Іnternational marketplaces

W.L. Gore has to come to terms with the difficulty in the technical and environmental complexity of the international marketplaces they currently service. Gore must also address the cultural, societal and political differences that exist between these markets. The recommendation would be for Gore to set up geographical departments that specialize with relations for each government, legal system, and financial, accounting and environmental statutes for each country or region they currently operate and do business in.

An Ambidextrous approach or structured departments outside of the existing lattice structure should be incorporated to aid with the relations of the legal, political, environmental, social and financial requirements of each country W.L. Gore operates or conducts business in. This will help with process control as well as adapt to the infrastructure required by some of the foreign governments. Especially when considering things like data reporting requirements.

One of W.L. Gore’s primary advantages is the diversification of their portfolio of services and products offered. Leaders within however face challenges in the coordination of activities to sustain this business. W.L. Gore’s virtual teams are segmented by performance goals, work-type subsets, time zones, languages, geography, cultures, etc. It will be a monumental task to organize, structure, integrate and streamline collaboration to get all of these segments working together in a cohesive manner.

Beyond streamlining and optimization of these segments another challenge presents itself in knowledge transfer. To further drive this transfer employees must be open to learning from their experiences both domestically and internationally. Mimetic forces should be used internally and treat each site as both combined and individual organizations. The goal would be that W.L. Gore employees can learn from their international counterparts as well as other out-sourced domestic sites either inside or outside their cluster for best practices to copy. The diversity of cultural work styles and application of methodologies gives every employee and excellent opportunity to develop and learn new capabilities, practices and even develop new ideas or approaches.

The teams that are created will be of individuals that have multiple technical skills, will house many nationalities and the actions of the team will have effects both domestic and internationally. This will be identical whether the team is virtual or not, or the work is conducted electronically or in person. Culture, language, and regional short hand has the ability to disrupt the efficiency and effectiveness. Open communication facilitated by symbols, stories and heroes of patience and the open sharing of knowledge should be heavily utilized to ensure these teams function properly. The members of these teams not only should have high emotional intelligence but also but culturally astute and holistic as a person. This will help W.L. Gore optimally coordinate these electronic and virtual teams.

In the organization W.L. Gore’s employees have to share both tacit and explicit knowledge through multiple channels. Through these channels the leaders within the organization must review the data and look for outside connections that may not otherwise be connected leveraging virtual teams to contribute to this data analysis through multiple subject matter experts will reinforce the existing culture of innovation and information sharing. By focusing on the technical core as the center of innovation W.L. Gore will be focusing on utilizing an approach well designed for the existing organic structures in the lattice design. This will also help development new production techniques to help supplement expand and drive organic growth through the transnational footprint. Further these skunkworks of Subject matter experts will help identify areas of spectacular return. By making these meetings or teams functions with a scheduled reoccurrence increases legitimacy and structure will be introduced into some of these cross functional teams. This will also promote the relationship building skills necessary for the employees to do well within the existing lattice framework of the organization.

Pillars of the organization’s design and culture for W.L. Gore focuses on long-term goals, their related promises, and drives the collaborative effort among individuals and small teams. This is based not only on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs but also Theory Y which both point towards empowering individuals, then letting them manage themselves to deliver results and will continue to do so in their enlightened best interest. The decentralized lattice structure will best serve W.L. Gore into the future. W.L. Gore’s organizational design and the culture they have created and fostered will work very well for this Global Organization, within the Global Marketplace. This should translate very well into the use and development of virtual teams because of how each site will depend on each other moving forward. As long as there is open information sharing W.L. should be very successful with their Global and Virtual teams.

For W.L. Gore to continue into the 21st century and beyond, as with all business it becomes grow or die. With the culture as focused on innovation and knowledge sharing as W.L. Gore there will be a substantial amount of growth through product and service innovation. Beyond that optimization of processes and business services as well as data as a service should continue not despite but because of the existing structure and culture. Further product lines will continue to evolve and markets will continue to open. As these markets continue to open W.L. Gore must be ready to act upon strategic technologies, opportunities and key distribution centers.