Six Quick Questions:

1. You work with a Colombian guy and you have heard that he has a very sick cousin. Should you inquire about this, or is it none of your business?
2. Three people come late to a meeting. One is an American from San Diego, one a Venezuelan who has lived in the USA for five years, and one is a visiting Chinese businessman. Can you guess the order in which they will arrive, simply from knowing their cultural background? Why?
3. What one extra feature would probably significantly have helped the sales of US vehicles, in Japan, in the 1970s -1990s?
4. You meet a client from the UK. She orders a beer at lunch and uses some language that makes you blink. Is she a bad woman with an alcohol problem?
5. African-American culture tends to be higher-context or  more ‘diffuse’ than Caucasian American Culture. True or False? What would this mean to your sales process with an African-American client?
6. If someone asked you for the percentage of household spending done by disabled family members, or for the approximate spend of the disability community in the USA, what would you reply? (www.EnableAmerica.com)

Five Strategic Questions:

1. New York culture is lower-context or more ‘specific’ than Florida culture. How would this affect your customer service training if you have many more customers in FL than in NY?
2. You are in retail and your IT is outsourced to an applications/data storage management IT company. Most of their team is Indian and they seem to deal unusually well with confusing, ambiguous situations. Is there some sort of cultural advantage operating here? How can your company develop a competitive advantage from examining this factor?
3. One of your new sales reps reports a sharp downturn in business from an account that was previously a steady stream of income. S/he describes the (Lebanese) customer as “from one of those South American countries.”  Your senior manager wants to see your coaching plan for the new sales rep. What does it include?
4. A major client company has recently gone through a merger. Their new head office will be in Paris instead of San Francisco. What are you going to do about retaining this account and the flow of business from it?
5. Your customer base is getting younger. A new check shows that the median age is eight years younger than your last measurement.  What should you do about this change in customer demographics?

You are invited to schedule a CPS workshop on Finding and Keeping Multicultural and Diverse Customers: glynis@c-psolutions.com or 813 598 9184.

CPS apologizes for any hitches  in our new, evolving but extra-safe website. IT security is one of the three major issues that futurists predict will affect business in the coming decade.

People also struggle to “do” English humor, because it is part of acculturation.  Just as Western cultures are used to the octave as a basis for music, so it takes time to hear and reproduce English humor. For instance:

• There are three types of people in this world… Those who can count, and those who can’t.
• “Give me an alligator sandwich and make it quick.” (from Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett.)

You should say these kinds of things with a completely straight face in a conversation, and then move on, without explaining yourself. It is also important not to wait for a laugh or acknowledgment. The listener should, however, pick up on the humour and respond, but not by laughing. The correct response is a groan, or rolling one’s eyes, or saying “oh my God” (in a disgusted voice), or some other apparently negative (but actually playful) comeback.

It’s even better if you can repeat this in a sequence. For instance, in Witches Abroad, Pratchett has a whole lot of similar comments, including “give me an alligator sandwich and make it immediately/right away/on the double etc. He NEVER says “and make it snappy” of course. The pun can only be implied.

In Watching the English (by Kate Fox) she explains that the English are have a type of social lack of ease(dis-ease) and cope with this by their pervasive, all-embracing passion for humor. Humor is the English default method of operation. She says:

Humour is  one of our most ‘deeply-ingrained impulses’, a ‘default mode’ of behaviour, a ‘culture-all equivalent of the laws of gravity’.

Probably the most important of our three basic reflexes. Humour is our most effective built-in antidote to our social dis-ease. When God (or Something) cursed us with The English Social Dis-ease, He/She/It softened the blow by also giving us The English Sense of Humour. The English do not have any sort of global monopoly on humour, but what is distinctive is the sheer pervasiveness and supreme importance of humour in English everyday life and culture. In other cultures, there is ‘a time and a place’ for humour: among the English it is a constant, a given – there is always an undercurrent of humour. Virtually all English conversations and social interactions involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, wit, mockery, wordplay, satire, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, sarcasm, pomposity-pricking or just silliness. Humour is not a special, separate kind of talk: it is our ‘default mode’; it is like breathing; we cannot function without it. English humour is a reflex, a knee-jerk response, particularly when we are feeling uncomfortable or awkward: when in doubt, joke. The taboo on earnestness is deeply embedded in the English psyche. Our response to earnestness is a distinctively English blend of armchair cynicism, ironic detachment, a squeamish distaste for sentimentality, a stubborn refusal to be duped or taken in by fine rhetoric, and a mischievous delight in pricking the balloons of pomposity and self-importance. (English humour is not to be confused with ‘good humour’ or cheerfulness – it is often quite the opposite; we have satire instead of revolutions and uprisings.) Key phrases include: ‘Oh, come off it!’ (Our national catchphrase, along with ‘Typical!’) Others impossible to list – English humour is all in the context, e.g. understatement: ‘Not bad’ (meaning outstandingly brilliant); ‘A bit of a nuisance’ (meaning disastrous, traumatic, horrible); ‘Not very friendly’ (meaning abominably cruel); ‘I may be some time’ (meaning ‘I’m going to die’ – although, come to think of it, that one was possibly not intended to be funny). [402-3]

