Business project 5

Colossal Corporation maintains a subsidiary in Serafini, a small country in Eastern Europe. This subsidiary is incorporated in the state of Delaware as New Brand Design, Inc. (NBD), a company that designs, brands, and manufactures innovative electronic products and markets and distributes them for resale across the globe. NBD has been admitted to conduct business in Serafini.

NBD recently expanded its operations beyond Serafini and into Western Asia. It has attained all government permits and successfully opened a new facility in Asia. The CEO of Colossal Corporation, Janet Yoon, is worried about certain reports concerning NBD’s expansion into Asia. The CEO has submitted the following issues to the international task force and requires solutions immediately:

1. The local employees in Asia seem to spend considerable time chatting with each other instead of getting right to work in the morning. Not only that, but when meetings are scheduled it seems that everyone is late, sometimes significantly late.

2. In filling a recent vacancy in the new Asian facility, the local who headed the hiring committee insisted on hiring his uncle. The uncle appears to be qualified, but the CEO is worried about nepotism and whether that creates ethical issues for the company.

3. The various suppliers in Asia with whom NBD has supply contracts for the components that NBD uses in its manufacturing do not always honor the specific terms of the contracts that NBD has entered into with them. Particularly where market prices have shifted significantly, they insist that the contracts represent a partnership and that each partner should help protect the other from losing money on the deal. They say that the relationship is more important than the contract terms.

4. Four weeks ago, NBD’s Asian facility introduced an employee incentive plan with annual awards for outstanding individual performance by employees. Employees were encouraged to nominate a deserving colleague, or they could nominate themselves. So far there have been no nominations. The CEO, Janet Yoon, wants to know what’s wrong and whether the incentive plan should be scrapped.

Yoon would like the international task force to research and provide an analysis of the issues and recommendations on how to approach them.