I think there is nothing barbarous and savage except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the . . . opinions and customs of the country we live in.
—Montaigne
Business went global some time ago, but many businesspeople have yet to follow. They may now work every day with people from other countries—suppliers from China, IT support in India, virtual team members in Germany and Japan—but they’re unaware of key cultural differences between themselves and their international colleagues. Not understanding these differences, these folks become confused and frustrated in some of their most common everyday interactions. If you are regularly confused and frustrated by the things people you work with every day are doing, that’s not the basis for a good business relationship. In the end it means you succeed, when you do manage to succeed, more by accident—and a lot of trial and error—than by design. And when has trial and error ever been a good business strategy?
But these are smart people. If they have not “gone global” along with their companies, if they have not become “culturally competent,” it is only because they have not yet read the books, consulted the websites, or attended the intercultural training that could make a difference. And even if they have sought out guidebooks or websites, most resources only describe the target culture but fail to contrast it with one’s own culture. To become truly culturally competent, businesspeople need to know how they are different from people in other cultures. These differences, after all, are what lead to the misunderstandings—the mistakes, confusion, and frustration—that undermine good business relations.
Using a technique known as a “cultural dialogue,” this book describes the most important differences between Americans and ten foreign cultures: the Arab Middle East, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. These are ten of the largest economies and markets Americans do business with, and the issues addressed in the dialogues, five per country, are the most common cultural differences Americans will encounter.
A “dialogue” is a harmless conversation that causes great harm, a conversation with a mistake. In a brief exchange of six to twelve lines, speakers from two different cultures encounter a cultural difference that causes a significant misunderstanding (the mistake). However, because the two speakers are not aware of the difference, neither are they aware of the mistake. And neither is the reader.
The cultural mistakes in these pages have various causes: an unknown value difference, a misinterpretation, an inaccurate assumption, a mistaken projection, and occasionally a genuine faux pas. But they all lead to the same unfortunate results: they undermine business relationships and disrupt productivity. Mistakes, in short, have consequences.
The mistakes embedded in the dialogues are not obvious, just as mistakes are not obvious in real life; otherwise you wouldn’t make them in the first place. If readers fail to spot the mistake, they must accept that they could have had that same conversation and made that same error. Indeed, many people have told the author they have had conversations nearly identical to those in this book.
Since adults don’t appreciate being made fools of, most readers are upset when they finish reading a dialogue and can’t figure out what they missed. Nor do they soon forget the humbling truth that goes along with this feeling: when you work with people from different cultures, you’re probably not as smart as you think you are.
This observation is in fact the central lesson of all intercultural communication: When you interact with someone from another culture, never assume you know what’s going on. To be sure, there are many other things you should know about culture, but this first truth is paramount. The rest is details.
The power of the dialogue technique lies in its immediate emotional impact, which is difficult to overstate. It’s no exaggeration to say that these innocuous conversations are the closest you will come in any print-based medium to an actual cultural encounter. While there may be a puzzle or riddle at the heart of every conversation, a dialogue is not an intellectual exercise; it is an emotional incident. You don’t learn anything when you read a dialogue; you experience something. Nor do dialogues clear up any confusion; dialogues are the confusion. And that confusion, as we’ll see, is the first step to becoming culturally competent.
If we eavesdrop for a moment on Carl and Krishna, this will all become clearer.
CARL: |
Hey, Krishna. I just called to see if we’re still on track to fix that bug by the first of next week? |
KRISHNA: |
I’m glad you called. It’s going quite well, but there have been one or two unexpected problems. |
CARL: |
Boy, I know how that is. |
KRISHNA: |
I’m glad we understand each other. |
The first thing readers will notice is how completely natural and authentic the conversation sounds. This really is how people talk. If you haven’t had this conversation yourself, you can easily imagine having it. Readers identify immediately with the dialogue.
The second thing readers notice is . . . nothing. They see no mistake nor any evidence of a misunderstanding. And if they can’t see the mistake, then of course they could easily make the mistake. The hook is in. Readers quickly turn to the explanation to find out what they missed.
This conversation is explained at length in “I’m Glad You Called” (Dialogue 32), but suffice it to say here that—Krishna’s last comment notwithstanding—these two men do not “understand each other.” Krishna seems to think Carl understands and accepts that the deadline will be missed. However, Carl actually believes the opposite—that Krishna knows he’s still expected to fix the bug and is willing to work overtime to get the job done. These two part ways with radically different interpretations of the exchange. Bottom line: It won’t be pretty next week when Krishna cheerfully misses the deadline and Carl is caught completely off guard.
It’s a simple, unfortunate chain reaction: cultural differences cause misunderstandings, and misunderstandings undermine smooth working relations. When the dust settles, Carl and Krishna will be quite wary of each other to say the least. And this is just one incident. What if they continue to have these conversations and misinterpret one another? It won’t be long before their relationship breaks down altogether.
