Contemporary Authors

• The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2017

1. The language of global success : how a common tongue transforms multinational organizations LCCN 2017944328 Type of material Book Personal name Neeley, Tsedal. Main title The language of global success : how a common tongue transforms multinational organizations / Tsedal Neeley. Published/Produced Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1709 Description pages cm ISBN 9780691175379 (cloth : alk. paper)

• Harvard - http://www.harvardbusiness.org/tsedal-neeley

  Tsedal Neeley is an assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. She currently teaches the first-year Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) course in the MBA program. She also teaches in executive education offerings such as the Global Strategic Management Program. Tsedal’s research focuses on the challenges that global collaborators face when attempting to coordinate work across national and linguistic boundaries, with special emphasis on the impact of language, power, status, and emotions on social dynamics. Her work on global collaboration is featured in two Harvard ManageMentor topics.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tsedal/

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• Harvard - https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=438575

  Tsedal Neeley
  Associate Professor of Business Administration

  Tsedal Neeley (@tsedal) is an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. She has taught in both the MBA (LEAD, Leading Teams in a Global Economy, Field Global Immersion) and in various executive education programs including Global Strategic Management and Program for Leadership Development. Professor Neeley is a recipient of the HBS Charles M. Williams award for outstanding teaching in Executive Education.

  With her new award-winning book, The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations (Princeton University Press), Professor Neeley's research focuses on the challenges that global collaborators face when they work across national boundaries. Successful global collaboration can enable firms to capitalize on the promise of their global reach. For example, firms can draw on their diverse intellectual capital to meet customer demands the world over, giving them a competitive advantage in a range of marketplaces. The scale and complexity of global collaboration, however, makes its promise often hard to realize. Companies now span more languages, geographies, and cultures than ever before, making it more imperative and more difficult for workers to communicate effectively if they are to meet performance targets. To examine the communication challenges that global collaborators face, as well as potential solutions to those challenges, professor Neeley has identified key determinants of effectiveness in global work.

  Professor Neeley has also published her work in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of International Business, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review. Her research has been covered in many media outlets such as CNN, Financial Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist.

  Prior to her academic career, Professor Neeley spent ten years in industry working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various capacities including strategies for global customer experience, 360 degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. With extensive international experience, Professor Neeley is fluent in four languages.

  Professor Neeley received her Ph.D. from Stanford University's Department of Management Science and Engineering specializing in organizational studies. Professor Neeley was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research as well as the Stanford Distinguished Alumni Scholar.

• Russell Reynolds Associates - http://www.russellreynolds.com/insights/thought-leadership/q-and-a-with-tsedal-neeley

  QUOTED: "The seed of my interest in the strategic use of language in global organizations was first planted some 16 years ago when I was a doctoral student at Stanford University where I was part of a team examining the cross-cultural experience of global teams at SAP, a German high-tech company. Without prompting, as many as 70 percent of the employees we interviewed in Germany, India, and the US attributed collaboration hardships of one sort or another to language."
  "I found very little research that could explain the emotionally-charged and debilitating experiences these employees had recounted—a knowledge gap about one of the most fundamental means of communication for global workers. ... I have been motivated to go as deep and wide as I could to systematically study, develop interventions, and write about language."

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  Q&A with Tsedal Neeley
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  An Interview with HBS Professor Tsedal Neeley on the Language of Global Success

  Tsedal Neeley is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and the author of The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organization. She spoke with the Journal about her research, the challenges and benefits of global corporations establishing common language, and the role language should play in corporate partnerships.

  How did you first become interested in the strategic use of language in organizations?

  The seed of my interest in the strategic use of language in global organizations was first planted some 16 years ago when I was a doctoral student at Stanford University where I was part of a team examining the cross-cultural experience of global teams at SAP, a German high-tech company. Without prompting, as many as 70 percent of the employees we interviewed in Germany, India, and the US attributed collaboration hardships of one sort or another to language. One of my first interviewees teared up when describing an ongoing feeling of being ostracized as a result of other team members' habitual switch to a foreign language. Others described their difficulty speaking the dominant language, and cited it as the primary source of isolation in their teams and organization. Many saw language differences as the most divisive aspect of their global teamwork. As soon as I left those interviews, I turned to the literature to help make sense of what I had heard. I found very little research that could explain the emotionally-charged and debilitating experiences these employees had recounted—a knowledge gap about one of the most fundamental means of communication for global workers. Since that first study, I have been motivated to go as deep and wide as I could to systematically study, develop interventions, and write about language and the pivotal role it plays in facilitating or inhibiting effective global collaboration.

