we go into the presentation proper, I would like to share that the sharing today is only for educational purpose. Reason is because I have stepped down from the organization three years ago. So I'm still a shareholder of the company, but what I'm sharing today does not represent the company's voice.

I'm sharing based on my experience when I was running the company of what happened in Australia. And so basically, after today's sharing, I would actually share the slides with your lecturers and they would actually share with you via MS Teams. Okay, so a little bit about me.

So I was the COO. I was also, okay, I wear multiple hats in the company. I was a co-founder, I was a COO, I was a CTO and I was a shareholder.

So I wear four hats in the company. and As you know Benjamin Barker is a lifestyle and retail company in the in the F&B retail trade. So we are actually a lifestyle and design company. We are not really a retail or F&B company per se.

So for us, we run retail and F&B shops. So before I started this company together with a business partner, I was an FSD student here in Nei Yan from 1997 to year 2000. So 21 years ago, I was like you sitting behind the desk like this and having the blast and time of my life. So in fact, the experience was so enriching that I came back to teach in Nian in 2011 to 2013. So I was part of the faculty of HMS before it was HMIS. And I spent two years here teaching business management, public relations.

non-profit organizations. After 2013, I left and I went to join my business partner in setting up the company. At that time, we had only three stores in 2013. So today, this is our store presence internationally.

Today's topic I'm sharing specifically with relation to our Australia expansion are and Australia is a very interesting country for us because it was a country that we went and it was very difficult for us. It was very difficult, very challenging and I will share with you more what happened later on. So in 2016, three years after I joined, we opened our first store in Melbourne and in that same year we all opened another. I think in 2016 we opened three stores, but 2017 we had to close two.

Till today, we only have one store left and it's a very interesting case study and I'm here to share with you perhaps what were our blind spots. Why didn't we? Why didn't we expand it to more stores in Australia? Even though we were very confident at the start.

So using this hostess dimension, if I had learned this much earlier, perhaps we didn't have to close that two stores. Why Australia? First, Australia had a very strong and vibrant retail scene. So the retail scene is like Singapore, it's very exciting.

there are very interesting concepts, there are new stores popping up every day. And we thought, wow, perhaps our brand could add value to the consumers over there. Second, it was high urban influence.

It wasn't like Adelaide, it wasn't like Cairns, it wasn't like Canberra, it wasn't like Perth, right? Melbourne is a city, it's a vibrant city. There's life, there are many people looking for new concepts to buy into.

And that's why I see it in Melbourne, right? It's really one of the fashion lifestyle capital in the world. It was actually also close to Singapore. It's only a seven-hour flight, you know, apart from Europe.

And cultural familiarity, you know, for me and my business partner, we actually studied there. We lived there for some time and we thought we knew the culture. And that's why that was our first foray into a foreign country.

Not even Malaysia, right? We thought Malaysia would be a natural extension for us, or extension because it's just next to us, but Australia was our very very first store that we opened out of Singapore and perhaps that is perhaps why maybe it was a big lesson for us. And our growing Asian diaspora. So for those of you who are familiar with Melbourne, you understand that there are many Asians in Australia.

In fact, if you go to the city of Melbourne itself right, you will see actually more Asians than Caucasians and our products are specifically tailored for Asians. That's why we are so well received in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Our specialty is the fit. So for example, many of you might have bought foreign shirts, for example, brands from overseas and you realize that you can't fit you very well because they are more tailored towards the the Caucasian people.

Bigger, broader, taller. So our feed was very unique and we thought that we could actually make it in Australia. But what happened right? What happened was that sometimes we did our research, we collected data but we didn't look at culture, we didn't look at actually what, how did the people behave, how would they respond to a new brand.

Okay so we did. We thought we did everything right, but in fact we overlooked something. We did not look at culture.

How culture would affect the buying of our product, the purchase of our product. Okay, so what is culture? Hostet defines it as a collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Which means culture is actually a very subconscious component in us.

So for example, we are brought up in Singapore. And if you were brought up in a different culture, let's say a Western culture, we would behave very, very, very differently. And why do I say that?

