1. McDonald's established a culturally diverse global ICT infrastructure group to lead the transformation of its data network infrastructure into a unified global private WAN. The group consisted of technical experts from different regions and cultural backgrounds. 2. The group faced initial challenges with communication due to different time zones but overcame this with teleconferencing and regular in-person meetings. They also had to address issues with the high cost of the originally proposed global mesh WAN architecture. 3. After over 10 months of discussion, the group agreed to trial a new proposed virtual private WAN architecture that was more cost-effective. The trial was successful and this innovative solution became McDonald's new global standard, improving its infrastructure while

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A Successful Story of a Culture Diversity Work Group in a Global Organization
Organization Background
McDonald's Corporation is the leading global food service retailer with more than 34,000 local restaurants and serving nearly 69 million people in 119 countries each day (aboutmcdonalds.com, 2013). McDonald’s Corporation has restaurants on every continent. It has 8255 restaurants in the Asian Pacific Middle East and Africa region. (Lichter, 2009).
McDonald’s Corporation has a long history and clear vision of cultural diversity. “At McDonald’s, diversity and inclusion are part of our culture – from the crew room to the board room. We are working to achieve this goal every day by creating an environment for everyone to contribute their best” (aboutmcdonalds.com, 2013).
Overview of the Challenges
In late 20th century, McDonald’s global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) organization was facing enormous challenges. Its fast growing business, especially in newly emerged countries, required centralized data centre which can host the company’s many newly developed mission critical client/server applications (such as global CRM, McDonald’s unique New POS system, etc.) and vast growing business data. In order to achieve the above objectives, McDonald’s global ICT organization had to transform the organization’s standalone (country independent) data network infrastructure to a unified global scale private Wide Area Network (WAN) which was able to link each country’s head office Local Area Network (LAN) as well as to provide network connectivity to each store within countries. The critical aspect of this strategic transformation was a unique WAN infrastructure (in a global scale) which can provide cost effective ICT shared data communication service to 121 countries head office and 30,000+ restaurants. There was no global organization that has ever been able to achieve this kind of objective with such large scale and complexity.
Analysis and Interpretation
The senior leadership team of McDonald’s global ICT organization firmly believed in the value of diversity and believed the organization needed to have a culture diverse global ICT infrastructure group to lead this strategic global ICT infrastructure transformation. They

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believed the diverse technical leadership group would be able to achieve the ultimate goal of designing and implementing an enterprise class, cost effective, global private WAN infrastructure which would technically meet the organization’s WAN data traffic requirement and at the same time it would be affordable for each country.
This group consisted ICT technical experts from different regions (continents) who had diverse culture background and would be able to bring their local/regionalized knowledge and ICT technical expertise as well as seamlessly access different regional resources which ultimately would enhance the group’s creativity (Podsiadlowski et al., 2013) and help them to resolve many obstacles(complicate challenges) during the journey of designing and implementing a unique McDonald’s enterprise private WAN in a global scale. The senior leadership team of McDonald’s Corporation was also aware of the risk of mixing individuals from high context culture and low context culture (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010) and the negative aspects (such as geographic location of each member’s home country, personality conflicts and communication barriers) of a cultural diverse work group. However, they believed that McDonald’s Corporation has its “organizational practices for managing people to maximize potential advantages of diversity”(Podsiadlowski et al., 2013) which would overcome these obstacles.
The Author joined McDonald’s Global ICT infrastructure management group in 2001 as Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regional network services manager and was responsible for the technical and management aspect of this global program.
The team also consisted of Northern America regional network services manager (responsible for US and Canada region), Latin America regional network services manager and Europe regional network services manager. Each of them came from different continents and had completely different culture backgrounds. As Ely and Thomas stated that diversity is a characteristic of groups of two or more people and typically refers to demographic differences of one sort or another among group members (Thomas, 2001). Obviously, McDonald’s Global ICT infrastructure management group is a typical culture diverse work group.
The first challenge facing this group was communication. Paradoxically, language was not the issue. They all speak fluent English, but since they were all physically located in different regions/countries and subsequently in different time zones, the lack of verbal communication and visual contact were big issues especially in the first 6 months after the group was

