Answer to the question number one: Competitive strength is defined as the strategic strength that one business entity has over its rival entities within its competitive industry. The main reason behind ABB’s culturally diverse management team is a source of competitive strength is explained below.
1.ABB’s Cultural diverse management team bring new ideas, creative input and innovative thinking that are very useful for a cross- border organization like ABB in the age of globalization.
2. Diverse management has the ability and the expertise to improve the quality of decision making.
3. Diverse management team brings their national perspectives to bear on tough problem and help to understand how things are done in different countries and culture.
4. Finally for doing business in different country it is better to have a management team who has the better knowledge over the respective country’s language, culture, people and politics. As for an example if ABB want to do business in Bangladesh their management, marketing team should be Bangladeshi because they will understand the consumer attitude better than anybody.
Thus we can say ABB’s culturally diverse management team is their true source of competitive strength. Answer to the question number two:
“Percy Barnevik” has to overcome some barriers to make culturally diverse management team as their competitive strength. Those are explained below. 1. Communication: perceptual, cultural and language barriers need to be overcome for diverse management to succeed. Ineffective communication of key objectives results in confusion, lack of teamwork, and low morale. 2. Implementation of culturally diverse management team: Implementing the management is the hard task for any organization.

Answer to the question number three
“Need to acknowledge cultural difference without becoming paralyzed by them”
Above statement explains the thinking of “Percy Barnevik” about diversity of culture among ABB’s management team. Barnvik thinks they need to have the broaden understanding of cultural differences, not try to change anything.

Answer to the question number four There are certain ways ABB can increase the cross cultural literacy like 1. Cross cultural training: HRD can conduct language and cultural training before assign any work to the international assignee. 2. Arrange regular Gathering: ABB can arrange regular official meeting and social meeting, thus employees can share and learn things from each other.