For example, if I go into a lecture theatre and I'm teaching Caucasians, most of the time, they will actually look at me and their laptops will all be dumb. That's Western, you know, Western culture. context. So in Asian culture we understand that. So when I was teaching in IAN 2011, I had a culture shock because I thought that when I was in Australia when our laptops were open, the lecturer would at least rebuke us.

So I had a culture shock. And then my colleagues said, eh, Dana is normal because they are actually taking our notes, which I hope you are. So I used this comparison tool to look at the different scores between Singapore and Australia.

And let me start with individualism and collectivism. Okay, so what happened in Australia? Okay, so Singapore is a very highly strongly collectivistic culture, which means, you know, we work in teams.

We usually don't reward individual performers. But in Australia, it's very, very different. The employees there, they want the clarity on their roles. They wanted to know what their individual commissions were and they wanted to know how can we help them grow in their professional career. And this is something that we overlook because in Singapore, you know when you hire somebody, you do not actually necessarily tell them that okay this is your career progression, this is what.

We just give them the hygiene factors which is your salary, your annual day's leave and that's it. But in Australia, they really really wanted to know how can the company help them grow as a professional. So the thing is that, and so interestingly is that they wanted autonomy.

For my class TA1, TA2, I shared with you all something called the magic formula which is MAGIC. The A stands for autonomy. They wanted to make sense. they felt were right for the customers.

So we brought over this team, relational team approach. We said, no, we're all family here. We do things together. And I think that kind of backfired. So the lesson we learned, I mean, this was a very big lesson to us is that we have to adapt to the country's context of how they were behaving and how they behave in a way that they related to even customers.

For example, in Singapore, most of the time whenever there was a customer complaint, a major complaint, management would be informed first. So for example, let me give you this example. In one of the year that I was working, I had a call at about 7 pm on a Sunday night.

On a Sunday night, I had a call. from one of my store managers and you know what happened? A full-size mirror fell on a child. Thank god the child was safe but the full-size mirror fell on the child and I had to rush down to the store in the middle of my dinner and I had to placate the parents.

The parents were Caucasian, they were very demanding but eventually we resolved the issue. In Australia if such a thing were to happen right, most of the time the employees right because they have the autonomy they will actually deal with the situation themselves and after they have dealt with the situation then they will actually update you uh what they have done know what happened and what they have done okay so you see the culture is very very different here we want to know for for them they want to take autonomy and own the situation they want to take ownership but in singapore no that's why straight away the the manager called me and after this incident right i had a briefing with the team, all the managers, that time we had about 14 stores and I told them something. I said that in the future, you only call Damien when there's fire in the shop or when someone dies.

This is the only time you can call me, otherwise please deal with it. Of course we equip them with what to do in such situations, the different cases. But in Australia they really just want to take ownership so we saw okay that's a good thing but Is that really a good thing? So that was one of our oversight, individualism, collectivism. So power distance, power distance is a very very interesting dimension in our Hofstede's theory.

In Singapore, our power distance score is very very very high. Australia is very very very low. What does it mean? It means that the hierarchy If you look at the professional hierarchy, organizational hierarchy, in Australia it's very flat.

Which means that the bosses, the owners, the leaders, the managers are almost at equal level as their employees. Which means that after work, you can actually go out with your bosses and they treat you like friends. In Singapore, it's a bit different. between us and our leaders, sometimes we are a bit distant. Why?

Because in Asian context, we kind of give respect to our leaders. In Australia, they kind of look at you as, yes, you are my boss, but technically speaking, we are kind of equal still. You are only higher level than me because of your professional status, but as an individual status, you are the same as me. So we went there and the thing is that we brought down this top-down approach from Singapore. expecting them to listen to instructions.

