Cross-Culture

Indian Jugaad

As a cross-culturalist, it is fascinating to become immersed in a less familiar culture and find out something new. It tends to happen quite quickly, as you have an idea in advance of the sort of thing you are looking for. For me, it is to find qualities which are not found in quite the same form anywhere else. Defining concepts which capture in brief the essence of a culture – such as Finnish sisu, German Ordnung, or Korean kibun.

In India recently for a workshop tour to Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, I was about to start for the day when the organiser said there was a problem with the projection screen. It was a metre too low, so those at the back would not have been able to see the bottom of my slides. He called over the lone technician at the 5 star hotel conference centre and told him he had 10 minutes to resolve the situation. It was a huge and heavy screen with a large wooden surround with the management school’s logo on it. Impossible to lift alone. Within seconds the room was bustling with people, ranging from the conference centre manager to kitchen staff. Trestle tables, starched white cloths, various random pieces of wood, ropes, hammers and nails appeared. The screen teetered into the air precariously, just missing the rather large chandeliers. A collective effort raised it onto the now neatly-covered tables and a disorderly banging and shuffling began behind it. When the course participants began filing in, the set-up was perfect: screen one metre higher; looking as if it had always been like that. Not a workman in sight. I glanced behind it and observed that it was held up by a Heath-Robinson-style rickety wooden framework secured by long guy-ropes. It served its purpose all day. Next morning the screen was held in place invisibly and professionally.

Asking my Indian friends about this later, they said it was a perfect example of Jugaad – best described as a sort of hurried collective resourcefulness; a finding of an alternative, laterally-thought out solution - which somehow works against the odds – gaining time by acting before the proper means to carry out the job arrive, maybe using your connections, and possibly bending some rules along the way.

In concrete terms, a Jugaad is also a locally made motor vehicle used mostly in small villages as a means of low cost transportation and made by carpenters, who fit a diesel engine to their contraption. The brakes often fail – but, no worries, as a passenger will jump off and apply a manual wooden block as a brake. More Jugaad, in other words.

Jugaad can also be used in the context of management. In the West we may sometimes be hidebound by our solid structures and processes, too tied to facts and rules. Jugaad could be seen as a sort of out-of-the-box and network-style thinking that could serve us well in times of change, crisis and in extreme circumstances. It requires people to use skills outside the ones they may have been employed for, and which usually go unexploited. It requires strong collaborative skills. It means an open mind and boundless flexibility.

A recent comparative report by McKinsey on the relative strengths of India and China identified Indian flexibility as a key ‘soft competitive edge’ that India has.

Another Indian characteristic – the belief in Karma or fate – can sometimes be used as way of excusing things which go wrong. Even the most sophisticated and western-influenced Indian manager is likely to retain, at a deep level, a belief in Karma.

On the other hand, it can be a great stimulus to take the risks that may be needed to effect real change. If things turn out badly, then that was meant to happen – so you may as well take the leap of faith and be bold.

In our current global recession it is likely to be the bold, flexible and resourceful who survive.

We can learn a lot from India.

by Michael Gates

Open Spaces and the Arabian Gulf

Have been busy travelling so not posted anything for a while. But I just got a great mail about cultural matters in the Gulf from one of our blog readers, Martin Kralik, and quote it straight. Thanks Martin - saved me a job ;)

This blog has posited the powerful yet all-too-often overlooked idea that most of the tangible, material aspects of our societies are physical manifestations of our cultural values, beliefs and preferences. Societies that are going through economic hyper-growth and rapid change offer particularly good illustrations of this point. For instance, the Arab countries of the Gulf region are in the process of reshaping dramatically their infrastructures, urban landscapes, and lifestyles.

For observers of cross-cultural interaction, these developments provide the added bonus of witnessing a constant stream of Western consultants, architects, planners and designers visiting the region. They come to share (and sell) advice on how to turn cities across the Gulf into ‘great cities’ that will attract more investment, tourism and talent.

More often than not, the advice, while well-meant, is rooted in heavily Western / Anglo-Saxon notions of what constitutes good urban planning and a well-functioning city. In fact, the more dramatic the ideas, the more comically they sometimes fall off the mark.

Let’s start with the Gulf’s most ubiquitous species – the car. On his visit to UAE, London’s former mayor Ken Livingstone had some simple, and much-publicized, advice for Dubai and Abu Dhabi: “Get rid of the cars.” Granted, global financial centres do typically require world-class public transportation systems. Similarly, a variation on London’s congestion charge may one day become a useful tool in battling UAE’s ever-growing traffic jams. But how likely are UAE residents to abandon their top-of-the-line LandRovers, RangeRovers and other SUVs in favour of public transport, once the option becomes available to them? My experience from living in UAE for the past 12 months would suggest: Not very.