  Your new book tells the story of the Japanese-headquartered tech giant Rakuten, and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani's decision in March 2010 to mandate the use of English company-wide. What led him to that decision?

  Mikitani was often dubbed the Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos of Japan for his prescience in seeing the changes technology would bring to commerce and for his business acumen. By 2010, Rakuten was a household name and Internet destination of choice for the majority of Japanese online shoppers—nearly 90 percent market share for the company domestically. Mikitani felt that the only way Rakuten could grow was to expand globally. Migrating to English would contribute to fast and direct communication—without the cumbersome time delays that translation incurred— and was the only way to integrate his business across multiple nations and insert his company effectively in non-Japanese markets. A common language was the only way to extend knowledge sharing across the organization's existing global operations, as well as those that would be newly and rapidly established in order to efficiently achieve business results. Since transforming into a global organization facilitated by a common language, the company has grown from having some 200 million users to 1.1 billion worldwide in 6 years.

  His decision to stipulate a common language is in step with nearly 60 percent of multinational organizations that have migrated officially to English for global work. The pressure to grow globally, as well as the mergers and acquisitions that often cross national and linguistic boundaries, drive organizations to find a common way to communicate. Translators and interpreters for everyday work relationships tend to be inadequate. Meetings between individuals who speak different languages that rely on translators can become cumbersome and unnecessarily lengthy. Likewise, translated documents often lose nuance and slow down transactions. The absence of a lingua franca makes it challenging for linguistically diverse, and usually geographically dispersed, employees to share knowledge and collaborate. It has been long established that global team members who do not share the same language struggle to convey tacit knowledge that will advance their organization's goals. Finally, when subsidiaries are unable to communicate with their headquarters in the same language, the organization can find it difficult and inefficient to communicate a shared mission and values.

  I imagine many of Rakuten's native English speakers heard about this decision and immediately thought they were going to have it easy. Was that the case, or did they face challenges with the transition, too?

  The native speakers in several of the US offices were ecstatic at first. My favorite response that encapsulates the sentiment in the US offices is "I've got that box checked." And, indeed, the US employees benefited tremendously from their native language becoming the official language of communication in the company.

  But, within two years into the language change, the native English speakers at Rakuten had a very different story to tell. American employees experienced culture shock because they became inundated with Rakuten's corporate culture, which was steeped in Japanese cultural traditions, as well as new demands from the Tokyo headquarters. The language barrier had shielded them from the Tokyo headquarters' frequent demands, but the lingua franca adoption enabled Japanese managers to develop sufficient fluency to translate materials into English that called for substantive changes.

  I call this phenomenon the Trojan Horse of Language. Like the enormous wooden horse that the ancient Greeks gifted the city of Troy that hid warriors who opened the city gates to the encroaching Greek army, the "gift" of English that the US employees greeted so ecstatically at the outset in fact carried something more difficult to fathom, namely, a foreign corporate culture. The US employees had thought that the English language mandate would westernize work practices and work values, that is, their native culture, but in reality English transmitted Rakuten's Japanese work practices and values.

  You spent half a decade interviewing more than 600 Rakuten employees in eight countries, not to mention collecting survey data from over 3000 employees, and reviewing more than 20,000 pages of materials in the company archives. What surprised you the most?

  I was surprised by the adeptness of the group of employees who were neither members of the HQs nor the US locations. This group worked in the company's foreign offices: Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Thailand. One might expect that those who had to shed their foundational languages and cultures would have experienced a double jeopardy. This group had the easier linguistic adjustment to English and the easier cultural adjustment to the Japanese ways ushered in by the language mandate, although they too had to master steep learning curves to gain higher language proficiency and engage in new culturally unfamiliar work practices. Once they overcame the frustrations of communicating and coordinating work across borders, they were surprisingly open and receptive to languages and cultural practices that were foreign to their locale, nationality, or identity. These attitudes, in my estimation, makes the employee group most likely to be effective for global organizations of the twenty-first century. I describe their attitude and behaviors in the book as Global Work Orientation.