But it's so interesting, you know in Australia, they want you to actually consult them on every matter. Like you know, what kind of policies, what kind of directives, everything they want to be consulted. They are very, is this consultative factor that they are very, very... I think they okay. Personally if you ask me, this is something that I felt.

we could have done better because if I've learned this half step, this power distance right, I would have understand that okay in Australia I would have gone with a more consultative, collaborative approach than if I were to enforce or even impose our directive. So you see, in Singapore, we have this SOP manual which we developed. It's about 80 pages. Later I'll go into it when we talk about the other dimensions.

But we shared with them, this is how we do banks. But they said, no, no, no. I think in Australia, this we could have done this, we could have done it this way.

Now let me give you this example okay. In Singapore, do you call your parents by their names? Yes or no? Do you call your parents by their first name?

Okay let me give you this interesting example. My niece and my sister and my brother-in-law is living in Adelaide, Australia and do you know that my two-year-old niece calls her father by his first name? You know I was a bit perplexed, I was a bit shocked.

She's two years old, she called her dad by her first name. Hey Aaron, Aaron can you get for me this, Aaron can you get for me that. I was a bit perplexed but that is the culture.

That is the culture. So if I had learned this earlier on, I would have done things differently. Like I would have allowed my Australian teammates to actually do things that they felt were right in their own way. They also wanted a lot of transparency around this decision making. So in Singapore, whenever you tell your employees what they need to do, they will do it.

But then they'll question every single thing. So sometimes it takes us very long to even execute something. Because they keep questioning, questioning, questioning.

And they don't question because they want to know something. They question because they want to be involved in decision-making processes. So for us, leadership in lower power distance cultures like Australia, we have to be very participative.

okay and we are supposed to be treating them as collaborators not as subordinates okay so next uncertainty avoidance okay singapore you see our score is eight we are have we are very high uncertainty avoidance which means we have very low tolerance for ambiguity that's singapore but in australia right they are very receptive to ambiguity maybe not maybe not a lot but you look at 51 and 8 that's very very very high okay so we okay this is where i told you right we designed we have this standard operational procedure manual and everything in the manual we expect our australian team members to follow to it for example when customers come into a shop we have a script for them to say like hey hi good afternoon no ma'am Sir, how can we help you? Are you looking for something? event or for an occasion blah blah blah so everything is scripted by an australian so so then and then uh even this hang spacing it has to be one one uh fist spacing between the shirts but they didn't follow right they didn't they didn't follow let me give you example okay so for this scripts right for service uh they say can we not abide by this script because we want to adapt to the context where the client is coming from for For example, If the client replies with something, I have to reply in a way that answers the question, not according to the script. Why did our Singaporean members want a script?

So this was something that they actually requested for when I came to board. They said that we do not know what to say when customers come into the store. If you look at culture, we come from a culture where we...

We are not very expressive, we are not very verbal. But in Australia, it comes naturally for them. It comes through these greetings. Yes.

Authentic. Absolutely agree with you. But when we shared with our Singaporean colleagues that hey, you know, this is what you're supposed to be doing, right?

You can just, I can just give you a generic one-liner and then you take it from there. They are so afraid of saying the wrong things. I think it's a cultural thing.

For example, if you go into a local store in Singapore, do they greet you most of the time? Perhaps yes, sometimes no. But they don't go further than that, right? So the thing is that in Australia, they really really have a conversation and it's normal. Yes, exactly.

But in Asia, because we are more reserved, we are not outgoing, we are not flamboyant. And because of that, we kind of dial down and tone down in our conversations with our customers. And I think that's where we need to improve in Singapore. So we assume that with the script, it would help the Australian teammates overcome some of these challenges. Right.

What? I think we were wrong because Australians, they are really, really expressive. They're very verbal.

And when they actually really, you know, you come into the store, you know, it's so natural. Hey, good day, sir, good day. You know, how are you?

The jacket looks nice on you. Whether they mean it or not is a different thing. But they are so expressive. So in Singapore, we do not have that kind of culture where the customer comes in and treat them like friends.

But there, it's really personable. So we found our be very very rigid they say we cannot follow we cannot follow it okay we cannot follow it we have to express it in a way that we are comfortable with right and i and and so again we went back to the autonomy right they wanted the autonomy to be able to you know to have some leeway in how they approach customers and how they interact with customers okay so but why did we have this SOP because we wanted to avoid uncertainty, ambiguity. In Singapore, especially, we were brought up in a culture that everything has to work to a T.

