One of the things you tend to do particularly when you work on international assignments is you can spend time overthinking about cultural sensitivity. It’s important for all people on international assignments to be cognisant and aware of cultural sensitivity, but it can’t be at the detriment of communicating without a shadow of a doubt the attributes that are mandatory for success in your company. That’s not going to change and every person who walks in the door needs to know the attributes they should espouse to be successful in the organisation. Everyone at the end of the day has to get their cue from the managing director and the attributes that are necessary for success and growth need to be clear.
You think of all the different experiences you can have; there are a lot of other international assignments that could be really different to America! One of the things that has been really great is that as much as there have been some differences, there are also a lot of similarities. Even when you talk about different cultures, it’s not a 360 degree turn from life in America, but the thing that is interesting to me is basically learning a new country. It’s the day-to-day experience of just managing life in a different country.
Is there a Warner Bros way of doing business? Yes there is in terms of how we approach different things. But in a tangible way is it much different than how my counterpart at an Australian company might operate day-to-day? I think it goes back for us to clarity and really ensuring that every communication and relationship has absolute clarity in terms of here is the business and relationship we are looking to build and here is the goal and the result we are looking to achieve.
Taking retail, for example, in America there are a lot of retail options and I think that can inform how you approach retail when you are looking at all the options. Because of the landscape on the marketplace being very different in terms of that means that we have to be very thoughtful and strategic about how we spend our time and how we approach retail. We set up our organisation in such a way so it is about supporting how we approach retail and who the accounts are, that has become a very important part of our business. That is one of the things that is different as you just have the bounty of the retail landscape in America compared to a retail landscape here which is smaller, but really important in terms of how overall business is driven.
I started with HBO and I was basically taking HBO original movies to video and then, in a certain point in the process, I realised that the only thing I knew was video. Even at that point in my career I knew that I wanted to know more about product, so licensing really appealed to me, as in licensing you get to work across a broad spectrum of products. So I left HBO and went to MTV and I was able to work across publishing and the MTV store in Times Square. I was also able to broaden my demographics as HBO at that time was an older audience and MTV was very youth orientated. I was with MTV for a number of years and then went to Disney to get some international experience. I got international experience managing brand and also worked on franchising and working in pre-school. After some years at Disney I got the opportunity to come back to Time Warner, as they own HBO. My whole career has all been about product and working in all different demographics.
We will be hanging out with friends; my wife is doing a big spread at our house. It will be all of the basics like hot dogs and hamburgers and we will have Southern food like sweet potato pie and some collard greens just so we can to add to that American experience.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
