Interview with David Risher

Citation

(2008), "Interview with David Risher", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2008.13615dab.001

Interview with David Risher

Article Type: Executive Corner From: Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Volume 15, Issue 4.

David Risher is Professor, University of Washington Business School, on leave. Former Senior Vice-President, Marketing and Merchandising, for Amazon.com. Former General Manager, Microsoft Corporation. Former Board member, Seattle Girls' School, responsible for raising over $1 million. Graduate of Princeton University (BA) and Harvard Business School (MBA). Member, ESADE International Advisory Board and Catalunya International Advisory Board. Multilingual English/French/Spanish/proficient Catalan. Father of two young children at Benjamin Franklin.

What are some of the current cross-cultural management challenges within your organization or industry?

Internet businesses are almost all global by definition – even from its earliest days, one-fifth of Amazon.com's customers and business were from outside the USA (Now this number is about one-half.). Customers all around the world want something very similar: a large selection, fast delivery and low prices. But even in the internet world, companies cannot do things identically around the world. “Low prices” in France cannot include large discounts to books, since discounting books more than 5 per cent is illegal. Customers in China want fast delivery like everywhere else, but Amazon has had to hire bicycle couriers to deliver products and collect cash, since the trucking and credit card industries are not very well developed in China.

The problem comes when you confuse strategy – low prices, fast delivery, etc. – with tactics. Local managers will always (and understandably) argue that they need to pursue different strategies, because that gives them the greatest chance to be creative. But the reality is that it is often far more effective to keep the same strategy around the world, but modify the tactics according to local market conditions.

In your opinion, what are some of the major cross-cultural challenges your company will face in the future?

Companies like Amazon.com are getting smarter about how to understand differences in their customers' needs around the world. But at the same time, all technology companies are having to incorporate software development teams from different cultures – from India say – not simply to produce “fringe” components of their software, but to co-create integral pieces of their technology.

Please share an interesting anecdote or case you have experienced in managing your company across cultures

When Amazon.com opened its Japan-based store, amazon.co.jp, we used benchmarks from our USA, French, UK and German customer service teams to determine how many customer service representatives we would need to hire. By taking the number of expected customer service contacts per order, and forecasting the number of orders we expected, we came up with a hiring plan for our customer service group.

What we had not anticipated was that Japanese customers would be much, much less likely to contact customer service if there was a problem – they simply did not have the culture of “complaining” if something did not go right. So in the end, we had many more customer service representatives than we needed. Over time, as the business grew, we ended up needing those employees, but the number of contacts per order never grew to the level we had planned. Some cultural differences really do matter!

What are some subjects or cross-cultural themes that, in your view, could benefit from additional academic research?

From my Amazon.com perspective, I would be interested to see research on how cross-cultural software development and project management can be handled well.

I also serve as President of the Board of the Benjamin Franklin International School, a primary and secondary school in Barcelona with families from the USA, Spain and 30 other countries. In that capacity, issues surrounding fund-raising in a multi-cultural not-for-profit educational institution are critical. Some cultures have a strong tradition of donating money and time to children's education. In other cultures, it is assumed that government aid and per-student fees are sufficient to guarantee appropriate funding. If a school wants to undertake fund-raising to improve its facilities and educational environment, how can it best do so when its constituents come from such varied backgrounds.