Let's say for example, if everyone breaks down, everybody is worried. You see the telegram message on social media, everybody is complaining. My good friend was in France and Spain in the recent, and there was a blackout for one day. You know what the Spanish were doing? He said, Damien, the stopwaves were down, the internet were down, they did not even complain.

complete. It just went to the field, play soccer, have barbecue. But in Singapore, will that ever happen?

Will we? Our ministers get flooded with messages saying, why is all this breaking down? So you see, the thing is that for us, we are not comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Everything has to be... I mean, okay, let's take the context of your students. You all have to prepare for your exams, prepare for your assignments.

In Australia, when I was studying there, I did my undergrad in Australia. All the homework by my Australian classmates only done the night before. They did not, you know they can take like two hours and then they can pump up a 2000 watt assay without blinking an eye. And that was before even JetGPT even existed.

So they are very comfortable with all this ambiguity, right, but we are not. Singaporeans, we are conditioned in a way that everything has to work according to this, right. Everything, the structure, the processes, systems have to always be in order.

okay So for us, what's the biggest lesson? Don't over-engineer and export our model thinking that they will adapt it and they will use it. So in Singapore, yes we manage every detail. From the type of music, we had a Spotify playlist that each store has to use, the scent, the smell, it was carefully curated, the store layout, the hangers, right?

I mean, the thing was a bit painful for the Australians because You know sometimes you want to display more shirts right? How can each space between the shirts be one fist space? So you know they wanted to cram more so we allowed that okay?

So next masculinity and femininity. This is a very very interesting dimension right? You look at between Australia and Singapore, we are actually not that far apart. And what does this really mean in the context of our brand?

Okay so when we look at masculinity and femininity, Australians, they really like very bold colours, they like loud designs, very masculine. But in Singapore, our brand is very understated. We don't like to shout a lot of what we do. So if you have bought our shirts before, you'll realise that there are many indiscreet details in the shirt. For example, you look at, we have maybe On our shirts we have maybe about 12 buttons.

One of the buttonholes may be a different colour from the rest of the buttonholes. And that's very minor details that we don't usually shout out to customers. So for men, especially Asian men, we don't like to wear very loud colours, bold colours.

Although sometimes when we hit 50 years old, I realise that men have started to wear more colourful shirts. When we go to work, we still wear very muted colours. But we realized that our Australian counterparts, they really like bold, loud colors, which we didn't really have actually. So we marketed what we call heritage, hoping that our brand story would resonate.

But for them, they wanted to see, I want just loud, bold colors. Shirts, apparels that speaks to my personality, that showcases my personality. And this is something that I think we overlooked.

Singapore is a very interesting space. If you look at Japan, for example, you look at their workwear, for example, everyone is wearing a white shirt, black pants, black suit. It's uniform. When I was in Japan, we had some business dealings over there. So one day I just put on a jacket that is slightly more colourful.

It was a light blue jacket. And they were shocked. because if you can't wear that in a formal meeting, you have to wear just black and white. That's conformity. But in Australia, they really, really want, they treasure that individualism.

That's why they are a highly individualistic society. You look at their score just now earlier, it was 90. Only one more country has a higher score in the world and that's the America, 91. So because of that, we kind of design clothes for the wrong country actually. because our shirts are all very muted in color they are all uh they don't shout you know so for them it's the style isn't about looking good but signaling confidence and achievement personality it has to speak to that personality okay uh so that's where we kind of overlooked also we saw aspiration but in australia it had to be practical and it had to really be personable okay so long-term orientation and short-term orientation. You look at Singapore, right?

We did a very long-term approach to building a business. I will share this in the context of building the business. Benjamin Barker was started in 2009, but it was really only in 2016 that we gained traction. Okay, what do I mean by that? Between 2009 to 2015, not many people knew of us or they have heard of us, but they...

did not really support the brand. It was only really in 2016 that the brand signed kind of game traction, attracted more customers and that's where we expanded to more stores and countries. But the prior between 2006 to 2015, we were very very quiet and muted and why we purposely took this approach where we did not want to over expand.

