The location of a country not only influences its climate and physical characteristics but it has also a strong impact on its people and their lifestyle.
How much is the success of your company pegged to the cultural and economic traditions of the country you do business in? Not much—at least that is what is suggested by Rohit Deshpandé's research on high-performing companies.
Tigers, elephants, rabbits, and monkeys—even dragons—all play a part in Harvard Business School professor Rohit Deshpandé's search for success factors among high-performing Asian firms.
But in the end, it's the tigers and rabbits that oftentimes run the best zoo.
The animals represent different types of organizations. Highly entrepreneurial organizations are rabbits, emphasizing innovation and risk-taking. And tigers are built around competitive advantage and market superiority. Elephants are, as you would expect, full of regulation and bureaucracy. Consensual organizations, emphasizing loyalty, tradition and internal maintenance, are the monkeys. Organizations frequently show aspects of different cultures, making for dragons.
Deshpandé and collaborator John U. Farley have studied the impact of corporate culture and national culture on global marketing strategy. A few years ago they looked at the role played by these key organizational factors (innovation, market orientation, organizational culture, and organizational climate) in helping define company success in highly industrialized countries. In short, they reported that companies with cultures that embrace entrepreneurialism and competitiveness—the rabbits and tigers—outperform companies that tend toward the bureaucratic and consensual—elephants and monkeys.
Now comes the next step, as outlined in a working paper entitled "Tigers and Dragons: Profiling High Performance Asian Firms." Deshpandé and Farley extended their research to analyze company performance in large companies in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, India, and Japan.
The conclusions are important for any company doing business in multiple countries. While it is simplistic to suggest that there is no country effect at play in determining the success of companies—Deshpandé and Farley do not make that contention—their work does suggest that corporate organizational factors trump national factors in determining performance.
In other words, successful companies in China or Thailand look a lot like other successful companies regardless of where they are located, and regardless of their country's political and economic system.