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.

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.

But your Millennials are finding out a great truth about business – that risk takers and innovators are a good thing in theory, but in practice they usually receive a very cool reception.

”You should not wonder why innovation doesn’t happen in most organizations. For much of the journey, innovation is hard work rewarded by bad headlines” says Rick Porras et al in “Success Built to Last” (2006, Wharton School Publishing), which explores the work of successful people who have achieved extraordinary results for at least 20 years.

Porras et al define the best strategy for innovators as “tolerate the risks, feel the fear, take the brickbats, learn from failure and do what matters to you anyway”. Oh yes? GenYs may be more likely to blog bitterly about how their ideas are being ignored, and then look for another employer, or get some start-up capital and become entrepreneurs.

What your managers need to know:

Managing the Millennials is not simply an intuitive process which can be done without specific thought about the challenges which this demographic group presents.

Embedding this principle in the organization’s knowledge:

Organizations themselves can learn to become progressively more agile in response to differentness. Generational differentness is merely one part of the spectrum of human diversity.

You don’t help your organization learn to cope with heterogeneity because it is a compliance issue. You do this because it creates competence and confidence in the organization’s ability to respond easily and fluently to cultural, lifestyle and generational differences. And the result is trust, communication, agility, innovation and good business – on the bottom line. This is the kind of competitive advantage which companies like Genentech have been leveraging for years!

Great read: Dov Seidman’s How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life). Probably more for the serious reader of business and management books, but a great explanation of the need for reputation and trust in a transparent business world (which tech-savvy GenYs live in).

You can safely dismiss Publishers Weekly’s comment that Seidman does not explain exactly how this can be done. I wondered whether those guys live under a rock if they haven’t seen any of the last 15 years of literature and research on exactly how these strategies can be implemented!