We wanted to build a strong base. a strong foundation, getting our systems and process right before we expanded. So we took this approach to Australia.

We took this slow and steady approach to Australia, believing that our brand would over time, through community engagement, attract customers. But in Australia, we realized that they just wanted quick wins. They wanted you to say that, what does your brand stand for?

Why are you here? What value are you giving me? and from there they judge whether they will support you or they will not support you. So you see the approach was very very different. In Singapore, we took a slow steady approach.

But in Australia, they just wanted it quick. They wanted to know what you have for me, what value are you adding to me? And from there they determine whether or not they will support your brand. So that was something that we also overlooked and we were not prepared. We were frankly, we were not prepared.

In short-term cultures, we have to build momentum very very very quickly. But in Singapore, we took the approach that we felt was right and I believe it's still a right decision and that's why today we can expand so quickly because our processes, systems, our formulation was strong. So the last one is indulgence versus restraint. So if you understand, Australia is a very interesting country.

They are in the Asia Pacific. And if you look at the Australian culture in perspective, Australia isn't a... Who were the original inhabitants of Australia? It wasn't Australians, it was the Aboriginals.

They were living in the bushes. And then after World War II, there was a huge migration from the United Kingdom. A lot of British. And that's why British and Australians, they kind of share.

They are under the Commonwealth nations, they share the same queen, monarchy. And you look at that, the culture did not just develop overnight, it was kind of imported. And if you look at Western countries as compared to Asian countries, right? Asian countries, we really, really live to work.

In Western countries, they work to live, right? They really treasured their work-life balance, right? When I was, so when I'm teaching TO1, TO2, right? Our very first lesson, I actually asked these two classes to indicate in the workforce, if they were to go out to the workforce today, what were the non-negotiables, what were the things that they endeared to.

And they said something, work-life balance was very consistent among all the groups and classes, work-life balance. And I think that is something that we overlooked in Australia back in 2016. We are a very hard-driving culture, which means that the stores have to open at 11 o'clock sharp and has to close at 8pm. So that is the stipulated requirement by the malls.

So our brands are in 16-17 malls in Singapore and the malls only allow you to close two days a year which is the first two days of Chinese New Year. If you are closed any day apart from these two days, you are fine okay? They impose a fine on you okay? So the thing is that regardless in Singapore, our stores have to open from 11am to 10pm.

which means that it's very very tough on our retail employees, our retail colleagues. In Australia, for them, they really respect their personal time, which means that during the weekdays, we only open from 11 to 7. So it's very short operating hours, which means that we can't actually generate much revenue because the store opening hours is so short. Yes, they have Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Fridays, Saturdays, weekends, extended hours but relatively the hours are still very short as compared to Singapore.

Okay so we brought over that in Australia you have to open from 11 to 10, 11 to 10, 11 to 10. Do you know what happened? Do you know there was one day when I flew into Australia, I did not inform the team that I was going there and I went to the store, the store was closed because I didn't know that in the Australian culture Mondays to Thursday they close at 7 pm right so I went about after dinner and the store was closed and I was a bit frustrated and I called the manager and said what happened I'm here and the store is closed they said no we close on 7 p.m on a weekday and I think because of that you know there was a lot of tension because expectations we have very different expectations we thought that they would be putting the hours right but it's not about who's right who's wrong this was because we did not adapt to the context right and we weren't relevant you know in the country that we were right so in indulgent cultures downtime is sacred and non-negotiable but in singapore we are really kind of you know driven in the red race that we have to put in these hours so that we can so in singapore we really work very hard so that we can rest for them the rest is non-negotiable they won't rest regardless okay so In Singapore, we work hard to earn rest. In Australia, rest is part of working well. So that kind of ends my sharing, 40 minutes, hard and over just nice. I'm actually opening the next 20 minutes to questions because I think that is even more important than the sharing itself.

