IDA and the Irish mind

[odie1kanobe]

Compared to the continentals, we are far less bureaucratic. Many of them expect very close supervision and slowly develop autonomy. In a case here a non-Irish guy with 20+ years experience was asking for his supervisor to arrange his tasks in order of priority on a daily basis while Irish guys with less than half that were working with minimal supervision. Their approach was reactive, rather than the Irish being pro-active.

Irish management can tend to be autocratic though. The worry I have is that management complacency couild cause the downfall of many Irish companies.

Worked for a well known UK company in the 1990s before directors split it to enrich themselves and worked on the assumption that I could do whatever was necessary within reason to get the job done.

After expensive consultants were brought in they started selling the idea that you had lots more autonomy to make decisions to get the job done.

Sat in a meeting with colleagues and all feeling great that they could do all these new things and being the arguementative sort I went through their list and ticked off everything I was doing anyway, cue boss and his boss sitting stunned that I was getting the job done anyway.

Post meeting an attempted bollicking from both failed when I pointed out that if I was doing all this things that I shouldn't then it was obviously down to poor management control and how could they now give more power to people when they couldn't control what people were doing before.

God it was good to walk down the corridor leaving 2 little B******* trying to figure that one out.

They screwed me at review time but MD I was working with sat down after my review with them and it changed dramatically upwards.

One thing I fund in various companies I have worked is Irish people are more likely to be labelled troublesome because they are willing to be upfront in their views.

A disagreement with a german in a meeting finishes when meeting is over and not taken personally as its business but with a brit its seen as being an insult, even americans are better.

[HanleyS]

CRH, Kerry Food and Smurfit (before Michael got greedy) did ok in their chosen markets.

Those are not world scale multinationals. Diageo was within a sniff. I doubt it is anymore.

[Pauli]

[quote="TradCat"]But the Irish have jobs. If you set up in Ireland now you'll have to employ people from everywhere else who don't have the unique Irish mind. Imagine the disappointment of the multi-nationalist who thought he'd be getting Oscar Wilde but ended up with Franz Kafka.[/quote]

Your best one-liner yet, TradCat!!

[jmcc]

Strange they use Irish artists in attempt to encourage business to locate here, when the artists concerned chose to locate elsewhere.

Ah well those artists are safely dead and the descendents of the medocrity that drove them into exile are now trying to attract business.

Regards...jmcc

[MichaelHennigan]

CRH, Kerry Food and Smurfit (before Michael got greedy) did ok in their chosen markets.

Those are not world scale multinationals. Diageo was within a sniff. I doubt it is anymore.

CRH - not a significant multinational? The largest building materials supplier in the US and a North American payroll of 43,000.

Ryanair, Digicel and INM are three others that put us on the map but it's insignificant. Elan for example was founded by an American.

While A-T is impressed with the subliminal message and accepting that we are recognised for creativity in English writing, would not the message raise the question as to our record in science/innovation - Nobel Prizes etc.

We are for example more informal than Swedes and those who haven't worked overseas tend to be humourless and boring but that hasn't prevented them having an impressive record of success.

Our record shows that we are more the infantry than the cavalry.

Just look at the people we elect.

Naas, 20 miles from Dublin was bypassed in 1981 and 26 years later there isn't still a motorway link between the 2 principal cities and so on.

Broadband? - a reflection of our conservatism and slow adaptation to change.

[HanleyS]

CRH has a market cap of $22.62Bn.

Ericsson has market cap of $56.47Bn.