  We have a number of articles this issue about corporate ecosystems – companies building relationships with other companies to get closer to the market or better serve their customers. Should sharing a common language be a factor CEOs should consider when evaluating a potential ecosystem partner?

  I think it is important to understand if language is important for the critical tasks or the basic work that the organization must do well in order to create distinctive value for stakeholders. For example, to access global markets— and build accessible global brands— dispersed workers must be able to engage with external international partners and customers effectively. A common language makes it easier to synchronize services, helps accelerate the integration of new entities from different regions by helping achieve efficiency in migrating onto common platforms, sharing resources, strengthening internal communication, and fostering cohesion in with partner organization.

  What are you researching next?

  I continue to tackle some of the many challenges that arise from managing and working in today's global workforce. I am currently focusing on the roles that global leaders play and the strategies they design to meet these challenges.

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Economic, Social, and Environmental
Richard N. Cooper
Foreign Affairs.
96.6 (November-December 2017): p153+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries BY JUSTIN YIFU LIN AND CELESTIN
MONGA. Princeton University Press, 2017, 384 pp.
Lin, a former chief economist of the World Bank, and Monga, the chief economist of the African
Development Bank, bring to bear their considerable scholarly credentials and practical know-how in this
iconoclastic treatment of economic development in poor countries. The authors quarrel with the
conventional wisdom about what is necessary for successful development. Instead of hawking a one-sizefits-all
formula, they urge countries to find a niche in the world economy by taking a pragmatic approach
tailored to their financial resources, labor markets, and types of government. That said, Lin and Monga tend
to favor the creation of industrial or export zones, outfitted with infrastructure and unburdened by red tape--
but also offered no protection from market forces. They have no ideological objection to an active role for
government, which is often necessary, but they are wary of restrictions and regulations that allow only some
players to profit.
Robert McNamara's Other War: The World Bank and International Development BY PATRICK ALLAN
SHARMA. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 240 pp.
Robert McNamara was best known as the "whiz kid" secretary of defense under U.S. Presidents John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and as one of the main architects of U.S. (and, by extension, South
Vietnamese) strategy in the Vietnam War. But as the death toll from the war mounted and public opposition
increased, McNamara left (or was perhaps pushed out of) the Pentagon and took the helm at the World
Bank, where he served until 1981. His famous drive and energy radically transformed the bank:
reformulating its mission, increasing the scale of its operations, and turning it into the preeminent global
institution for supporting economic development. This useful book describes McNamara's tenure during a
turbulent period that saw the partial breakdown of the postwar international monetary system, two major
increases in world oil prices, and China's entry into the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Sharma analyzes the positive and negative aspects of McNamara's enduring legacy at the bank, including
his focus on reducing poverty and his insistence on rigorous quantitative analysis of both client countries
and the bank's own performance.
Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy BY PHILIPPE VAN PARIJS
AND YANNICK VANDERBORGHT. Harvard University Press, 2017, 400 pp.
Basic Income: A Guide for the Open-Minded BY GUY STANDING. Yale University Press, 2017, 392 pp.
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Is the world--or at least some countries--ready for a basic income? These two books argue strongly in the
affirmative. Such a policy involves the government providing cash grants to every member of society at a
level that could sustain life: an amount equal to one-quarter of GDP per capita would suffice, suggest Van
Parijs and Vanderborght. The size of the grants could be affected by various factors, such as the recipient's
age and level of need, and could be conditioned on grantees meeting certain behavioral requirements, such
as preventing truancy in their school-age children. Van Parijs and Vanderborght, however, prefer a
universal, unconditional cash grant--as does Standing. Van Parijs and Vanderborght's book is more scholarly
than Standing's and explores the history of basic-income schemes going all the way back to sixteenthcentury
Antwerp. Standing, for his part, usefully examines present-day pilot projects in Finland, the
Netherlands, and the Canadian province of Ontario.
Both books summarize the existing empirical research on basic incomes and the various ideological and
practical objections that economists have put forth. And both books address the question of how rich and
poor countries could finance basic-income schemes. In India, for example, a basic income that would lift
millions out of extreme poverty could be comfortably financed by eliminating numerous subsidies, such as
those for electricity and gasoline, that mainly benefit higher-income families. Finally, both books emphasize
how a basic income would bring about not only economic benefits but also greater freedom of choice for
individuals; evidence suggests that most recipients would make good decisions about how to spend the
money. Puzzlingly, how ever, neither book discusses the potential impact that a basic income might have on
birthrates--possibly positive for countries with declining populations but possibly negative in the many
more countries where populations continue to rise.
The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations BY
TSEDAL NEELEY. Princeton University Press, 2017, 200 pp.
In 2010, the chief executive of a rapidly growing Japanese e-commerce firm, Rakuten, mandated that all of
the company's 10,000 employees, most of whom were Japanese, start using English to communicate within
the firm, both in speech and in writing. Neeley followed the implementation of this radical change over the
course of five years. She weaves her observations of Rakuten into a larger story about language education in
Japan, which is a crucial part of the "Abenomics" agenda of the country's prime minister, Shinzo Abe. The
result is an interesting and informative book full of practical lessons for any internationally ambitious
organization. Ninety percent of Rakuten's employees obtained the targeted level of English proficiency
within two years, and those who did not but nevertheless showed promise were granted another six months
to reach the goal. Neeley points out that although language reflects culture and influences behavior, it does
not determine them. Indeed, she reports that one consequence of the universal use of English at Rakuten
was the reinforcement of traditional Japanese customs throughout the firm, especially Japanese-style
hospitality thanks to clearer shared expectations.
The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction BY
RICHARD BOOKSTABER. Princeton University Press, 2017, 240 pp.
Bookstaber criticizes modern economic theory, especially its reliance on the idea of a natural equilibrium in
human affairs and its use of models that assume that households will always maximize their utility based on
unchanging preferences. As aesthetically pleasing and occasionally useful as such theoretical constructs
may be, human life does not conform to them. In particular, they fail to account for the crises that all too
frequently plague modern economies. Bookstaber's cogent and accessible book explains the financial crisis
of 2008 in great detail, demonstrating how people's reactions to events--sometimes emotional, sometimes
rational--influenced the behavior of other people, which then reverberated back to the initial actors. This is
what the philanthropist and investor George Soros has called "reflexivity." To better understand such
dynamics, Bookstaber endorses a pragmatic, inductive "storytelling" approach and recommends that
analysts eschew deductive, theoretical approaches.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Cooper, Richard N. "Economic, Social, and Environmental." Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 153+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513927370/ITOF?
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QUOTED: "This case study skillfully demonstrates that major corporate initiatives must be championed by top leadership and provide meaningful support and training for employees."