Questions that you may want to ask with regards to any of those six dimensions because it will really really help you in your first assignment which is your reflection. due on next Friday, 23rd. Okay? So any questions that you have, I think I'm very happy to answer them.

Otherwise, I'm going to ask you questions, okay? Yeah, any questions? Sorry I didn't get your name just now.

Clarissa. Okay, so Clarissa, just now you were mentioning that the scripts may not be a very good idea especially in the context of Australia because of the script, it will not be very questionable, it may feel very robotic, very cold. In the context of Singapore, do you think it's required and why would you quit?

I'm going to go to the hospital. Okay. I would like to just maybe paraphrase what Clarissa shared just now because I think it's very, very important and I think it's very insightful. She mentioned that if she was given a script by a retail employee, she would quit the next day.

And then she shared with me She went even further. Why she would quit? Because she would be just doing the work itself. It would be very robotic.

It would not be personal and there may not even be a connection between her and the customer. So the thing is that in Australia, that was something that we may have overlooked. Because in that culture, it's highly individualistic. They want autonomy. right which today I believe your demographic, your generation, autonomy is something that you treasure and value a lot.

You all do not like to be constrained within a certain framework. You all like to freely express yourself, but of course within certain guidelines. So the thing is that it's really about giving and taking. It's about giving and taking.

And I think that is something that we have to bear in mind if we want to open stores in countries out of Singapore. because cultures are very different. So there is no right, there's no wrong. Hofstede developed this cultural dimension back in the 70s when he was working for IBM. So he kind of interviewed 100 over 1000 employees from IBM and looking at the kind of values that they espoused because they wanted to communicate.

He wanted communication to be better in the organization. right the biggest challenge today's world is communication, right? You know, countries, you know, we go to wars, we have all this fallout because of miscommunication. And Hofstede was looking at, so he did not develop these dimensions to help to teach us about countries and cultures. He was actually specifically looking at the cultures of organizations.

And that's why I think it's very apt and important that I put it into perspective. Today's sharing is about the context of the Horsetag dimension in an organisation. I'm using Benjamin Barker as a life case study because I felt that if we understood what Horsetag was actually teaching all along, we could have actually grew in Australia. But because of that, we were very afraid after that biggest failure.

Because it was a big failure to us, right? Because it was the first country that we expanded out of Singapore and we were very confident, right? And because of that, you know, our confidence took a hit. And it was a few years later, in about 2020, that we started expanding out of Singapore again. So this was kind of, personally speaking, from my own experience, it was very hard on us.

It was very hard on us. Okay, thank you so much, Clarissa. Any questions?

I'm sure you have. right otherwise we would expect an a for your assignment okay any questions pertaining to those six dimensions okay you don't have that i would have to yes yes Okay, thank you very much for the question. Can I have your name please? Claire. Okay, so Claire asked what did we do to perhaps incentivize our individual teammates in Australia?

Okay, so for us we have, apart from the hygiene factors which is their basic salary, we have commission for our sales team, right? And they have the two-tiered commission actually, right? Prior to, we have always had an individual component and a team component, which means that there's individual sales and then there's a group sales target and then they will get two tiers if they manage to achieve both targets.

In Singapore, this individual tiered one was sometimes, if you ask me, it didn't work very well for us, the individual one. Why I say that? Because I have managers telling me that, you see, there's this salesperson, every sale she wanted to grab money. She didn't care about the... So in Singapore, right, I'm talking about Singapore, she wanted all the sales.

She did not care whether her colleagues got the sale or not, she just wanted as much individual sales as possible. So she wasn't... So in Singapore context, although we are collectivistic, she wasn't Singaporean. She came from a country that was highly individualistic, right?

And then I felt that, okay, something must be wrong here because if this individual just wants to grab all the sales and disregard her other colleagues, the other colleagues may not be able to get the sales, so they may not be able to get an individual commission, which means that sometimes they may not even hit the team target because everybody was relying on one individual. So in Singapore, we said that, okay, we really, really have to re-look at how we design our commission structure. So in Australia, it's very simple because they didn't care. They didn't really, not really, I shouldn't use the word didn't care. They wanted a higher proportion of individual targets than team targets.

