"Bay Of Pigs" Invasion and Cultural Diversity

"We can try to avoid making choices by doing nothing, but even that is a decision.”

I just love this quote because it talks about decisions that we make every second in our lives. We will face decisions be it at personal level or professional level. There have been numerous examples in organizations that one would not never want to emulate.

Lets talk about history. Scared? Don't be. My focus here is on something called Group think that drowned many people and how USA suffered a defeat in hands of Group think in the past .The question is: Are two heads better than one? Its not just Leaders who make the bad choice but one whole team can also make a bad decision and the organization will have to suffer the consequence of it.Our textbook talks about various symptoms of groupthink like illusion of invulnerability,collective rationalization etc. One of the case that I read about is the popular historical event 'Bay of Pigs' invasion which was a unsuccessful action by CIA trained force to invade southern Cuba. Launched in 1961, it was a failed operation as reported and it was unsuccessful because the team did not realize early that the chances of success are really bleak. As Dr. Sheep rightly said in the class that if you does not question anything and everyone agrees on it then there is something wrong with it. No one felt and realized that the decision is wrong and they had inadequate aircraft, lack of ammunition. CIA Report says that there was an insufficient involvement of leaders. Which is surprising to me, because a leader is an essential part of the team which guides and takes responsibility of the team and there was no involvement of leaders. May be they felt it was a wrong decision or may they were too lazy to participate or they might have thought (Hm mm its just Cuba, why need leaders when my team is more than enough) that is called overconfidence bias.

Another thing that went wrong was poor internal management of communications and staff. Open Communication is really important while taking such crucial decisions and if there is a gap then the result is as you see USA lost to Cuba. Cultural Diversity played a vital role here as there were no spanish speakers in the team i.e. team was not diversified enough to provide opinion on what might get wrong and hence they were not able to understand/interpret what was going on in Cuba.

Assessing risk in an organization is very vital.To take or not to take risk is the task that makes the team and leader think deep into the situation. In this case, there wasless leader involvement and according to CIA report they failed to assess risks and didnot communicate information effectively. There have been numerous examples in the history on the same track like Vietnam War, Hostage rescue in Iran (Operation Eagle Claw) etc. There can be a cure to such kind of failed groupthink. Firstly, the leader should assign various roles to the members of the team, outside experts should be brought in who can challenge the thoughts and opinion of team members, atleast one member should become the devils advocate so that he can question assumptions and plans. One of the techniques which is very interesting is 'Nominal Group Technique' in which it is made sure that all members participate fully.It is important when members are struggling with problem solving or idea generation.

I talked a little bit about cultural diversity in the 'Bay of Pigs' Invasion.Let me shift my focus from history to whats the latest. As I am an international student, Cross culture Business is a very interesting topic for me as a whole. There have been many blunders related to cross cultural business or awareness. It is amazing how cultural ignorance can lead to negative consequences on a large scale. One of the examples of this blunder is what American Motors tried to do with the name of its new car, the Matador. However in Puerto Rico it means killer due to which it became highly unpopular in certain area. Now though a small example but this can be a huge blow towards an organizations reputation. Probably they should have researched more into the market.If they would have had a diverse team working on the project, it might have struck to them at that stage then later when the product has been launched. Numerous examples are there on the same line like Pepsi introduced their slogan into Chinese market "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" translated into Chinese it read "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave". Honda, McDonald's, KFC, Mitsubishi Pajero did the same mistake and suffered losses.

Fed Ex faced a huge blow when it wisely chose to expand overseas. They failed to consider cultural differences. In Spain the workers preferred late office hours and in Russia workers took truck cleaning soap due to consumer shortages. FedEx was finally shut down over 100 European operations and lost $1.2 billion. Isn't it amazing how lack of diversification can affect an organization at such a huge scale? If they would have done proper analysis before entering a particular market they would not have failed badly.

Sheena Bedi