The answer lies only as far as the minds and preferences of the local people: Not only is the motorized vehicle a useful transportation tool for large families and their maids, it is also a status symbol. The recent ‘global’ instinct to trade in the SUVs for smaller models, or switch to hybrid fuels, has had no impact on this part of the world: After all, petrol is cheap and recycling or environmental protection of any kind have never been a concept to begin with, at least as far as the middle-class consumer psyche is concerned. To accommodate the SUVs, the government has for the past 20 years built roads that would be considered illegally wide by international standards.

Much more so than in the West, the car projects the owner’s sense of power and machismo. Ever read about the Gulf’s traditional pastimes in an airline magazine? They include horse racing, camel racing, falcon racing… The list goes on. This is the stuff that has built a sense of masculinity in many generations of local men. Is it any surprise then that so many drivers think of the city roads as their racing track – beating traffic lights, speeding past schools and residential neighbourhoods, and honking pedestrians off the zebra crossing?

Beyond the infatuation with speed, the car offers a sense of separation and insulation – from the heat and dust of the streets; from the crowds of immigrant labourers who usually don’t share the local owner’s faith, race or language, let alone lifestyle; from the pedestrians’ random glances (to this end, most of the car windows are tinted [again – illegally, at least ‘on paper’] to protect the driver’s female offspring from unwanted attention).

A similar clash of cultures can be seen in discussions on public space, particularly shared spaces. Unsurprisingly, Western architects’ ideas in this area are strongly democratic and egalitarian: The more open space and public parks, the better. To their way of reasoning, what could be more joyous for a city than to have all its residents mix in the same space, regardless of creed and status? But, as is so often the case, ‘the reality doesn’t quite work that way.’ The harsh climate has always encouraged the affluent coffee aficionado to migrate indoors, to the latest and most opulent air-conditioned shopping mall. Men tend to fraternize in different establishments than women/families. In addition, there is a huge gap between locals and foreigners in spending power; among the locals, the civil servants are different from private sector employees in their working hours, dress code and dining habits. Looking at local people’s homes gives yet more clues: How likely is someone who chooses to live in a 12-bedroom villa, behind the high walls of a family compound, to embrace openness of the Western kind and mix freely with residents from all walks of life?...

Finally, why is it that with so much massive investment into new infrastructure and architecture, the new face of the oil-rich Gulf city is essentially the same from Dubai to Doha and Jeddah?... Why the same marinas, man-made islands, corniches and clock towers?... Are they the only artefacts that money can buy? Are there only a handful of architectural firms on hand to come up with the designs? No – they are reflection of what the people who live in these cities believe to be modern, luxurious and sophisticated. Coming as they are from the same, rather homogenous culture, the physical outcome of their dreams and ambitions is correspondingly homogenous.

by Martin Kralik (via Michael Gates)

“Froggies” v. “les Rosbifs”

It could be said that the English and the French do not get on together as well as they should. It is not unusual in this world for neighbours to be critical of each other – and this may be part of the story – but the centuries-long, cross-channel sniping has a certain strangeness about it.

Cultural misunderstanding usually arises either on account of differences in communication style or, weightier still, basic values. The French manner of speech is more extrovert than that of the English. Not only do they use four times as many words, but they gesticulate with hands and arms, shrug mightily, pout and perorate; most of the time they talk down their nose. These mannerisms irritate the English, whose stiff-upper-lip facial mask and folded arms annoy the French with their opaque aloofness.

Interestingly, when we come to values, we find that French and English core beliefs are almost identical. Reaction to world crises or other significant events are strikingly similar. This is not as strange as it might seem. The two peoples have long shared a plethora of convictions and experience. Both were former superpowers with far-flung colonies and empire, adventurous explorers on land and at sea, champions of the Christian religion, science and the arts, bastions of freedom and latterly, democracy, prominent in military history and allies in two world wars. The common heritage is as evident as it is compelling.

Why, then, this persistent friction? Is one side more to blame than the other? As a native of the North of England (dangerously close to Scotland), I tend to sympathise with the French. People who hail from either side of the Pennines often view their southern compatriots as virtual foreigners – at best tweedy and posh, at worst smug, snobbish and patronising. No wonder the French find them cold, opaque and illogical. Not renowned for their patience, our Gallic friends often dismiss the English as insular, impenetrable eccentrics who rarely can be relied upon (‘perfidious Albion’) and drive on the wrong side of the road.

Yet the English seem more scornfully dismissive of the French, especially the males. The caricature is disparaging: the dangling Gauloise, the wine-soaked moustache, the stupid beret, the theatrical, whining eater of raw garlic and frogs’ legs. Not very flattering. How poorly this compares with the (somewhat misty) image of the heroic Anglo-Saxons of the past – narrowly defeated at Hastings but perpetuating, through the centuries that followed, indomitable English traditions of honest toil, wholesomeness and ultimate invulnerability.