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established. In order to overcome this challenge, this group leveraged all of the modern telecommunication technologies which they could get their hands on, and developed a flexible teleconference meeting time table (rostered the weekly meeting time) which minimised the impact of time zone and maximized the verbal communication for members of the group. The group also scheduled 4 times group development activity every year. The venues of those group development activities would be in different regions/countries. This method dramatically reduced culture categorization within the group and quickly brought group members close to each other. The group members also had chances to get familiar with other peer’s region every time they had their group activity. Based on author’s observation, as Giambatista and Bhappu suggested, group members actively assess and even adapted others’ personalities as soon as they met each other. Group member were motivated to bind with each other in the group development activities (Giambatista and Bhappu, 2010). Those approaches had successfully overcome the obstacles which this group faced and at the same time enhanced the group’s decision-making effectiveness.
The second challenge was the technical and financial aspect of the original enterprise private WAN solution architecture-global mesh WAN architecture. This WAN architecture required high bandwidth and high quality private WAN telecommunication connectivity in each region and country. In order to have private WAN telecommunication connectivity, each country had to purchase very high cost private WAN telecommunication connectivity from local Telecom in Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa region and other developing regions (i.e. Latin America region). This financial burden made the original McDonald’s enterprise private WAN architecture solution unsustainable from running cost perspective. McDonald’s Corporation is in low margin business. It is impossible for the organization to implement any technological solution without sustainable Return on Investment (ROI). As a matter of fact, right or wrong approach to resolve this challenge may also determine the existence of this group. In order to overcome this obstacle, the group had to create an alternative/new enterprise private WAN architecture which would be very cost effective compared with the original one. This was a tough task.
One of the team members had proposed a complete new enterprise class virtual private WAN architecture design. Inevitably his recommendation had started long, serious team discussions and opened many robust debates. The original private WAN architecture design was based on well-known technology and had been successfully deployed in developed regions and countries of McDonald’s (i.e. Northern America region and Europe region). The

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new/alternative virtual private WAN architecture was hardly known at that time and had never been used in a large global scale anywhere. The group had to decide either to use high running cost original private WAN architecture in developing regions and countries or to change the original design and use the new/alternative, lost cost, virtual private WAN architecture in developing regions and countries. This became a great test to this culture diverse group as well as to each of its member. WAN Architecture Pros Cons
Mesh (Private WAN)
 Simple Architecture
 Store direct connect to regional/global data centre
 Lower WAN latency between store and data centre
 Requires High WAN bandwidth in each country
 Requires High quality private WAN service (unable to leverage ADSL WAN Technology)
 High ongoing administration overhead from WAN management perspective
 High monthly cost
 Requires expensive device
 In data centre
Hub and Spoke
(Virtual Private WAN)
 Complicate Architecture
 Store (spoke) connected to each country head office (Hub)
 Requires lower WAN bandwidth in each country (able to leverage new ADSL WAN technology in developing country)
 Much lower monthly cost
 Not require expensive devices in data centre
 Higher WAN latency between store and data centre
 Never been used in large global scale
Table 1. Mesh Private WAN Architecture vs. Hub and Spoke Virtual Private WAN Architecture
After over 10 months of technology assessments and many long philosophical discussions, the global ICT infrastructure management group eventually agreed to start the small scale trail of the new/alternative virtual private WAN architecture. The small scale trail was very successful. It removed all the technical obstacles as well as the financial obstacle of implementing McDonald’s enterprise class WAN infrastructure in developing region. The new cost effective enterprise virtual private WAN architecture eventually became McDonald’s next generation global private WAN architecture standard. This innovated global virtual private WAN architecture helped McDonald’s global ICT organization established its sector leader position (in the fast food industry) from global ICT infrastructure

