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Question answered in Quora - What are the pros and cons of a diversely multinational startup culture

Pros

1-You will have diverse work force that is able to come up with so may different perspectives and solutions because people from different cultures think differently

2- You will build a much more mature work force in the long run, that is tolerant overall

3 - International expansion will be easier and you can do it faster as you guys grow big

4- You will have a much better pulse on international markets and opportunities

5- If there are people from countries like India, China and Mexico they will come up with cheaper solutions for the problems

6- Also international sourcing will be easier, if you need to get a hardware made in Shenzhen or software developed in India, these folks can help leverage their connections

Cons

1- Everyone needs to understand that they are working in a multi cultural environment and empathize with everyone in general and put in some extra effort to understand each other, work together, it could be all the way from Communication, running effective meetings, overall facilitation in anything and everything

2- If the multi cultural environment is not managed properly it could result in issues, people would align and would form groups that may not like each other, in order to avoid all that a really transparent environment/culture needs to be encouraged and maintained

3- You will not be able to execute on the Pros I mentioned above

4- The cheaper solutions they come up with for problems may not always be the most sophisticated solutions, it might not have all the bells and whistles to make it a thorough and complete solution

5- If these international people are very new and from developing nations then they might not understand the sophisticated processes and systems that are in place in a developed nation like the US, so they will need extra training in those areas (unless they went to school here in the US)

Here is an example, this is too much of an exaggeration

Also check out my book Puga Sankara's Supply Chain Blog - that is a must read before spending Hundreds & Thousands of $$$ on your MBA or Masters Degree to get the best ROI or before starting your Entrepreneurial journey.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology consisting of Smart Gladiator Wearable Scanguns, Tablets, Mobile Tech & Apps for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard, texting&video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com

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