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Mr. Nobuhiro Tanaka has been working at Toshiba, one of the oldest and largest consumer electronic appliance companies in Japan, for more than thirty years. He joined the company after graduating from Keio University in Tokyo, one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. He has held many different positions since he joined the company, including sales manager and senior vice president of the international division. Mr. Tanaka is now a corporate representative appointed by corporate top management in the role of representing Toshiba Corporation in Europe. His job is to help top management with strategic decision making by providing a critical regional perspective about Toshiba’s businesses. Specifically, he analyzes the competitiveness of each in-house company in Europe and advises corporate top management of necessary strategic changes. Each in-house company func- tions independently, doing business globally, and is responsible for its own business results. For example, Digital Media Network Company is in charge of advanced audio and video products such as color TVs and DVD players. Tanaka is one of four corporate representatives among the high- ranked executives assigned to assist the in-house company’s business and support subsidiaries in the region through their respective RHQs.

Toshiba recently redesigned its global organizational structure, including the roles of RHQs, to enhance its global competitiveness by assigning different yet complementary roles to corporate-level and company-level RHQs. Whereas the former is responsible mainly for integrating and coordinating intercompany activities from a strategic perspective, the latter takes care of operational integration as well as local responsiveness in a specific region. By removing the operational function from corporate RHQs, each in-house company has more autonomy in mobilizing necessary business resources and developing an appropriate business approach to fit their own business environments. This new, two-tiered RHQ arrangement aims at more effectively meeting the challenge of balancing global integration and local responsiveness. As a corporate representative, Tanaka serves as a consultant providing his expertise and experiences in resolving the conflicting interests of individual companies to optimize profits for the whole group. He believes that his extensive experiences in international assignments at the earlier stage of his career has broadened his perspective about global business and enables him to perform his job successfully.

tive strategy driven by high cost pressure, it rarely sends expatriates to run its overseas subsidiaries, using many local managers instead. Consequently, managers from the United States are denied any opportunity to work with local managers and to learn about best practices originating in the overseas subsidiaries, which fail to find their way into the U.S.-dominated official KX system. This situation will undoubtedly con- strain the ability to share knowledge among various units of global operations.

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MNCs need a top-down initiative to establish and legitimize the role of transferring core competencies within the organization. Yet the opening case indicates that one of the main problems Accenture faces is its inability to disseminate the existing knowl- edge of the organization to the collective organizational memory. This gap is caused primarily by Accenture’s failure to enable its employees to share and contribute their knowledge, both explicit and tacit. To share important knowledge among different units of the MNC, it is critical to establish an organizational structure and corporate culture that facilitates the active exchange of best practices. The easiest way to counter this problem is to start by addressing the explicit contributions.

In the case of Accenture, the company needs to motivate employees to make all pertinent submissions to the KX. Currently, however, the KX division is disconnected from the rest of the organization, with little support from upper management. As a result, KX managers lack the respect needed from the consultants if they are to in- crease contributions. If management would mandate knowledge sharing more strictly and give the KX division the power to enforce it, consultants would certainly be more apt to set aside the time to make the necessary contributions. Giving the KX division more enforceability would also help combat the idea within the organization that the KX is not as vital as a more direct revenue-producing department. Essentially, Accenture needs to align its organizational structure in a way that provides KX with more respect and credibility both within the company and among the other departments.

At the same time, MNCs must establish a better reward system for knowledge sharing. If knowledge sharing is such a minute part of employee performance evalu- ations, it will provide little incentive to make contributions. Employees need to re- ceive some kind of direct compensation for their efforts. This compensation would motivate employees to take knowledge sharing more seriously and would certainly give rise to better and more thorough contributions to the transfer of best practices. It is the responsibility of human resource management to establish such compensation and reward systems that produce a global learning environment conducive to knowl- edge sharing across borders.

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International human resources can have several forms of strategic influence on an organization’s ability to compete in the global marketplace. In turn, particular strat- egies and structures that MNCs choose tend to have an impact on international hu- man resource management practices. We have examined a contingency model to

understand how different types of international human resource management prac- tices may be selected to support the effective implementation of distinctive competi- tive strategies and organizational structures.

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1. What are the key characteristics of Accenture’s knowledge management strategy?

2. Why does Accenture’s knowledge management strategy fail to utilize the human resource knowledge generated in East Asia?

3. What do you think would be the key roles that managers could play to im- prove the current knowledge management strategy at Accenture?