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The Language of Global Success: How a
Common Tongue Transforms
Multinational Organizations
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p42+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations
Tsedal Neeley. Princeton Univ., $26.95 (200p)
ISBN 978-0-691-17537-9
Neeley, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, tackles her study of "Englishnization" with
scholarly rigor and journalistic zeal. On a Monday morning in March 2010, the CEO of Japanese tech
company Rakuten announced that the company was adopting English as its lingua franca. By the next day,
the two-thirds of Rakuten's employees who are Japanese nationals found themselves ordering from Englishlanguage
menus in company cafeterias. Yet it wasn't these employees (whom Neeley calls "linguistic
expats") who had the hardest time adjusting--it was native English speakers in the company's U.S.
subsidiaries. Suddenly it was possible for Rakuten to translate its organizational culture into English,
requiring everyone to adapt. Neeley spotlights the struggles of individual employees to adjust to the
changes at Rakuten against the backdrop of the CEO's enthusiasm, lightly wearing a mountain of data
gathering (650 interviews, about 3,000 survey results, and more than 20,000 pages of archival data). She
also tells an intriguing story about culture and language, showing that the key to success for modern-day
businesspeople is embracing a "global work orientation" and being open to collaboration across national
borders. This finding is supported by the experience of Rakuten's employees in Brazil, France, Indonesia,
and beyond, "dual linguistic-cultural expats" whose openness to change helped them fare better than both
their Japanese and American counterparts. This case study skillfully demonstrates that major corporate
initiatives must be championed by top leadership and provide meaningful support and training for
employees. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations."
Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile,
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Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
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Cooper, Richard N. "Economic, Social, and Environmental." Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 153+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513927370/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538356/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

• Pro English
  https://proenglish.org/2017/08/29/english-as-the-language-of-global-success/
  Word count: 288

  QUOTED: "Neeley’s book provides a sterling example of how even a Japanese company understood the great importance of learning the English language."

