The majority of the intercultural managers interviewed for this book agree that expatriate managers should introduce management practices in a different culture in an incrementalist fashion. We use the following analogy to demonstrate how an expatriate could do this. Consider a frog that has been tossed into a cauldron of boiling hot water. Its reaction will be to leap out immediately. Imagine instead that the frog is taken out of a pond, along with a substantial amount of pond water and bracken, then placed in a cauldron along with the pond water and bracken. The cauldron is made to resemble the pond from which the frog was removed. The temperature of the cauldron is then raised gradually, degree by degree, until it reaches boiling point. It will then be found that the frog has got cooked to death, without realizing what has happened.

Expatriate managers must have considerable patience when trying to introduce a management practice in a new culture. Since they need to do so incrementally, they may have to wait for quite some time before they can see the results of their efforts. Often, expatriate managers would like to demonstrate that they are performing well on the job, and have successfully transplanted a management practice. However, they cannot artificially hasten the adoption process.

Keeping in mind Mexico's culture, the first question that an expatriate in Kortright's situation has to ask is whether TQM is too revolutionary a management practice to introduce to the company. When Kortright first bought his company, he found that 'Sandalias Finas resembled an artisan shop rather than a factory'. However, over time, he managed to revamp the organization, and structure the company into a series of departments. A supervisor or coordinator, ultimately responsible to Kortright, oversaw each department. The coordinator could interrupt work processes when a special or rush order had to be attended to.

The efficacy with which Kortright had managed to replace a traditional form of organization with a more professional one would suggest that he could introduce TQM in his company. The workforce had adapted to the change, although the reorganization was effected over a decade and not overnight. It would therefore appear that a TQM initiative could be attempted. And that is what Kortright chose to do.

According to Ager's case study, the employees within each department performed their tasks as individuals and not in teams. In the cutting department, for instance, 'A cutter completed an order individually. Seldom was an order split between two cutters.' But a TQM intervention requires some changes to be introduced at the group level. One can therefore ponder whether Kortright's choice of this management practice was appropriate.

Kortright's main concern was to revitalize his company so it could become internationally competitive. In 1989, 14 years after he had bought an interest in Sandalias Finas de Cuernavaca, he found that as a consequence of economic liberalization, the Mexican footwear industry was being swamped by imports. Suddenly imports amounted to 30 per cent of sales. One reason the imported footwear found a ready market was its lower price. Kortright therefore had a legitimate interest in increasing the productivity of his workforce. He also had to demonstrate to his customers that his company's shoes were comparable in quality to imported shoes.

An expatriate manager in Kortright's position might be tempted to introduce the TQM approach because it is an organization-wide effort that attempts to involve all employees in organizational processes.

Participation is an integral component of TQM. However, the Mexican employees of Kortright's company had not participated in decision making until 1989. So when a TQM effort is initiated in such a context, what ensues is 'imposed participation'. Imposed participation is paradoxical, but it succinctly describes what eventually happened at Sandalias Finas de Cuernavaca.

Imposing participation requires skill and patience. The targeted employees have to first participate in training sessions before attempting TQM on the job. Thus, a TQM effort conducted in Kortright's Mexican company would have to be subdivided into a larger number of sequences than would be the case for a comparable company in Kortright's home country of Canada.

Training employees to be participative would have to be followed by training in empowerment, a more difficult concept to translate into action. When empowerment occurs, the empowered personnel are in a position to accept responsibility and take the initiative. It can be asked whether empowerment is a culture-specific concept. Can Kortright as a Canadian expatriate manager expect his Mexican employees to behave as empowered personnel?

The success of TQM in Japan suggests that it can work even in societies where broad-based participation is not the norm. In Japan, problem-solving TQM teams have been happy to find solutions to problems that affect conditions at their own level. They therefore do not view their behaviour as that of upstarts, or of employees who feel they know more than their seniors.

This method of first introducing TQM to a single cell was devised by Kortright after he had carefully considered how the concept could be effectively introduced to his Mexican employees. As a Canadian expatriate attempting to introduce a new system of management practices to Mexican employees, he also took into account the cultural dimension. Hence he succeeded in his endeavour of bringing TQM to his company, and eventually succeeded also in making his company internationally competitive.