Many people who work with or for UK companies find English (or British) humour a major problem, but spare a moment to pity those who are deeply British acculturated, but live and/or work in other cultures. In US culture,  their “straight-faced but intentionally-humorous insult as opening conversational gambit” is seldom appreciated. Their tantalizing but oblique puns are ignored or congratulated. Black humour falls into the category of “talking about disagreeable things is disagreeable” and their whole beloved realm of politics and religion (which is the natural area of British conversation after the weather) is suddenly tabboo!

Culture … infinitely fascinating. On Wednesday I am off to Korea to find other ways to get into cultural trouble. And to see what it is like to do everything bali bali! (Fast. Fast.)

Tampa Bay Medical and Technology Expo: 2:15 pm – 3:15 pm: 15th July 2010.

This workshop reviews the challenges that arise at the interface of healthcare and information technology, and points the way towards realistic and cost-effective solutions.

• Glynis and Greg Ross-Munro will offer research and insights into the cultural gap between the healthcare clinical world, and IT world, and the position of Medical Informatics, caught between two different occupational cultures.
• ‬The presenters will focus on the occupational cultures of each stakeholder, and the ways in which this affects interactive processes, assumptions, communication, innovation and other factors.
• The workshop considers how these factors influence project and process outcomes, including collaboration, satisfaction, safety, project success, failure, or abandonment, costs and employee retention.

The aquatic metaphor is also apt. We swim in our culture, so like fish we do not notice it. It is the water that surrounds us, and we don’t analyze it. It is simply the environment in which we live.

The other common image of culture is the onion. Our daily lives are framed by layers upon layers of  unseen assumptions and mind-sets. Because we have no need to conceptualizing our world differently, we seldom see it through different interpretations, until some rather dramatic event gives us new eyes. Or until we choose to study behavioural sciences that may help us see many things are hiding, in plain sight, right in front of us.

One layer of the onion that interests me particularly (especially in recession) is the way that trust and collaboration operate in US business, and how this often limits opportunity and prosperity. I am also interested by the way that numerous scientific studies and popular books prove that our tendency to withhold trust and collaboration is ineffective, but it still prevails.

Let us call the general trend we can all observe the “small pie approach”. Small pie behavior says “If you win, then I am probably losing.” Small pie behavior prevents sharing ideas (they could be stolen and claimed by others), networking (others may get to know our prospects and then steal them), growing and building others (they may grow more powerful/successful that us and displace us) or trusting others (they may use us and then stab us in the back when they have gained all the benefit there is to gain.)

Let’s look at the science.  As always when examining culture, remember the mantra: cultures are not right or wrong, they is simply different. We are all acculturated, and one cannot make value judgments about cultures.

Firstly, as a culture, in the US we think short-term. Trompenaars noted that the US is a very present-oriented culture. Geert Hofstede measured the United States’ Long Term Orientation at 29, compared to the world average of 45. This aspect of culture is one of those deep, unseen and unnoticed dimensions which one seldom sees if one has lived all one’s life within a short-horizon thinking world.

Planning horizons in the US are less than 5 years, whereas they are about 10 years in Europe. They are closer to 20 years in the Far East.

Present-oriented cultures tend to expect shorter term relationships. Long-term “people farming” (which includes putting oneself on the line for people, and demonstrating caring and integrity over long periods of time) is therefore not core to such cultures.