  English As The Language Of Global Success

  29 AUG 2017STEPHEN GUSCHOVASSIMILATION, BENEFITS OF OFFICIAL ENGLISH, ENGLISH ON THE JOB, ETHNICITY, FRONTPAGE POSTS, MULTICULTURALISM, NEWS
  English As The Language Of Global Success
  Melanie Kirkpatrick of The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed a new book authored by Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, and entitled “The Language Of Global Success: How A Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations.”

  In the book, Neeley describes how on March 1, 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, chief executive of Japanese e-commerce powerhouse Rakuten, addressed the company’s 10,000 employees via a video link and told them that Rakuten was becoming an English-only company, and that all employees had two years to pass the Test of English for International Communication or face demotion or dismissal.

  Mikitani called his plan “Englishnization.” Two years later, approximately 90% of Rakuten’s 10,000 employees had passed the English test.

  Neeley explains in the book how Rakuten management continually stressed to its workers why English was vital to the company’s success, and the company provided intensive English language classes to its employees during the workday.

  The English language program helped Rakuten become globally competitive, and it even expanded its international operations into the United States.

  Neeley’s book provides a sterling example of how even a Japanese company understood the great importance of learning the English language.

  Read more at this link:
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/business-in-a-common-tongue-1503867971?shareToken=st0015d9090f514b5ca35e5dd195f0fa67&reflink=article_email_share

• Strategy + Business
  https://www.strategy-business.com/article/When-a-Japanese-Company-Adopted-English-as-a-First-Language?gko=82a6b
  Word count: 1352

  QUOTED: "The Language of Global Success is more than a study in organizational communication. It also is a study in change management."
  "Neeley details the ways in which Mikitani addressed these problems, and for any executive contemplating a major change initiative, it is worthwhile reading."
  "Although The Language of Global Success is very strong on narrative, it is less comprehensive when discussing results."
  "Although this makes for an excellent case study, it’s possible that the entire concept of a corporate lingua franca, which Neeley has studied for 15 years, may be on the verge of obsolescence—thanks to artificial intelligence."

  January 23, 2018 / Spring 2018 / Issue 90
  BUSINESS LITERATURE
  READ MORE
  For the full issue subscribe now and download s+b digital edition
  When a Japanese Company Adopted English as a First Language
  In her new book, Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neeley examines the challenge of establishing a lingua franca in global companies.
  by Theodore Kinni

  The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations
  by Tsedal Neeley, Princeton University Press, 2017

  On March 1, 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japan-based e-retailer, announced that henceforth English would be the official language of the company’s 10,000 employees. Moreover, declared Mikitani, who often was billed as Japan’s Jeff Bezos, any employee who didn’t become fluent in English within two years would face demotion.

  The initiative, dubbed “Englishnization” by Mikitani, shocked Rakuten’s 7,000 or so Japanese employees — 95 percent of whom did not speak their employer’s newly established lingua franca. It also made headlines around the world, and drew some domestic fire: “It’s stupid for a Japanese company to only use English in Japan when the workforce is mainly Japanese,” said Honda Motors CEO Takanobu Ito. (Five years later, Ito would be out and English would be in at Honda, too.)

  Rakuten’s Englishnization didn’t shock Tsedal Neeley, author of The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations. “By mandating English,” writes the associate professor at Harvard Business School, “Rakuten was prepared to join the approximately 52 percent of multinational companies that had adopted a language different from that of their originating country in order to better meet global expansion and business needs.”

  In The Language of Global Success, Neeley reports the results of her five-year longitudinal study of the initiative, which began a couple of months after Mikitani’s announcement. She also ticks off the reasons companies need a lingua franca. Communication and knowledge exchange top the list. Rakuten was operating in a fast-moving and highly competitive sector. And by 2010, the 13-year-old company was pursuing a strategy of global expansion. It was clear to Mikitani that the language barriers within Rakuten were bogging down everything — integration of acquisitions, management of business units in 27 countries, the minutiae of daily work. For instance, an email from an English-speaking employee in the U.S. to a Japanese colleague required translation, as did the reply and any additional messages — and the translations themselves often required interpretation. As you might guess, even simple exchanges could drag on for days.

  Neeley explains why English was the natural choice for Rakuten’s official language. It’s an easy language to learn, relatively speaking. Better yet, one in four people in the world already has some command of the language, and more than 1 billion of them are fluent. English also was the language of the world’s leading political and economic superpower — the United States.

