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“You know, we are opening up a plant in Japan, an Omutsu (diaper) manufacturing plant near Kobe, in Minami Futami. We are very concerned because we have been in Japan for 11 years and have not made any profit yet. We are throwing money into Japan without a return. We have an enormous cultural problem at our General Offices in Osaka. So we know that in starting a plant in Kobe, we will need to have a professional consultant, for strategic advice as well as for tactical guidance. We can’t think of anyone who could help us with that more than you.”
I was just surprised and said “Why me?” He said the following.
“In the years we have been working with you recruiting students, you gave us assessments of every one of our candidates. And I want you to know that in every single case except one, in ten years of recommendations on hundreds of students from Cornell and Stanford, you were right on target. We hired those students you recommended and they all worked out beautifully, except in just one case. If you have that kind of insight to intercultural assignment for working across cultures, we want you to help us.”
Subsequently, I wrote a proposal for $550,000 and they ultimately agreed for a two-year full-time contract in May 1980. I established a company “Clarke Consulting Group” and hired ten Japanese and Americans to work with me to build the first large-scale, long-term program on intercultural management training and consulting with 18 Japanese and 18 Americans of P&G plus their families.
My staff and I became intercultural consultants, trainers, mediators, and facilitators of team development to build an intercultural organization that was truly synergistic, truly bicultural and would operate effectively and productively with high client satisfaction. We became primarily “facilitators” and “coaches” rather than trainers or teachers. Everyone was learning to be intercultural within the task of building the organization. We discovered “answers” together through a lot of hard work of facilitating communication in every task.(6/9)