Making Local Knowledge Global – Case Solution

Case questions answered:

Not the questions you were looking for? Submit your own questions & get answers.

Making Local Knowledge Global Case Answers

For the past year and a half, Lexington Labs has been experiencing a decline in sales and revenue. The company’s chief operating officer, David Martin, will be holding an upcoming meeting with his senior sales executives. He wants to tackle how the company should be making local knowledge global across its offices worldwide in line with its goal of being one global company.

The main problem with Lexington Lab resides in its internal practices. Instead of pushing for group decision-making techniques, this company is practicing miscommunication between relevant global offices. Additionally, they fail to offer feedback to one another and forget to follow the values they initially started with. Instead, low cohesiveness and an overboard office decentralization are present.

This company focused on the global expansion and the initial success of the company. It was so focused on this that they lost sight of the changing trends in the worldwide market, i.e., they pursued the wrong strategy to maintain a strong position in the pharmaceutical market, which led to a humongous decline in sales and payment shortages.

Lexington Lab (with its matrix structure) failed to acknowledge the malfunctioning of the independence they gave to every office. It is quite understandable that because of their existing dominant organizational culture, they value freedom so much, but the said move has caused a break of cohesiveness between offices. They do not communicate, and every effort that Martin has tried, such as survival courses, has not produced any valid outcome.

Martin has apparently forgotten that these offices are in different countries where diversity is present and has pushed offices to create their own group norms (they follow different strategies). So, how could a culture create one work for sixty globally? His main dilemma is in making local knowledge global.

This strong culture of decentralization explains why offices do not work as a whole. This also results in harder communication or encounters between them.

Although the aforementioned situation corresponds as unfavorable, Lexington’s status quo will change. The situation will be resolved when Lexington initiates negotiations between offices by following certain steps.

Martin needs to start a negotiating process with country-leading offices. He should focus more, not on resolving a conflict. Rather, he would have to help negotiate a common strategy to bolster their presence in the pharmaceutical market. This method will become the intergroup strategy of ideas and information sharing.

Martin needs the office representatives close to him. Since these people were appointed to those positions, it shows that…