CIICPD 2023

3.2.3 Critical Incident 3: Status quo The last excerpt chosen for analysis demonstrates the importance of the manager’s foreign experience for the company’s progress. It shows that international missions provide a diverse experience, erudition and maturity to leaders to be able to tackle the limitations caused by the status quo attitudes. In the narrative below, a senior manager recalled numerous critical moments he repetitively experienced upon returning from his work abroad. He started by accentuating his extensive experience with the company ever since his studies, pointing out that “being with the company relatively long” gave him “a real opportunity to function within the group a lot” , meaning his repeated stays within the VW Group brands. Upon providing context, he shared his observations and related feelings triggered upon each of his returns from abroad: The Group is a big corporation, it is not about one brand. It is 650,000 people around the whole world, so we really are a big company. But we sometimes live in a bubble. I always go work to the headquarters for a few years, then I return and am horrified that we live in the ‘Czech Eden’ here. And we think that we are the centre of the universe, and we are not. And sometimes even our marketing, starting from our company bulletin, we keep assuring ourselves that we have been the best. We have not. We simply must be really open, and I don’t mean accepting every nonsense which is the activism of the latest time, but we simply must communicate with our colleagues, employees and partners assertively. In this section, the manager expressed his general frustration due to a lack of open mindedness and flexibility of the local brand seen from the global perspective of the whole VW Group. Convinced that the company needs to be more open to progress and assertive in performance, he added a more concrete example: When I returned from my last stay, I got a chance to talk to our talents who will go abroad. So, I told them, if our company goes bankrupt, it will not appear on the first page of The Financial Times. If we were lucky, we would be mentioned on a fourth or fifth page in a little paragraph. They were shocked. Because they have been raised in a belief that we have been the navel of the world. To reiterate, in order to express the urgency of the need for more dynamics and open the company to the international market to succeed on a global scale, the manager mentioned young people and their limited awareness of the status of their business in international contexts. Then he emphasised the company’s need to establish itself within the global competition, and keep pace with the speed of the global trends once again: We have done a huge amount of work here, it is amazing what we have achieved over those 30 years, but we simply must go on, we have to transform from an international into a more international brand, there we need an absolute openness. Not to close the door, the world is large. The main message of this testimony again is the significance of leaders’ ability to project their experience not only into the company strategies and visions but also pass them on to the future generation of employees and potential leaders for the company. While participating in a group of managers from varied low and mid-management ranks,

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