Culture Conversion

I’m on a trip to Europe and I was looking at the plugs and realized how the different outlets in the world are symbolic of cultures. You can’t ignore the different shapes of the plugs and outlets, and even when you can adapt the plug, without a proper power converter, you’re likely to blow up your machinery.

Your personal style, national culture, corporate culture

You bring each one of them to work with you everyday and have to bring it in harmony with each other. When the national culture and the corporate culture are comparable, it’s easy to understand the rules and adjust your personal style to adapt to them and still be productive. But the corporate culture always needs to be learned because even corporations in the same city may have different corporate cultures. For example, in some corporate cultures it may be a career-killer to contradict your boss; while in a company across the street, it may be OK to express a spirited disagreement with the management team.

Corporate cultures, personal styles and national cultures were not a big factor when international trade and business were predominantly focused on manufacturing where a company could buy knitting looms from the U.S. and set them up in Thailand and train local employees to operate the machinery. However, in an era where the key component of a business transaction is intellectual and it’s critical for people from different cultures to collaborate, appreciating, understanding and adjusting to the differences in the corporate and national cultures becomes critical. Failing to do so is comparable to trying to put a U.S. plug into an English outlet and at the same time, trying to run a 110 appliance on a 220 circuit. It won’t work and something will blow up.

Mike