There is one other important feature in every dialogue: a clue or hint—if the reader can find it—that alerts the speaker to the mistake that’s being made. After all, if readers (like the speakers in the dialogues) have to be in possession of specific cultural information in order to avoid the mistake, then the dialogue doesn’t work; that is, readers would never identify with a mistake they could not possibly have avoided. But if the clue is there and readers simply miss it, then shame on them.
In the encounter above, the clue is when Krishna refers to “unexpected problems,” suggesting that somehow they would be a universally acceptable excuse for missing a deadline. Carl cannot be expected to know why Krishna thinks this way (that will be made clear in the explanation that follows the dialogue), but if he is listening closely, he should realize Krishna is telling him something important.
When all is said and done, a dialogue is primarily a pretext for discussing cultural differences—a clever and compelling pretext, perhaps, but a pretext nonetheless. The differences are what matter. Accordingly, each of the dialogues in this book is followed by the “explanation,” a brief analysis that reveals where the misunderstanding occurred, the cultural differences that caused it, and the origin of those differences. In this example, the difference has to do with the extent to which Indians and Americans believe they can control external circumstances and, therefore, the degree to which it is acceptable to miss a deadline.
When people realize that misunderstandings are the result of legitimate cultural differences—of a value or belief that makes perfect sense in one culture but not the other—then they will see that no one ever tries to confuse or frustrate anybody else. And that in turn means that no one is “to blame” for what happened because neither party knew what was happening. Are you going to be upset with someone just because he or she comes from a culture?
This realization changes the entire dynamic of any cross-cultural interaction. When the two parties realize that no one was trying to confuse anyone else—that Carl was not trying to misread Krishna and Krishna was not trying to mislead Carl—this takes most of the emotion out of the encounter. Instead of two people who are angry with each other, we now have two people slightly embarrassed by their mistake. Angry people find it difficult to work together, but embarrassed people are willing to try again.
If this were the end of the story, we could all go home; but it’s not. Carl and Krishna may be best buddies again now that they understand what happened last week, but they still have some work to do. They still have to come up with what in this book is called “The Fix,” which comprises the last few paragraphs of every dialogue explanation. Realizing that nobody was trying to frustrate anybody else certainly takes the sting out of Carl and Krishna’s encounter, but that realization doesn’t change the facts on the ground: namely, that these two men have very different notions of what a deadline is and what it means to miss one.
Carl and Krishna now understand what happened last week, but that understanding by itself won’t keep something like this from happening again. Carl and Krishna may indeed have progressed from not realizing they think differently to realizing they do, but that’s not quite the same as thinking alike. What they have learned about each other’s culture has not changed what’s going on between these two men; it has only changed how they feel about it. A change for the better, to be sure, but not a solution to their problem. We can all cheerfully accept that these things happen—and still wish they wouldn’t happen next time.
What’s needed now is for Carl and Krishna to reconcile their cultural differences and find a way to work together. It’s not realistic to expect either man to adopt the worldview of the other, even if that were possible, but they do have to move toward each other, culturally speaking. The ideal fix involves finding a middle ground that does not require either party to venture much further outside his/her comfort zone than the other party, a behavioral compromise that spreads the pain around more or less equally. In the fix we have proposed for Carl and Krishna, for example, Carl adjusts the way he sets deadlines, while Krishna takes on some of Carl’s urgency about meeting them.
But ideal fixes are the exception; in most cross-cultural standoffs, the burden of adapting is usually greater for one party than the other. And as for which party has to do more of the adapting, that almost always depends on circumstances. If we assume that Krishna works for a vendor with a contract with Carl’s company, then it makes sense that the vendor adapts to the client, in which case Krishna is going to have to clean up his act regarding deadlines. If the tables were turned and Carl is working for Krishna, then the logical fix would be for Carl to stop obsessing about losing a day here and there.
We might add here that while circumstances are everything in a cross-cultural standoff, a typical dialogue contains almost no description. If dialogues are going to work as conversations, they can have very little context. Context is taken for granted when two people are talking; they’re in the situation, so why would they have to explain it? But if we started trying to slip additional details into our dialogues (setting, work titles), they would no longer sound natural. And their complete naturalness is the only reason dialogues work as well as they do.
And that’s how this book is going to help you: It’s going to show you:
Readers will observe that one of the two speakers in every dialogue in this book comes from the United States. That would seem to suggest that this book is exclusively for an American audience, but there are several reasons why this is not the case.
Let’s start with readers who do not come from the United States or any of the ten other countries featured in these pages. It doesn’t matter; so long as you do business with Americans, every explanation in this book contains useful tips. And then there are those ten other countries. Do you do business with any of them? If so, you will find valuable information in the relevant chapters. Finally, while your particular country might not be included, a country from your region of the world—say, Asia-Pacific or Latin America—does have a chapter here. To the extent that your culture is similar to others in your region, that chapter will have relevance to you.
