How to fix culture clashes in global teams

Alicia Clegg looks at examples in which the challenges to effective cross-cultural communication were identified.

Has Twitter lost its wings?

Twitter has been struggling for some time now to adequately define itself in the social media sphere and set itself up as a real contender for market share. There doesn't appear to be a concerted marketing strategy which has led to a stagnation in user numbers and confusion over its usage, which means that Twitter is struggling to clearly define its market share. Can it compete with successful rivals such as Facebook and Snapchat, or as The Economist argues, has it let its chance fly by?

Multinational businesses grow faster than emerging national economies

In a recent survey of the top 200 economic entities, many of the smaller emerging economies have been replaced by corporations. The slowdown of the Chinese economy has reduced the growth of many nations from Africa, Asia and South America, while large corporations continue to grow rapidly. The survey compiled Global Justice Now an anti-poverty charity reports that the 10 biggest corporations – including Walmart, Apple and Shell – make more money than most countries in the world combined.

Entrepreneurship in the USA

Recent figures published by the Kauffman Foundation indicate a continuing decline in new business formation in the USA. There is also a pattern of regional disparity, with just 20 counties generating half of net new businesses between 2010 and 2014. Several explanations have been suggested including high levels of personal debt, increasing regulation and difficulty of accessing venture capital.

Facebook bot platform to transform entire industries

Facebook wants businesses to adopt bots to communicate with their customers on its Messenger service, in the hope that opening up its artificial intelligence tools to companies will transform industries. By deploying bots within Facebook Messenger, people will be able to communicate with companies without having to remember extra usernames and passwords, and with the context of their previous interactions recalled by the software. Industries such as news and music have already been disrupted by social media, which has in many cases disintermediated their relationship with customers. If the new bots are successful, more industries including retail and online travel, could find themselves increasingly dependent on Facebook Messenger.

Emotional and creative skills may be more robot-proof in the next wave of automation.

Oxford university’s Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say almost half of the jobs in the US are at high risk from computerisation in the next two decades, together with two-thirds of those in India and three-quarters in China. The new phrase is “EQ”, which stands for emotional quotient (or emotional intelligence). “The high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future may involve skills better measured by EQs than IQs

Decline in global trade may be a long term structural trend

Until 2007 international trade had been growing at twice the rate of global GDP. Falling traffic had been explained as a consequence the financial crash and then the slowing of growth in the Chinese economy. Now some experts perceive a permanent shift in the fundamentals driving globalization Economists at the McKinsey Global Institute see increased automation and the uptake of 3D printing as factors that may be reducing demand for international trade in physical goods.