Secondly, the US is a specific-oriented culture. We therefore tend to keep private and business agendas separate, and we tend to “box” our relationships into clearly defined sectors. We do not invite our contractors home to hold our babies and play with our dogs, and we are surprised when this happens in certain foreign countries. We have ‘mental boxes’ for tennis friends, gym friends, place-of-worship friends, and work friends. Few people overlap between these categories. As such, trust and collaboration are limited to the particular box in which a person fits.

Thirdly, as all social scientists note, the US is the most individualist nation on earth. We value individual achievement and self-determination as the highest form of personal development. While collectivist cultures value group well-being, and group belonging, as the apex of development, individualist cultures measure self-improvement by the achievement of our own potential.

(This is only beginning to sink into some US human resources departments, who are often still happily using Maslow’s hierarchy. This has started changing because individualist reward systems have produced some very odd results with collectivist Asian, African and Hispanic employees.)

Anthropological data like Trompenaars’ and Hofstede’s research is neither new nor secret. There is a Hofstede iPhone application (CultureGPS) to help international business people to understand US-international differences when traveling. You don’t get more mainstream than that free Mac apps!  http://www.culturegps.com/About.html

Let us turn to the many books and websites that prove that the “small pie” approach is more than ineffective: it is counter-productive to the development of wealth.

• Many things from McKinsey (e.g. Lowell L. Bryan, Claudia L. Joyce’s Mobilizing Minds)
• Most things from FranklinCovey (e.g. The Speed of Trust)
• Anything (almost) with the words Integrity, Innovation, Ethics, Collaborative Intelligence or Collaboration in the title (e.g. The Integrity Dividend, by Tony Simons)
• Anything (almost) that you can Google that talks about how ethics, trust and collaborative intelligence are profitable.

We live in a world where our international competition is often better educated, less fearful and more confident that we are. They are forging ahead in an age when collaborative intelligence and innovation are the keys to wealth, and when cooperation in the only answer to an Age of Complexity.

We can, however, collaborate more, trust more, make our pie bigger, and keep enlarging it.

The barriers we need to fear are the barriers we cannot see, or which we become defensive about, when we do see them.

So it is now time to look at Big Pie people. You can probably look around you and see who builds you, connects you, inspires you and encourages, irrespective of the gain to themselves. There is your first collection.

Visit www.zipcar.com, an example of bigger pie thinking, that uses the concepts of mutual trust, also known as cooperative capitalism.  Robin Chase has another new venture too, called GoLoco.

Bigger pie thinking is seen in many of the ventures called social entrepreneurship, where trust, ethics, and social responsibility move from non-profit to a ‘more-than-profit’ or blended business models, in which everyone wins.

You have seen an example of small pie thinking in the last week or two. You have probably behaved in a small pie way in the last week or two. So have I.

We can do better. Each day we can consciously reach out and make a bigger pie for everyone, build our community, our region and our nation.

I will work with you. Tell me what I can do to make your pie bigger, now or in years to come. I’d like to invite you around to play with the dog and baby, but my ‘baby’ has a masters degree now, and lives in Korea. My old dog has passed on.  Perhaps you have another suggestion? I’m listening.

If we make a bigger pie now, our children will dine well.

“The change in our sales guys is great. They’ve had fun, but they are also thinking outside the box in a completely new way”.
Senior sales manager.

Sign up for this event

The problem is how to invest in people, but achieve this with  short, affordable, effective training designs, that deliver a considerable amount of customized, sustainable learning and attitude change. Businesses need training interventions that provide

• powerfully interactive experiences: they need these to cost as little as possible,
• real lasting learning: they need these to take people off the job for the shortest time possible, and
• engaging training experiences that spark innovation and collaboration: they need these to be custom targeted on the specific needs of their organization so that people feel  “invested in”

It’s hard to blame them.  Organizations are “doing more with less,” and their alternatives are often minimal canned training, on-line non-collaborative training, or no training at all.

CPS began addressing this need by using accelerated learning techniques, such as jigsaw training designs, often mixed with plays and/or multiple intelligence work.  These most powerful, interactive learning methods work well for all generations. The collaborative nature of the work is ideal for innovation and cross-functional problem solving.

Topics included Generational Communication, Managing Generations and Multi-cultural Understanding (which does not mean international etiquette!).

