The world’s business models are moving towards a “global workplace” — using all the technology available to connect across countries and continents in an attempt to unify company image and pool resources. And it seems to make sense: keep your centers of business on the same page, make sure the company isn’t repeating work that has already been done, give a sense of unification to your employees, and – importantly – increase the diversity of your workplace simply by connecting through email, webcam, conference call.

There are a lot of ways to do this right. At the same time, unfortunately, there are a lot of ways to do this wrong.

One of the biggest flaws with the concept of a global workplace is that we are, in fact, still diverse: the strength becomes a weakness. Regulations are different in America vs Japan vs Europe vs Africa. Demands are different from region to region. And some global strategies can acknowledge that and work with it — but I’ve seen a lot of failure in my own career: the failure to understand these differences, and what happens when one center of business takes priority and calls the shots for the other two without acknowledging differences in company culture, marketing strategy, and logistics.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about this when I start digging into the structure of YoSaffBridge Donuts and how easy it is to distinctly mess up those relationships. It isn’t just this hypothetical company either; I have a selection of other examples to share, times companies have tried to expand beyond their usual borders, but failed, because they kept an old set of rules and figured it would apply everywhere. There’s a lot to unpack here, but it should help employees and managers to make smarter choices in how they deal with international business.