Why Your Home Country Playbook Does Not Work in American Manufacturing
- Philip Lamb
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
"What got you here will not get you there." That observation has ended more than a few careers. For foreign manufacturers expanding into the United States, it ends entire US operations.
The companies that struggle most in the American market are not the ones that lack capital, technology, or product. They are the ones that arrive with a proven management system from home and apply it directly to an American workforce without modification. The results are predictable and expensive.
The Stellantis Lesson
No case study in recent memory documents this failure more clearly than Stellantis in 2024. CEO Carlos Tavares, running a Franco-Italian-American conglomerate from a European cost-discipline framework, applied an inventory-push model to US dealer relationships that is standard in European markets and catastrophic in American ones. Dealer compensation was tied to vehicle shipments rather than actual sales. Co-op marketing funds were cut. Pricing remained high while inventory piled up.
North American revenue collapsed 42 percent in Q3 2024. US sales fell 20 percent. More than 100,000 Jeep Grand Wagoneers sat unsold on dealer lots at prices exceeding $100,000. The National Dealer Council sent a public letter calling out the "rapid degradation" of the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram brands. The United Auto Workers called for Tavares to be removed. He resigned December 1, 2024.
The board confirmed on his departure that there had been "different views" on how to operate in the US market. That is a diplomatic way of saying the playbook did not travel.
The Management Gap the Data Confirms
Harvard Business School researchers Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen studied more than 10,000 organizations across 20 countries to understand why management practices produce different outcomes in different markets. Their finding on the United States is unambiguous.
The US has the largest advantage over every other country in incentive-based management. Performance-based pay, merit promotion, and rapid accountability for underperformance are structural norms of American business culture. Germany and Japan score well on monitoring and target-setting but trail the US significantly on the incentives dimension.
American workers and plant managers expect that performance has consequences and that good performance is rewarded individually. A seniority-based, consensus-oriented system where pay is flat and decisions move slowly through a hierarchy does not land as stable and fair to an American workforce. It lands as demotivating. The people with options leave first.
The Decision-Making Problem
The most consistent friction point documented by firms that place leaders into foreign-owned US manufacturing sites is decision authority. German and Japanese management culture values careful, consensus-driven decisions. Approvals move up the chain and across functions before anything moves forward.
On a US shop floor, that creates a specific kind of damage. Decisions that need to happen in an hour wait three days. A plant manager who has to escalate routine operational calls to a European headquarters on a different time zone signals to the American team that leadership does not trust them. Experienced American operations leaders who have other options recognize that environment and leave.
The pattern that follows is consistent. The foreign parent sends a trusted expat to run the US plant. The expat applies home country norms to an American workforce. The workforce pushes back in ways the expat does not recognize as pushback. Performance declines. A crisis call comes in six months later.
What Actually Works
The foreign manufacturers that build successful US operations share one characteristic. They hire an American general manager or plant president who has run operations inside a foreign-owned company before. Not an American who has never reported to a European or Asian board. Someone who has lived on both sides of that relationship and knows how to translate in both directions.
That person understands what the parent company needs to see in reporting and governance. They also know how to build the kind of performance-driven, empowered environment that American manufacturing employees expect. They protect the culture on the plant floor while managing the relationship with headquarters.
Finding that person requires knowing who they are before the search starts. They are not applying for jobs. They are running a plant somewhere right now for another foreign-owned company that values what they built.
That is the search. It is specific, it is relationship-driven, and it is worth doing right the first time.
For more on how we place executives for foreign companies building US operations, read our international executive search guide and How a European Manufacturer Hired Its First US Leadership Team.
If you are ready to fill a senior role or want to talk through your search, reach out at prlinternational.com/contact
Want to know what questions to ask before hiring a search firm? Download the free 7-Question Guide: https://prl-proposal.vercel.app/guide
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