Who really runs a company: the political metaphor

Two departments of one company read the same directive and understand it in opposite ways. One hears “economise”. The other hears “take risks for the sake of growth”. Formally they share one charter, one mission statement on the website, one chief executive. In practice they are two states with a common border. If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone is supposedly on the same side and yet argues as if dividing territory, you have already seen an organisation as a political system.

For a company selling into Russia from abroad the picture is close to literal: a head office in one country, an operation in another, a real border between them and a different language on either side.

What the metaphor is, and why anyone needs it

An organisation is more than its processes, and more than its people with their feelings. At a certain level of abstraction it turns into a system of interests: departments have their budgets, managers have their ambitions, teams have their own view of what counts as right. The political metaphor, one of the images described by Gareth Morgan, looks at the company from exactly that altitude.

Three things combine into what I will call ideology here: the company’s values, the way it handles pressure from its environment, and its strategy. Ideology in this sense is neither an insult nor propaganda. It is a working tool: a shared way of reacting to difficulty, wrapped in symbols, slogans and stories about the company that are easy to retell.

The tool is needed because people inside an organisation have different vocabularies and different cultures. An engineer, a salesperson and an accountant each hear something different in the word “efficiency”. For the word to mean one thing to all of them, the ideology has to be translated into the languages of every group at once. This is where internal communication grows from, and what people call corporate branding from the inside: political work that holds a single meaning together inside the company, with no advertising wrapper for customers involved.

Two functions are easy to confuse here. HR is responsible for culture, meaning how people feel in their place. The political function is responsible for what everyone gathered here for in the first place.

Why the conflict is built in

Picture a company with several lines of business. One brings in profit today. Another is developing what will bring profit in three years. The first has a sales plan and quarterly bonuses. The second has an experiment budget and the right to be wrong. The company’s strategy has to sit above both and balance their interests. Otherwise the unit that brings money here and now will sooner or later push through and subordinate the one working for the future. Simply because it holds the stronger hand today.

So internal conflict is unavoidable. The people are not bad. The parties inside one organisation objectively have different spheres of interest and different shares of the budget. Whoever answers for profit this quarter and whoever answers for what happens in two years physically look at the same resource differently. This is why conflict management inside a company is a discipline of its own, and without it the political metaphor does not work.

Moderator or mediator: two roles in one chair

A manager at this level performs two different functions, and mixing them up is a frequent error.

The moderator applies hard control. Sets the rules, stops escalation, takes the decision from above when the parties will not settle it themselves. The mediator does the opposite: does not press, balances the sides in a negotiation, helps them hear each other and find a solution that does not destroy either of them.

A leader who can only moderate turns the company into a dictatorship of outwardly calm people. A leader who can only mediate loses control exactly where a plain “no” was required. Both abilities are needed, and the manager has to know precisely which situation calls for which.

There is a Russian angle here that foreign head offices underestimate. In Russian business practice the moderator mode is the familiar one. Decisions from the top are expected, and a leader who opens a negotiation between two departments instead of ruling on it is often read as weak, or as not having decided yet. This is an observation from practice, not a survey result. A manager sent from head office whose native mode is mediation may find local teams waiting for a ruling while being offered a conversation. The reverse failure also happens: a Russian country manager moderates everything, and head office reads the resulting quiet as alignment.

Conflict of interests, or conflict of understanding

If you run people or a unit, the metaphor gives you one simple diagnostic question: with whom is my team competing for a resource, and is this a conflict of interests or a conflict of understanding?

If it is a conflict of interests, you need mediation, or, when time is short, moderation from above. If it is a conflict of understanding, you need no conflict management at all. You need translation: the same ideology carried into different languages, instead of an argument about who is right.

This works for your own position in the company too. When you feel that a directive from above has been “misunderstood” by another department, most likely nobody has misunderstood anything. Two departments are honestly defending different interests, and someone has to stand above the fight. Not as an arbiter by job title, but as a person capable of holding the common ideology over the private gains. It is unpleasant work. It requires speaking to salespeople in the language of sales and to developers in the language of development, without losing the meaning the whole thing was started for.

The province across the border: the Russian operation

Now apply the same question to a company selling into Russia from another country. Here the provinces have different languages, different legal environments and usually a different commercial model.

Head office writes the strategy in English. On the Russian side there is some combination of a local sales team, a distributor or partner, and a contractor running the advertising. Each reads the strategy through its own interest. The distributor is paid on volume this quarter. The contractor is judged on the cost of an inquiry. The local sales team wants the product positioned in whatever way closes deals fastest against local competitors. None of these is the interest the strategy was written for, which is usually a longer horizon and a brand position that has to hold across markets.

So the first thing the metaphor predicts is that every disagreement between head office and the Russian side will be filed under “they did not understand us”. More often it is the plain thing: the Russian side has a quarterly interest the strategy does not serve, and it defends that interest by reinterpreting the document. That is a conflict of interests, and a better translation of the memo will not fix it.

The second thing the metaphor predicts is the disappearance of the translator. In a domestic company the person who walks between departments carrying the meaning is at least in the building. In a cross-border arrangement that role often belongs to nobody. Head office assumes the country manager does it. The country manager assumes head office marketing does it. The agency, which writes the Russian-language text customers actually see, has never seen the strategy, only a brief. What reaches the customer is a local version of the truth, assembled from the interests of whoever was closest to the keyboard.

Here the difference from a Western market is sharpest. A Google or Meta campaign at home is run by people who read the strategy in the language it was written in and sit inside the same incentive system. In Russia the campaign runs on Yandex and VK, in Russian, often through a partner with its own incentive system. The advertising platform is the smaller difference. The political geography is the larger one, and it quietly decides what the brand says.

What a company selling into Russia should do about it

This is no argument against partners. It is an argument for staffing the arrangement as the political system it is.

1. Name the translator. One person, by name, is responsible for carrying the strategy into Russian in the sense of meaning, and for carrying the Russian side’s interests back. If the honest answer is “nobody”, close that gap before the next campaign.
2. Write the Russian version of the strategy, not a translation. A document that explains what the company is for, in Russian, with the local market’s reference points. The distributor, the sales team and the contractor should all be reading the same page.
3. Decide in advance who moderates and who mediates. Head office keeps the moderator role on the questions that define the brand. The country manager mediates between local interests inside that frame. Agree the boundary before the first dispute, because it will not be agreed calmly during one.
4. Ask the diagnostic question at every escalation. Interests or understanding? If interests, look at how the Russian side is paid and what the strategy asks it to give up. If understanding, fix the glossary and the reference points.
5. Keep HR out of the political seat. Engagement surveys of the Russian team will tell you how people feel. They will not tell you whether the strategy survived the border.

If you are building this arrangement from the start, its shape is part of market entry rather than something to sort out after launch. If it already exists and the memos keep being “misunderstood”, the usual entry point is the marketing strategy itself: whether a Russian-language version of it exists at all, and who is holding it.

Who holds the flag when the provinces speak different languages

Picture the company as a country with several provinces. Each has its own dialect, its own needs, its own idea of where to go. There is one flag. But the flag does not hold itself up. It is held by the person who walks between the provinces every day and translates the decree so that in each of them people hear the meaning and not only the words.

Remove that translator and the territory stays formally united. In substance it splits into principalities at war over the same budget. When one of those provinces lies across a national border and reads the decree in another language, the translator is the whole difference between a company that operates in Russia and a company that merely has a partner there.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Кто на самом деле управляет компанией