Case Study - Lajolla Inc.

Case Study: LaJolla Software, Inc. LaJolla Inc. is a young business information software company based in California outside the Silicon Valley. The company is interested in forming an alliance with a Japanese firm and has for the last several months been negotiating with several firms in Japan to realize their goals of distributing their product in Asia. The owners have finally found a Japanese firm that will create an alliance with them. The firm is now sending a contingent of managers to evaluate the company and work out the details of the merger. LaJolla owners now need to learn how to work with managers from another culture. They have biases that the Japanese do not know anything about California. To make matters worse, the owners have put the responsibility of hosting the Japanese on their marketing specialist, Todd Batey, who is young, inexperienced and over-worked. In order to make this merger as smooth as possible, Todd Batey needs to come up with a plan to introduce the Japanese to the American culture, and also prepare the American employees to work with the Japanese managers while they are visiting. LaJolla Software, Inc. was founded by Chad Lucas and Marcus Flynn soon after graduating college. Their firm is comprised of young talented software programmers who have helped build the company to become a $150 million publically held firm specializing in business information systems. The culture they have built is very informal and their concentration has been almost entirely internal. Their marketing specialist, Todd Batey, has been a big part of the negotiations in finding Ichi Ban, the Japanese firm who is forming an alliance with LaJolla Software. He has been putting all his time into this project putting off all the more tedious daily tasks until he could get the merger done. Just when he thought he could get back to these things, he’s now been put in charge of acclimating to the new Japanese managers to the company when they

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