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perspective. It enabled McDonald’s corporation seamlessly transferred their old/obsoleted global ICT infrastructure to new/modern global ICT infrastructure with significant cost saving and at same time leveraged new telecommunication technology in a large global scale.
Summary and Conclusion
The author had observed strong agreeableness diversity as well as openness diversity co- existed and correlated within the group even each member of the group came from completed different culture background and has distinguished personalities. Member of this group respect each other’s personalities, culture and technical expertise. Members of this group trust each other and enjoy each other’s company. There was a strong brotherhood that existed inside the group. Even if they have different views with some of the subjects, the group discussion was always filled with helpful and creative suggestions. The high level of agreeableness diversity attitudes that was demonstrated by the team leader had made this strategic global WAN architecture change become possible. The coexisted agreeableness diversity and openness diversity had played a very important role which eventually enabled the group to make one of the most important decisions for the organization as well as for themselves.
The author also observed that individuals within this group who were able to offer unique and high relevant categories of knowledge/expertise that was also a critical elements for the success of the group. The author observed many evidences of greater levels of openness among introvert and extravert individuals which have promoted effective balance between divergent and convergent thinking that associated with greater group performance (Giambatista and Bhappu, 2010).
Interestingly enough, the author was unable to find significant traces of ethnic diversity within this group even each of the member came from complete diffident culture background, region and race. As a matter of fact, it was really hard to find any tangible evidence that can prove the existence of ethnic diversity within the group even with the view of it may encompasses other diversity (Giambatista and Bhappu, 2010). The author believes the strong brotherhood and close bind between the members of group had overpowered the ethnic diversity within the group.
The positive contribution to the group decision making process of agreeableness diversity also contradicted with the view of it had significant and negative effect on group creativity (Giambatista and Bhappu, 2010). The author observed the correlation of conflict and

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compromise during the critical decision making process. It appears to be a healthy organism of the decision making process as long as each group member not taken them personally.
This real life diversity work group case does support some diversity scholars’ view that everyone can benefit from a diverse work environment, the organization as well as its employees (Podsiadlowski et al., 2013). As a member of this diversity work group, the author had learnt a lot from peers and group leader and the author believes his colleagues of this group felt the same way.
This real life story of a successful culture diverse work group in the global organization has proved that cultural diversity brings new ideas and different knowledge to the workforce, which are critical to the success of the business. cultural diversity helps us to develop new skills and cultural diversity helps us to become more innovated (Podsiadlowski et al., 2013). My literature research and real life experience made me believe that successful culture diverse work group requires: high level of collaboration between group members, ability to leverage modern communication technologies to enhance verbal and visual communication between team members, balanced agreeableness and openness diversities aspects and the most important was that everyone thoroughly understand and share the same vision and had a common goal. The success of creating an innovated global virtual private WAN architecture by McDonald’s culturally diverse global ICT infrastructure group was the strong evidence which support the view of organization benefits from culture diversity from integration-and- learning perspective (Barinaga, 2007). Based on recent published Deloitte research report, The positive psychological, behavioural and work group performance (in terms of ability to innovate) improvements, that brings by culture diversity, are significant (Deloitte, 2012).
References:
aboutmcdonalds.com, 2013, viewed 20 April 2013,’Inclusion & Diversity’, http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/inclusion_and_diversity.html
BARINAGA, E. 2007. 'Cultural diversity' at work: 'National culture' as a discourse organizing an international project group. Human Relations, 60, 315-340.
BUCHANAN, D., AND HUCZYNSKI, A. (eds)2010, Orgnizational Behaviour, Pearson Education Limited, England
CRISP, R. J. & TURNER, R. N. 2011. Cognitive adaptation to the experience of social and cultural diversity. Psychol Bull, 137, 242-66.
DELOITTE 2012. Waiter, is that inclusion in my soup? A new recipe to improve business performance. Deloitte Research Report.
GIAMBATISTA, R. C. & BHAPPU, A. D. 2010. Diversity’s harvest: Interactions of diversity sources and communication technology on creative group performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 111, 116-126.
LICHTER, A. 2009. McDonald’s approach to cultural diversity.

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PODSIADLOWSKI, A., GRÖSCHKE, D., KOGLER, M., SPRINGER, C. & VAN DER ZEE, K. 2013. Managing a culturally diverse workforce: Diversity perspectives in organizations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37, 159-175.
THOMAS, R. J. E. A. D. A. 2001. Cultural Diversity at Work: The Effects of Diversity Perspectives on Work Group Processes and Outcomes Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46, 229-273.