Then there are readers who come from the ten featured countries. To begin with, an entire chapter is dedicated to the most common mistakes Americans make when they work with you— and vice versa. If you do business with any of the nine other countries in this book, you should probably read those chapters as well. To be sure, the chapter on U.S.-Mexican differences may not contrast your culture with Mexico, but you’ll still learn about both Americans and Mexicans.
And now a special message for northern Europeans. Most intercultural experts agree that—at its core—America is a northern European culture. This is unsurprising given that more Americans claim ancestry from northern Europe, especially Germany and the United Kingdom, than from any other part of the world. We hasten to add that northern Europeans are not all alike; indeed, we could easily write a book of dialogues featuring Finns talking to Brits and Germans talking to the Dutch. Moreover, people from northern Europe are unlike Americans in many significant respects—significant enough that there are U.S.-England, U.S.-France, and U.S.-Germany chapters in this very volume!
So what do we mean when we say America is a northern European culture? There are many similarities between Americans and northern Europeans concerning personal identity, management style, communication style, attitudes toward rank, and the concept of universalism—all cultural topics we discuss at some length. That being the case, there are many dialogues where the American speaker could be replaced by someone from Germany or perhaps Denmark. The particular attitudes or behaviors illustrated often apply to more than one culture.
And so it is that northern European readers—and here we mean Germans, the Dutch, Scandinavians, the British, and people from the so-called Anglo cultures (Canada, New Zealand, and Australia)—might easily identify with the American in many of these dialogues. They are encouraged to read the explanations and might very well find observations that apply to them.
Some readers may wonder if a single cultural mistake can really be that serious, if a single misunderstanding means we are guaranteed to lose the contract, alienate the locals, or otherwise poison the cross-cultural well. It does not. We should remember, however, that a dialogue depicts only one mistake, made in one moment in time. But if we interact with folks from another culture every day or every week, we’ll have a chance to make numerous mistakes. So, no: one mistake is not a deal breaker, but before long an accumulation of misinterpretations and misunderstandings begins to have real consequences.
Many readers may wonder about the value of cultural generalizations—as well they should. Not because such generalizations are normally inaccurate but because they’re generalizations. You’re never going to meet a “general” person or find yourself in a “general” situation. Be that as it may, it’s also true that individuals raised in the same physical, social, economic, and cultural environment will probably be more like their peers than like people raised in other environments. In short, this group of individuals is likely to have some things in common, and it’s those commonalities which confer a certain legitimacy and accuracy on generalizations made about the group. But “group” is the key word here: While generalizations can and often do accurately describe a certain type, you’re never going to meet a type, only individuals.
To compile this book I selected ten of the world’s largest economies/major markets, and for each country I identified five of the most significant cultural differences between that country and the United States, differences which cause the most common misunderstandings and undermine successful business relations. Next I created five scenes (the dialogues) to bring the differences to life in common business interactions. I then wrote the “explanation” for each dialogue, a short essay revealing the embedded cultural mistake and describing the cultural differences behind the misunderstanding. In effect, then, this book consists of 50 essays on various characteristics of American culture (five per chapter) as contrasted with five key cultural characteristics of the featured country for that chapter.
With that as background, I make the following suggestions:
American readers: |
Read the whole book (it doesn’t take that long) because every chapter contains information about your culture that you should be aware of if you do business globally. To be sure, you can focus on the countries you work with most often, but every essay in the book contains valuable information for American readers. |
Readers from the ten countries: |
While you will probably want to start with the chapter that compares your culture to American culture, you will find important insights into the American mindset in other chapters as well. |
All other readers: |
You should read the whole book (for the reasons described above). If you do business with one of the ten featured countries, read that chapter more closely. If there is a featured country in your region of the world (Latin America, for example, or the Pacific Rim), read that chapter more closely. It may actually describe cultural differences that would also apply when Americans do business in your country. |
If I’ve felt free to make a number of flattering observations about dialogues in this introduction, it’s because I deserve no credit for “inventing” this marvelous technique. All credit is due to the late Dr. Alfred Kraemer, a sociologist who was chief of research and development for the U.S. Army. Dr. Kraemer sought to illustrate to U.S. Army personnel how their own culture influenced their behavior in dealing with local nationals overseas. He wrote and then filmed a number of dialogues and used them to train men and women in the military. I came across the scripts for these filmed sequences many years ago, was completely captivated by the concept, and started writing my own dialogues. And I’ve never looked back. I am as grateful to Dr. Kraemer now as I was the first time I was exposed to his ingenious technique in the early 1980s.
• • •
But enough preliminaries. Let’s meet a few foreigners, embarrass ourselves, and start down the road to cultural competence.