And then we design accordingly, which means that if you hit your individual target of X amount, actually you kind of got more commission than if you were in Singapore. Because in Singapore, we had to rely on the teams rather than individuals. So for example, if in Singapore, my individual commission, if you hit $20,000 in sales a month, you get let's say $400.

In Australia, maybe you get $600. You get more. And they are perfectly fine with it.

They were perfectly fine with it. But in Singapore, you see, people started to talk, people started to get jealous, and people started to say that, you see, she's stealing all our sales. We are unable to hit our target because of her. But in Australia, it was perfectly fine. Because they just say, okay, if this person really, really worked very hard, they deserve it.

So did I answer your question? So we really have to design the structure. We call it motivating factor in IO psychology, hygiene factors and motivating factor.

This commission, we really have to design it in the context of where we work. So in Singapore, in Australia, in Philippines, in Cambodia. It's all different structures. Maybe I'll just want to share with you, because this is an enclosed room, what we are sharing, we don't share with the public.

I'll share you something, why we were so successful going internationally. It was because of Australia that we realized that maybe our strength isn't in expansion. What do I mean by that?

The thing is that we felt that if we were to go into a foreign country, country that we have no knowledge of, we will have a very hard time. So we started to look for potential franchisees. So if you look at all the countries that were stated, right, all the countries that were right at the beginning, the only country that we really, that we manage is Singapore and Malaysia only.

The rest, Australia, Cambodia. Philippines and Vietnam are all franchisees. Because we knew that if we were to go into these countries on our own, it would take us a very very long time to understand the culture and then perhaps to gain momentum.

So the only countries here that you see that we operate by ourselves is Singapore and Malaysia only. The rest are all, we work with franchise partners. Because we realized that if we were to do it ourselves, we may not be successful because why? It takes very long to understand the culture of a new country right you know it's not overnight that you go into a country and you expect to be successful because you have a good product they don't care whether you're a good product they care whether your product is fit for them it appeals to them it adds value to them okay thank you Claire any other questions?

So the thing is that in order to be successful in any country, it has to be contextually driven. What may work in Singapore may not and will not work out of Singapore. I think that's why learning this theory is very important as you walk into the workforce because eventually you'll be in the workforce, you'll be working with colleagues who may not be Singaporeans, right? They may be from other cultures. What makes an organization successful is not like what Clarissa said just now.

The organization itself is just a shell. There's no life. What gives life to any organization is the people that's working in it. And every individual has a personality.

And every personality is different. But how do we... But what separates us actually, what is actually very... The differences that separates us actually, it's because of our cultural upbringing.

But if we can understand where that individual is coming from, why do they behave in such a certain manner? The world, I mean the organisation, I always like to say that it always starts at the organisational level. It will be a better place. So if we can understand our colleagues better, if they come from different cultures, if we understand why are they communicating like that, why are they behaving like that. we will actually be happier, much happier in the workplace.

Yes? Oh, okay. I didn't know.

Okay, so if I had understood Hostet's dimension, right, we would have approached our entry to Australia very differently. I would have actually hired managers in advance or maybe a CEO there and then I would empower them to run the operations in Australia and not us. Because we were actually managing the operations, we were managing everything there.

So I thought I had enough lived experience in Australia because I studied there and I lived there. four or five years wasn't enough. I didn't think like them, I didn't behave like them, and I'm still imbibed with the Asian context. We are a collectivistic society, which means that when we make decisions, we make it as a team. We don't make it by ourselves because the decision may impact the team, not the individual.

But in Australia, it's not about who is right, who is wrong, but how they see their self is I, not we. So in that context, I would have hired an Australian to manage the team and operations over there. So that's what I would have done differently. Yes, exactly. And so I think that was where we kind of, that was our blind spot.

We did not anticipate that. Yeah. Thanks, thanks Stephen. Yes, Larissa.

