Suppose a German manager needs to choose between, say, a Finn, an Italian and a Portuguese. For the employment of local managers necessitates the creation of loyalty on their part to a distant entity with culturally diverse norms and assumptions. I won't tell them and try to smooth over the issue in some other way. It can be much more difficult for the locally employed manager, especially under stress. Companies which contrived to impose a global corporate culture, such as IBM, did not face the insidious cultural problems of a transnational organization.
Language is another problem.
Worse still, behind the words on the surface lurk centuries of cultural and ideological rivalry which has often exploded into war. At moments of strain, when a minor conflict might have irreversible consequences, simmering stereotypes and prejudices boil up. In a world as competitive as that of the telcos will be in coming decades, nothing may be taken for granted. The Way Forward Cultural training is essential to avoid potential conflict, and to improve the disastrous failure rate of joint-ventures in the recent past. In fact, most telcos with global ambitions now provide cross-cultural training in order to create genuinely international managers.