Case Bhiwar Enterprises

Bhiwar Enterprises Brief summary of the import facts Currently, the enterprise in question is employing ineffective import techniques to maximize its potential within its current cultural context. Conflicts between family members inhabit the full and expeditious use of all of the assets of the company. Family connections, patronage, and internal loyalties determine who is promoted and who fulfills leadership positions, rather than actual merit. At present, there has been a resistance to changing the current management structure as well.

State the problems or questions concisely At present, the importing problems are gripping Bhiwar Enterprises are not only those of goods traded, but a recently imported a new individual into the company's fold, namely one Pratap Bhiwar. This individual returned after one year in an MBA program in the United States. Understandably, Bhiwar was eager to apply the concepts he has learned to his family's business. After all, this is why he uprooted himself for a year to the United States in the first place.

However, by applying Untied States business systems of ethics, of valuing individual employees' potential worth to the company, rather than preexisting family and community structures inevitably produced conflict within the company's leadership framework. Moreover, Bhiwar neglected to take into consideration, despite his extensive technical knowledge, that he had reentered a country where economic systems of patronage, as well as familial and personal systems of knowledge, were of equal importance as to what was rationally expeditious for a business to pursue.

Moreover, Pratap Bhiwar should not have automatically assumed that he has the ear of the company's main leaders. Although he was the nephew of one of the retired brothers, this meant that he was currently not part of the family management structure. His travel to the United States and subsequent education in business ethics and techniques, if anything, alienated him from the community's current ways of doing business as well as its current structures of understood as well as formal authority.

Pratap's critique of current business structures, promotions, and leadership looked self-interested, whether fairly or not, in the eyes of company members. Analysis From Pratap's logical point-of-view perhaps a system of doing business applicable with the principles of the United States business school he intended might be best to employ. However, Pratap neglected to fully appreciate the high-context familial environment that the Indian business was located in.

A high-context culture has been traditionally defined as a culture in which how one expresses one's self, depending on social status and non-verbal cues, as well as one's personal relationships with others, is equally important as what is directly stated, when communicating meaning and conferring authority in the decision making process. Even though who and how the business engages with on a daily basis might be in need of change, to neglect this immediate cultural system of relationships and environment was not wise on Pratap's part.