Business Communication Issues
The global marketplace creates many opportunities for business development, but ineffective communication that comes along, both internal and external, can harm employees, customers, and stockholders. Therefore, when conducting business globally, it is important to understand the barriers to effective communication and know how to overcome them. Based on different objectives, we can identify these business communication issues from three dimensions.
In the case of multinational corporations, the first barrier exists in the multi-level communication between headquarters and the overseas branch. With limits or no authorization in making big decisions, the branch has to report to headquarters and make requests for approvals before implementations. However, the information has to be passed through many more layers than in a local business during the procedure, which inevitably affects the efficiency of communication. Amazon, whose market value surpassed the U.S. nation's largest retailer Walmart in July 2015, has never performed as shiningly in China as it does in the U.S. Left behind by Taobao and JD.com, the leading businesses in China’s C2C and B2C area, respectively, Amazon’s market share kept slipping in recent years. Steve Frazier, Amazon’s ex-CEO in China, attributed the reasons to the very limited decision-making power that the China management team has, and the redundant layers of hierarchy that result in ineffective communications with the U.S. headquarters.
Second, a foreign company often faces barriers or challenges to effective cross-cultural communication with its local consumers. Culture intricacies, reflected in customer psychology, value and behaviors, etc., if not dealt with appropriately, are often problematic to customer relationships. A successful example is KFC in China. Based on its continuous efforts on