Story 19: Around the world with aspherical optics and systems – internationalization at asphericon

At asphericon, we encounter different (corporate) cultures both internally and externally thanks to our locations in Jena, Florida and the Czech Republic as well as our customer and sales relationships around the world. Internationalization is inevitable. In this story, we show how asphericon has implemented it in the last few years.

In·ter·na·ti·o·na·li·za·tion

The business dictionary Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon defines internationalization as the geographical expansion of economic activities beyond national borders. We started actively promoting our products abroad early on at asphericon. The first steps were trade fair appearances in France, England and, of course, in the USA. A milestone was the engagement of our first sales representative, Jean-Luc Nogues, who helped us cater to the American market in a more targeted manner from 2014 onwards. Further cooperative partnerships for the South African, Israeli and Asian markets followed.

Subsidiaries

The differences between our locations are most obvious when it comes to different time zones. An appointment at 10 a.m. in Jena means getting to the office by 4 a.m. for colleagues in Florida, which is not a good idea. In contrast, colleagues in Jena and Jeřmanice (in the Czech Republic) with the same time zone also tend to get off work at the same time. Thanks to everyone’s willingness, regular coordination meetings are feasible and, if absolutely necessary, are even conducted from one’s couch in the evening.

Video conferencing and video messaging tools were already the standard means of communication at asphericon before the coronavirus pandemic, as many things are easier to clarify or explain in virtual face-to-face meetings. It is not only at Christmas that the video messages often mentioned in this context are tailored for each location and even provided with subtitles.

Shared Christmas gifts, internal calendars, mugs with logos and our company clothing are other things we share as a matter of course at all locations. Despite the kilometers that separate us, this is another aspect that makes us an asphericon subsidiary.

Speaking of language

We distribute our products worldwide and the operating instructions are available in different languages. The website is available in German, English and Chinese, and we have already translated catalogs and brochures into Japanese and Czech. That’s why we know that BeamTuning means 光束调谐系统 in Chinese and ビームチューニングin Japanese. To be honest, we prefer German and English because we can do the translations here ourselves and keep the error rate relatively low. Fortunately, our sales partners help us with other languages, and our own colleagues with texts in Czech.

Speaking of colleagues: interfaces between the individual locations arise time and again. English is the language of choice in such cases. Although employees in Jena receive English courses, a little patience and a sense humor as well as the use of hands and feet still come in handy for communication, even to this day. We in Jena are happy when we are able to say hello, cheers and goodbye in broken Czech to our colleagues at s.r.o., for example. And although we in Europe don’t always have the American festivals and holidays on our radar, we still try to keep an eye on events such as Labor Day or Thanksgiving, and to note in advance that we may not be able to reach our colleagues in Sarasota on certain days.

International relationships

Cultural differences become most apparent at trade fairs and conferences. We are not too keen, at this point, on repeating clichés about how reserved or not people of different nationalities are. Expectations of how to greet one another differ from person to person and can result in gaffes being made even without considering different cultural customs. Getting engaged and informed is the order of the day. This also applies to advertising materials and even then not everything always goes as planned. In 2018, we visited a trade fair in Japan just before Christmas. We like the idea of handing out little chocolate Santas as a giveaway. Unfortunately, we were apparently the only ones to do so. Nobody was interested and until the very last day we hardly managed to convince any trade fair visitor at all to take along a chocolate figurine. Several conversations later we finally found out why: no one knew that our giveaway was made of chocolate. Christmas simply has a different meaning for us. In 2019 we thus took along new promotional items: screen cleaner. Less explanation required and thus easier to hand out. 😉

As challenging as activities in an international environment can sometimes be due to different cultures and/or time zones, we have also had a lot of fun with them time and again over the past 20 years. Eating pork knuckle together with Japanese sales representatives in a beer garden in Munich, team evenings during the Super Bowl at the trade fair in San Francisco, an online event for the company’s anniversary that was translated into three languages – all of this and much more will be fondly remembered, offered great learning opportunities and make us look forward to more trade fairs, international customers and new employees.