  But none of those reasons made the Englishnization of Rakuten easy to achieve. The way Neeley explains it, the mandate transformed every employee in the company into an expat of sorts.

  “The Englishnization of Rakuten transformed every employee in the company into an expat.”

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  Almost all of the company’s Japanese employees became linguistic expats in their own country — struggling to speak, write, and read in a new language at work. The morning after Mikitani’s announcement, writes Neeley, “Japanese-language cafeteria menus were replaced with their English equivalents. English replaced Japanese floor directories in Rakuten elevators. Even the corporate executives were stunned.” The CEO had not informed them about Englishnization before his announcement.

  Rakuten’s English-speaking employees in the U.S. were elated with Mikitani’s mandate, at first. They figured that the Japanese company would become more like an American company and that their opportunities for advancement would expand. But the other shoe quickly dropped and they became what Neeley calls “cultural expats.” One day, she writes, “a massive, encyclopedia-like policy handbook arrived in the U.S. Rakuten offices. Employees were as astonished by the handbook’s size as they were by its very existence, which was previously unknown.” The heretofore untranslated handbook included arcane rites, such as the proper employee badges to wear and how they were to be positioned on one’s clothing — and disciplinary actions taken when these rites were not followed to the letter. As Mikitani was importing English to Japan, he was also exporting a Japanese organizational culture.

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  Interestingly, the third set of expats — labeled “dual expats” by Neeley — had the easiest time adjusting. Employees in countries such as France and Brazil were already both linguistic and cultural expats at Rakuten. They felt less threatened by the language mandate, because many of them already spoke English. And they turned out to be more willing to make the changes required by Englishnization.

  The Language of Global Success is more than a study in organizational communication. It also is a study in change management. Mikitani announced Englishnization, but apparently didn’t give much thought to the level of change it demanded. Employees were expected to learn English and adopt the cultural precepts of headquarters on their own. As it turned out, chaos ensued and productivity plunged. “Despite Mikitani’s deliberate immersion efforts, reasoning, and persistent messaging,” writes Neeley, “after nearly a year and a half, employees’ TOEIC [Test of English for International Communication] progress was dismal.”

  Neeley details the ways in which Mikitani addressed these problems, and for any executive contemplating a major change initiative, it is worthwhile reading. The CEO began offering employees language classes at work and on company time. Progress within the business units was measured and reported to top management. Middle management was enlisted in the initiative. And success stories were promoted and publicized internally.

  Although The Language of Global Success is very strong on narrative, it is less comprehensive when discussing results. Neeley tells us that 90 percent of Rakuten’s employees achieved Englishnization by Mikitani’s 2012 deadline. She also describes the rapid global expansion of the company, the establishment of international R&D centers, and other anecdotal benefits, such as tighter integration, a larger talent pool, and enhanced knowledge sharing. But she doesn’t explicitly connect Englishnization’s impact — good or bad — on financial results.

  What’s more, although this makes for an excellent case study, it’s possible that the entire concept of a corporate lingua franca, which Neeley has studied for 15 years, may be on the verge of obsolescence — thanks to artificial intelligence. In late 2017, Google released Pixel Buds, headphones with the company’s first, albeit crude, attempt at a real-time translator built in. Microsoft and IBM are working on their own language translation initiatives. Very soon, companies may not need an official language because technology will enable all of us to communicate clearly without losing anything in translation.

  Author Profile:
  Theodore Kinni is a contributing editor of strategy+business. He also blogs at Reading, Writing re: Management and is @tedkinni on Twitter.

• Times Higher Education
  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/reviews-new-and-noteworthy-14-september-2017
  Word count: 139

  QUOTED: "This analysis offers sharp insights for any multinational."

  The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue 
Transforms Multinational Organizations
  Tsedal Neeley
  Princeton University Press

  In 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, head of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, announced that communication within the company would henceforth be in English. To assess the impact, Tsedal Neeley did surveys and interviews all over the world. Native Japanese speakers based in Japan suddenly found “their daily work experiences fraught with language challenges”. Initially pleased anglophones soon discovered that “the shift to their native language ironically opened the door to [more Japanese] organizational practices”. Those who had to take on both a new language and new cultural practices often proved the most adaptable. This analysis offers sharp insights for any multinational thinking about adopting a “lingua franca”.

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