The Norman Invasion of 1066 was the last the English had to suffer (England had a history of constant occupation – Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Danes). But just what did we suffer? What did we lose or gain?

The arrows had barely stopped flying at Hastings when William the Conqueror embarked on an ambitious construction programme. His specialities were cathedrals and castles, built mainly with French stone imported from quarries across the Channel. The magnificent cathedral edifices of Winchester, Canterbury, Durham and Norwich were speedily erected to match, in their Gothic splendour, their cousins in Chartres, Rouen and Amiens. Imposing castles were built in Windsor, Arundel and Colchester as well as further north in Harlech, Caenarvon, Conway and Newcastle. More than 50 forts were constructed before William’s death in 1087. More than 1,200 religious foundations were established the length and breadth of the land, where Cistercian, Carthusian and Benedictine monks employed thousands of Saxon workers, to whom they introduced sheep and the wool trade, which propelled English country life and prosperity for nearly a thousand years.

The Normans were not interested in settling the land as the Saxons and many Vikings had done. They came to England to rule it. It was largely an upper-class affair – the 10,000 men who followed William represented only 1% of the population but they were la crème de la crème. Among them were 5000 mounted cavaliers. The invention of the stirrup produced cavalry, then knights and the (French) concept of chivalry (rooted in the world of the cheval). William’s followers became bishops, barons, knights and grandees. Thus was born the English aristocracy and class system with its connotations of respect for property, land ownership and law. The subsequent Kings of England had French blood – the only dyed-in-the-wool English ruler since 1066 has been Oliver Cromwell.

Though place names have remained largely Saxon or Scandinavian, people’s names show Norman influence, particularly in the upper and middle class families – the De Veres, Montforts, Mortimers, Mowbrays, Lacys, De Mandevilles, De Villiers. The working classes also changed their names to Norman versions. Ethelred, Godwin, Alfred, Wulfstan and Godric became William, Robert, Roger and Geoffrey. When surnames came into vogue at the end of the 15th century, most of them were Norman in choice. Even today football fans worship Gascoigne, Neville, Venables, Sinclair, Terry, Lampard, not to mention obvious ones such as Le Saux and Le Tissier.

The most pervasive element of the Norman invasion was that of language. While we retained such mundane Saxon and Viking words as houses, homes, ships, souls, sea, sky, cows, sheep, calves and swine, the Normans brought in vocabulary redolent of a more elegant, civilized way of life, with romance, beauty, courtesy, palaces, savoir faire, tête-à-tête, élite, encore, panache, coup d’état, fait accompli, dénouement, en route, milieu, par excellence, banquet, buffet, bon-vivant, gaffe, débacle, débris, à la mode, chauffeur, pied-à-terre, rendez-vous, joie de vivre, au revoir, débutante, entrepreneur, entrée, camaraderie, nouveau riche, esprit de corps, maitresse, déjà-vu, bidet, boudoir and raison d’être. In culinary matters they swamped us with haute cuisine, maître d’hotel, dessert, soup, sauce, sausage and much more.

There are about 10,000 words of French origin in the English dictionary. To say they enrich our language (including that of Chaucer and Shakespeare) is something of an understatement. Cross-channel loan words going the other way are a poor recompense. Le building, le meeting, le businessman, le shopping, le jogging demean French rather than enhance it.

By the reign of Henry II, the English nation had a fulsome Norman legacy in the political, military, religious, commercial and administrative spheres. The Normans also gave us our gardens, vineyards, hunting on horseback. They can be seen as the bringers of civilization, especially among fans of the Gothic. “England still laments the coming of William the Conqueror,” wrote Thomas Carlyle,” but without him, consider what had we ever been?”

With one thousand years of inter-marriage on these islands, who is English and who is Norman? The Norman invasion of England was the last one; it was certainly the most benign. “Our island story,” wrote Robert Winder, “a convulsive saga of class animosity and inequality, would be shaped forever by this superior elite.”

I live in the Meon Valley of Hampshire where the farmers look out over the Channel and go on about ‘them’ and ‘us’, repeating a centuries-old national myth. But what if ‘we’ are ‘them’ and moreover, the better for it?

Long Live the Anglo-Norman Kingdom.

by Richard D. Lewis

German or Global?

The CEO of Siemens announced last week that his priority for his second year in charge would be to improve the ‘global diversity’ of managers and warned that Germany's competitiveness could be threatened if it failed to do so.

"The management board are all white males. Our top 600 managers are predominantly white German males. We are too one-dimensional," he said in an interview to mark his first year in charge, according to the Financial Times.

He is not alone. Jorma Ollila, while CEO of Nokia, said that his company had to reflect its key markets in the internal diversity of its staff.