We recently shared this technique (with everyone participating in a cultural jigsaw) with the Suncoast learning community at the ASTD Suncoast Chapter in November. Dr. Deidre Cobb-Roberts came from USF to participate (and commend the results highly) The learners built insights into how misunderstandings arise as a result of often-invisible culture differences between occupations, organizations,  regions and  national/ethnic cultures.

Other topics such as green attitudes and commitment, performance management, innovative and critical thinking are designed to include other interactive, accelerated techniques such as plays and/or multiple intelligence activities.

Where we use plays, the dialogues are often custom-written around industry-specific issues, and the roles are often created around Myers Briggs or DISC guide-lines.

Our largest jigsaw to date has been the Tech Data Pow-Wow, with 150 managers present and six other sites linked in technologically. Feedback from clients suggests that our most entertaining jigsaws are our “dog-and-pony show” jigsaws, where Glynis and Greg facilitate subjects like generational communication together, from their widely-different generational perspectives and knowledge bases.

Learning and retention: When participants learn material and then teach it to each other, they retain about 90% of the material (vs 20% of a Powerpoint-based presentation). When they are responsible for creating a mental framework for their section of the learning, they use this mental framework  to process and store learning received from their colleagues. The intense interaction and focus achieved in small groups working on tightly-targeting learning  leads to powerful insights, and to conceptual breakthroughs.

Time: Jigsaws take up to 2 hours, and can cover almost any learning area. The design can accommodate many people from a minimum of 16, up to over 100 participants.

If you would like to try a jigsaw or other interactive, accelerated learning experience with your team or company,  email glynis[@]c-psolutions.com or call 813 598 9184.

Second Prize: Engaged staff, increased retention, teamwork and trust.

First Prize: A long-term, company-wide culture of awareness of the importance of respecting and protecting corporate information. Employee-driven emphasis on its role in trust-based business relationships, legal obligations to business partners, competitive advantage etc.

In CPS’s Managing Millennials workshop, we suggest many ways to give your Generation Ys some variety in their work, to engage their interest and loyalty, and to offer some outlet for their creative minds, as they focus on routine tasks. Most of these suggestions leverage their technological and generational-specific skills, for the well-being of the organization.

We have recently added another interesting task. Please consider adding it to your list.

Large amounts of proprietary information, including details of prospective contracts and other material that falls into the area of “stuff that shouldn’t be out there” is getting onto the web through blogging, social networking and other breaches of privacy.

Let us assume:

1) that you have trained your Generation Ys, as covered in the workshop, on privacy guidelines and confidentiality.

2) that you are working towards a collaborative and trust-based relationship with your people, because you know the business need for this and the bottom-line values of engagement and retention.

3) that you know the size of the threat of the web-based privacy problem and the numbers involved (look at things like www.websense.com)

You could take a Big Brother approach to protecting your valuable information, and sign up with an information monitoring service. You could take a collaborative, team-based approach and rotate the task amongst your GenYs and GenXs. This will a) get the job done, b) give them some fun, varied tasks (and you know what that’s worth!) and c) create a deep and lasting culture of awareness of the importance of protecting corporate information. And culture change is always the first prize.

It’s not hard to do. [Remember that other generations might be interested - do not exclude them, especially if you are a small enough organization.]

• Call a meeting (remember that pizza!) or send out an email (using E-writing, people…  not 20th century Composition 101!)
• Present the problem of information security, and some information about what various companies are doing about it.
• Put your people into groups or a group to discuss approaches. (You know the drill – a time limit or 24 hours to email group leader and 24 more for the synthesized group responses).
• Take feedback and let them map most of the plan. Review your Marshall Goldsmith rules, and don’t hijack the project because you know more than them. Don’t let them run amok – provide clear guidelines like time off the main job for any one person.
• The end product must have clear objectives and metrics, clear time frames, and must be high on direction, with strong structure from a good executor. No fuzzy edges, no dependence on a “big vision with minimal direction.” The whole thing must run on a system, with short goal spans, not on people remembering things. The check-ins, check-ups and assessments must all be put in the system at the very beginning.
• Encourage your team towards continuous improvement, and ownership of the project. A Ning-based or intra-net based discussion forum for the team (with senior management on the group) would be a great idea.
• Remember to give feedback to your praise-hungry young talent. And any other generations involved. Remember? You said you kinda also like feedback, and you enjoy being praised too!

Let CPS know how you’re doing Glynis