Yoshi Watanabe Original Image
When It Really Matters Moments

Balancing global and regional ways of working during a major carve-out

Yoshi Watanabe Original Image
Tokyo-based Yoshi Watanabe of our Automotive & Industrial team shares how respecting regional ways of working led to success for a multinational client.
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I was a part of a team that was tasked with supporting the carve-out of non-core business of a Japanese B2B manufacturing company. We assisted in both the separation of the company and the management of the transfer of ownership by supporting the implementation of carve-out tasks and improving the new company’s operational efficiency.

I was responsible for cost optimization on the first stage of the project and acted as a project manager for second, serving as a link between the new company’s global headquarters and its regional offices.

One of the challenges with this project was balancing the need for a unified format controlled by the global headquarters for managing regional carve-out tasks with the different working cultures and communication styles of each region. Essentially, we needed headquarters to answer the “Why” and the “What” for the project but then empowered each region to best determine the “How.”

We tailored our communications and approach for each region to accommodate different working cultures and avoid confusion and duplicate work, which required extensive coordination.

To achieve this, as a direct contact of headquarters management, I worked with 20 of my AlixPartners colleagues across three continents and six time zones. Support from our regional colleagues was indispensable to gain the trust of the client’s local management teams. Together, through daily touchpoints, we successfully organized and completed the necessary carve-out initiatives in each region.

We also needed to coordinate with and manage relationships of many stakeholders that are part of any carve-out transaction, including the management, employees, customers, and suppliers for both the original and new companies, and the investment banks and law firms that we also working on the transaction. We needed to find common ground with these groups by considering each issue from several points of view.

This project provided an important lesson of respecting regional ways of working, communication, coordination and stakeholder management. It was rewarding to see our client prosper regionally and globally because of our efforts.

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