A Manager’s Dilemma -The Pink Eraser Man 第 3-7 組 組員 : 黃姿瑋 ( ) 林宛璇 ( )

Dilemma 1 The W.R.Grace & Co. has a mascot of eraser conveying a message: “Erase” waste. However, the staff in Asian was perplexed because the concept of “erase”means invisible in China.

Why the problem happened? In America, erase ≈ reduce In Asia, erase ≈ invisible or ignoring So staffs in China think they want the program to be invisible. Nerves arose between the same company in two regions because of the different explanation of the word ”erase ”.

How can such problems be avoided in the future? For a manager in native: 1.Getting information about culture differences before cooperating with other countries. 2.Ethnocentric attitude is not appropriate among international trading. For a manager in foreign countries: Think the culture differences,too.

Dilemma 2 Why pink becomes an unacceptable color in China but not in the headquarter? What’s wrong with color ’pink’ ?

Why this happened?? The reason why this situation just happened in China but not in the headquarter is because that there exists cultural differences and various growing backgrounds among different countries. Pink is a feminine color in Chinese culture so Chinese was educated that a man with self- respecting won’t want to associated with color pink. As a result, this program was marked by the color pink so it will definitely rejected by the Chinese.

Due to the problems of cultural differences, the common dilemma occurred in multinational corporation (MNC), I think one solution to it is that the company should transfer to be a more transnational MNC. They can hire more employees who are the residents in the regions and have a meeting gathered each managers. Thus, it can avoid such dilemmas among global corporation. How can such problems be avoided in the future?

Conclusion As a manager in multinational corporations, we should have a more geocentric attitude toward international cooperations. Otherwise, there will exist many dilemmas in the future.