It is very easy for companies to make horrendous blunders when managing across cultures. Especially when decision makers live at a distance from vital operations and don’t share the culture and knowledge where the action is happening, bad decisions come easily.

So many things can be so radically different in cultures and situations across which we must work, that it is often impossible for distant directors to begin to imagine exactly how things must work in an overseas context to get the results you need.

For this reason, attitudes very close to the Carver Policy Governance trainings can help avoid corporate failure. Put very simply, Caver’s principles for board governance observe that a board’s effective role is to do three things well.

First, define what ends the company is seeking, what is the goal—i.e. thinking in a football word picture—delineate clearly and memorably what defines scoring a goal—what the team is trying to do.

Second, clearly describe the boundaries outside of which the team cannot go in scoring a goal. Define practices, conduct, methods and situations that must be avoided.

Third, choose good team members and entrust the team to pursue the goals according to the rules. In other words, turn the team loose to adapt to rapidly developing situations that they see up close and first hand on the field to score goals without interference from management as long as they do not go outside the bounds. Don’t tell them specifically how to do it, as if you–with at best second hand knowledge of the immediate situation, might see better how they need to move the ball into the goal.

What if they follow your guidelines, move the ball forward, but in a way that still ticks you off?

This approach means that if the team (think local team in a faraway cultural context) moves the ball toward the goal or even scores while staying inside the defined bounds, but then gets in trouble for not satisfying leadership, the leaders managing them have clearly failed. The leaders  failed because they forgot to explicitly define some assumed boundary that they would not tolerate anyone crossing.

When the board or other top leadership has done its job well, teams working in other cultures can concentrate on winning the game with confidence that they know the rules about how to be true to their company and to themselves in rapidly changing situations.