I strongly believe that in order to do well, we must learn from those who came before us. For this reason, I was very excited to complete the informal interviews portion of this Global Reflection Portfolio. I wanted to interview two professionals from different fields who have had international business experience within different business models in order to get advice on various challenges that might result from global operations. I decided to interview Ursula Haas-Kotzegger, who has experience managing international subsidiary offices, and Kim Vaccari, who has experience working with global distributors.
In order to avoid leading their responses, I chose to ask open-ended questions to learn about their experiences. Some of the questions included:
- Have you ever had a miscommunication as a result of the different cultures? What was the miscommunication and how did you solve it?
- How did you chose your expansion strategy? If you could do it over again, would you pick a different strategy? Why?
- What is the most challenging aspect of your international business responsibilities? What steps do you take to avoid these challenges in the future?
My questions were geared towards understanding what caused challenges in an international setting and what were some ways to avoid committing those mistakes in the future. I believe that there is no sense in making someone else’s mistake when you can just learn from their experience and commit different, more original mistakes in the future for your own learning purposes.