As one company, ING started in 1991 due to a merger of a Dutch bank and a Dutch insurance agency. Since the merger, ING has experienced tremendous growth. One of the areas experiencing such growth is the Asia Pacific region. In 2002, ING promoted Jacques Kemp as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ING Asia Pacific. As Andreas Schotter indicates in the ING Insurance Asia/Pacific case study (2006), “Kemp was concerned that ING needed to prepare for the time when the general market growth in Asia slowed and the competitive pressure intensified” (p. 1). As a result, he contacted three different consulting firms to establish a clear path to take ING Asia Pacific to the next level. Unfortunately, none of the consulting firms provided Kemp with what he was looking for. This paper will address what Kemp should institute as a means of addressing: the misaligned strategies and values of the different entities within the Asia Pacific region, clear up communication gaps and finally empower local managers to help Kemp bring ING Asia Pacific as a leader in the industry.
To begin, Kemp should have conducted a thorough analysis of each country. The best approach would be conducting a Strength’s, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis, in an effort to find commonalities between the regions that he could build on. One of the issues Jacques Kemp identified in the ING Asia Pacific organization was that “The functional managers at the regional office had difficulties maintaining common standards across the region” (Schotter, 2006, p. 4). As Management Study Guide illustrates, “Its [SWOT] key purpose is to identify the strategies that will create a firm specific business model that will best align an organization’s resources and ca...
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...inally decentralizing decision making will empower unit managers to forge ahead within their own local environments.
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Our economic development will forever be defined as our ability to succeed internationally. PwC forecasts India’s real annual GDP growth until 2050 at 8.9 percent, Vietnam’s at 8.8 percent, and China’s at 5.9 percent. The list of fast-growing emerging markets goes on and on. The U.S. forecast is a meager 2.4 percent, comparable with most Western economies. The domestic companies that are likely to see incremental growth in the coming decades are those that are not only doing business internationally, but that are developing the strategic skill set to master doing business across cultures. Cross-cultural core competence is at the crux of today’s sustainable competitive advantage. For example, political environment will tell us, as to how and why political leaders control, whether and how of international business. Legal environment, both national and international will tell us about many kinds of laws by which business firms must work. The cultural environment will tell us about attitudes, beliefs and opinions important to business people. Economic environment will tell us about the economic system being followed by the host country, which may or may not be different from home country. It will also explain the variables such as level of development, human resources, Gross Domestic Per Capita and consumption patterns that determine a firm’s ability to do business. Geography will tell us about location, quantity, and quality of the world’s resources.
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