Yes, so exactly. So Clarissa, you brought up a very good point because that person who was actually trying to get all the sales was in fact a manager of the store. So the thing is that she's in a leadership position but she's doing that.

So the thing is that for us it's about educating them. why was this person behaving like that? Why did she want all the sales? Because if you just looked at that from an outside perspective, you think that she's very selfish.

But in fact, she wants to earn money so that she can send it back, she can send it home. So you see, if we didn't understand her, we didn't understand the culture that she was coming from, we would have misinterpreted her true intention. And so when we gathered and then we talked about it and then we educated our managers They kind of saw that she wasn't being selfish, she just wanted to earn more so that she can send the money back home for her children. So if we look at it from that perspective, we all have our blind spots.

Especially when it comes to dealing with individuals of different cultures, we always are very biased. And because she comes from a country that is highly individualistic, we overlook that. So again, if I had understood Hofstede's culture, I would have asked her, can we work together better? How do you think we can work better? How would you like to go about doing?

So I won't tell her what she should be doing, she should be telling me what she should be doing. So in individualistic culture, they want to be part of the decision-making process. They do not want you to impose them.

So I've learned that in individualistic culture, it's not about imposing, it's about influencing. How do you influence them so that they will do what you want them to do? Whereas in Asia, it's always about impose.

I tell you what I tell you what to do. You know in students, I tell you how to do this, do that, otherwise you all will fail. But in individualistic culture, like in Australia, if you were to tell them how we will treat you, they will just turn off. They'll turn off and they'll just walk away.

So they really wanted to be treated like adults. They wanted to be treated to for them to believe that they are actually helping you and giving you value also. So thanks for sharing Clarissa. So that's what we did.

We asked her for perspective, opinions, how do you think we can do it better? And she actually gave us suggestions and then as a team we talked, we discussed and then we to see how we can move things forward. Because such an incident right... was actually brewing on the ground.

And you could see that because in Singapore, most of our retail staff, most of them are not from Singapore. And so we had to learn and understand the culture before we can even approach them. And I think, and instead of, so for me, I thought that would kind of open a can of worms because then I said, wow, then it's, I think it's very hard to deal with because I can't be, no, we can't be fair to everybody actually.

But how can we do it in a way that is, that is fair to each individual also, right? Singapore, yes, we are a collectivistic society. Singapore is, actually if you look at it, we are highly collectivistic.

But because we have a lot of influences from the West, we are also kind of individualistic. So one of the, what host that, right, is this theory, right? I mean, there are a lot of, we always look at how, we always look at what can be improved, right? Because if we take his theory wholesale, we are only looking at cultures. We're not looking at individuals.

And that's why I'm very glad you brought this up because if we were to apply this at an individual level, you'll realize that the scores would be very, very different. Because this is only measuring countries. If it cascades out to the individual level, it would be very, very different already how we look at it.

Because all of us are very different in terms of personality and everything. You can be highly individualistic in this context, in school, but at home, you're collectivistic, for example. So it's really different. Then on context again.

Thanks, Larissa. Thank you so much. Any other questions? So all clear? Okay.

The slides will be given to your lecturers and they'll clear up in your MS team. So basically, everything that you need for your first assignment is actually on the slides already. Okay?

So for those of you who have taken pictures, good, you can go back and revise early. start doing your, please, please, on behalf of all the lecturers, this module is a PLP, it's a Personalized Learning Pathway, which means that you chose it, you chose this module, it's not a compulsory module. So I always believe that students who sign up for a PLP, they are very interested in this module, which means that you should be more motivated.

to do your assignments and submit them on time. Okay? Yeah. So any questions?

If not, then I think we can dismiss the class. But really no questions. I thought, when I share this with my uni students, the question Q&A is one hour, as long as the lecture.

Okay. So for those who did not take the attendance, please... look for your respective lecturers and scan the QR code. Thank you very much.

Transcript for:Understanding Cultural Dimensions in Business Expansion

Transcript for:
Understanding Cultural Dimensions in Business Expansion