“How do you manage multiple
customer and client cultures?”
“In my business, the answer is:
‘Go East, my friend!’”
As the general counsel of a U.S.-based public company with 80 percent of its business in
Asia, I had to face up to the future soon after my appointment. To understand the culture
at the customer interface, I would need to spend time in Asia. And that’s what I did. For
a year, I lived and worked in Singapore, and my appreciation for customer and client
cultures grew enormously.
We’re well into a post-American world, to borrow a phrase from Fareed Zakaria. Although
American principles are still influential, they seldom are dispositive outside our country.
Moreover, for many U.S.-based companies, future growth will be from outside the United
States. I want our legal function to be a favorable differentiator for Novellus, and that
means our lawyers have to appreciate the distinct cultural lenses through which we and our
company are viewed.
To manage a global legal function, you literally have to walk around the planet. This is what
“managing by walking around” means in the 21st century. We may provide legal services to
our sales force by interacting with them directly or through our regional counsel, but the real
action is not at the interface between lawyer and client. The real action is at the interface
between client and customer. As corporate counsel, we simply must immerse ourselves in
these culturally distinct customer interfaces around the world in order to understand them and
indeed to understand our own business.
The challenge doesn’t stop once you wrap your mind around different cultures. In fact,
only then does the challenge become really interesting. Once you have some insight into
Martin J. Collins
Senior Vice President, General Counsel
and Chief Compliance Officer
distinct cultures, you must then allow that newly found knowledge to wash back over all of
your policies and processes. Re-architect them. Make them adaptable to the world of your
company’s present and future.
Novellus Systems, Inc.
One more thing: Even if your company’s markets are more U.S.-bound than my own, you
San Jose, California
will almost certainly have personnel in the company thinking about emerging markets. Do
you know who those people are? When’s the last time you had lunch with them?
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