Of course, as the FT goes on to point out in its leader, you have to strike a balance. There are many admirable qualities of German companies, such as their reliability and technical prowess; their long-termism, and the consensus between management and workers that has increased competitiveness through wage restraint.

When diversity is encouraged, yet managed and anchored in some common values which everyone understands and shares, it can be powerful indeed. Not just in business, but also in nations.

We have seen how the various ‘-isms’ of the 20th century have resulted in warfare, oppression and economic failure. They have been rooted in the belief that there is an absolute truth or one way of doing things.

The USA, of course, is the prime example of a nation that has achieved economic success by managing to get a truly diverse set of people to stick, on the whole, to some core beliefs – such as that anyone can succeed; that you can take risks without too much fear of failure, and that you can learn from your mistakes. Outside of this set of beliefs, you are encouraged to be different, and diversity is in general respected.

The USA has not been doing well in the global popularity stakes in recent years, and certainly, in politics, the media and in business, one could say that it may have tried to export its way of doing things rather vigorously.

But in Europe, where countries like the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are struggling with questions of national identity, we could learn a lot from the Americans. At least they have had a clear and shared sense of purpose, while encouraging and supporting difference.

Getting the balance between diversity and shared values right is vital for business success in a changing world as well.

by Michael Gates

Stiff Upper Lip

Good piece in today's Telegraph about the demise of the British stiff upper lip.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/03/do0304.xml

There is undoubtedly some truth in what the writer says, that we Brits have become more emotional and likely to tell people how we really feel rather than always say "Fine, thanks" when people ask how we are. But a) we are still less likely to be emotionally effusive than many other nationalities, and b) we are still pretty much of the stiff upper lip school in 'official' situations, even if we have been changing in our private time.

Good example the other day. I was flying British Airways and there was a really bad jolt of turbulence. So bad that some of the female passengers started screaming.

After a pause, a voice came over the intercom: "This is your captain speaking...I do apologise for the slight discomfort in travelling conditions this morning..."

by Michael Gates

Fair Play

Saw an article in last week's press about a new study showing that the British really do have a sense of fair play. Apparently in scientifically-controlled games if Brits were reported as cheating by fellow players they accepted the situation and began playing by the rules. So did the Americans and Swiss. The Russians and Greeks, on the other hand, sought to get revenge on the people who had reported them.

It's good to see that there are some scientific ways of demonstrating culturally-determined behaviour, as cultural difference is so easy to see and experience, but so hard to pin down and prove.

On the subject of Russians, I was talking with some of them the other day about trust and was reminded of an episode I once witnessed on a Lufthansa plane. The pilot announced that we would have to wait  2 hours before take-off because of bad weather in Munich.

A Russian lady in front of me beckoned the hostess over until she was within whispering distance and said "Please, tell me the REAL reason!" The hostess drew back and said in a loud voice: "Are you calling me a liar?"

Russians tend not to believe official announcements, and so this poor lady was actually showing how much she trusted the hostess on a personal level to tell her the truth.

Makes you wonder how many disputes, broken business deals and even wars have resulted from such cultural misunderstandings...

It seems silly to wait until differences can be scientifically proven before using experience and observation to modify where we tread in the cultural minefield.

by Michael Gates

Britishness

The debate on Britishness in the UK press is here to stay. We are not alone. Australians, Germans and the Dutch - to name a few - are going through the same process of wondering about their national identity. The special challenge we have in the UK is that we tend not to like putting definitions about ourselves in writing. In fact, unlike our cousins the Americans, we don't even like to put our constitution in written form.

So, why are we and others so concerned about the issue at the moment?

Well, the key reason must be the growing realisation that 'multiculturalism' as an ideal, rather than simply a description of the fact that there are many cultures in the UK, has not really worked in practice.

The force of opinion now very much seems to be, from all sides of the political spectrum, that we should re-emphasise what makes us British rather than what makes us different. A change in direction that would appear to make sense if we are to have an integrated society.

But what never seems to get a mention in the drive to improve the social fabric is intercultural understanding - particularly communication.

If different ethnic groups were better able to understand the intent of other groups' communication and the impact of their own verbal, and non-verbal, messages, we would come a long way in improving relations between them.

Rather than focusing purely on British values, we may do well to look at shared values and where those values may be interpreted differently. For instance, the much bandied around terms 'fair play' and 'tolerance'. What do they mean to a native British person, to someone from Bangladesh or someone from China or Poland?

Until we define our terms in ways that mean something, and until we understand each others communication patterms and listening habits, we are going to have an uphill struggle in moving towards a more integrated society. Knowing the rules of cricket and how many members of Parliament there are is not going to help as much as understanding that when a native Brit says "Hmm, interesting idea..." they may mean precisely the opposite. It is on these issues that all important trust is made or broken.

by Michael Gates