A Google Street View car

The demarcation between public and private is generally made very clear in Germany and Austria. We discovered a blogger’s post, an expat in Germany, from 2010 that illustrates this demarcation (although all has been settled since).

Some prominent German government officials, most notably Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner, have denounced Google’s Street View. In a magazine interview, Aigner claimed that Google’s ‘comprehensive photo offensive is nothing less than a million-fold violation of the private sphere. I reject this form of exposure. There is not a secret service in existence that would collect photos so unabashedly.’

In Germany and Austria, the home is often considered a private sanctuary where only close friends and family are invited to visit. The expat in Germany who wrote the post linked to above said, “Germans really don’t like anyone peeping over their high fences and hedges. That’s why they are there.” Of course, this is a deeply rooted cultural value many Germans share (perhaps this is a value unique to certain generations). So, what did Germans do about this?

At the federal level, Aigner’s Consumer Protection Ministry now has a downloadable form online that German consumers can use to request that their house not be included in Street View – which could make Street View rather useless in Germany if Google complies with such demands. Google already allows people in Germany to request the removal of house address numbers.

More recently, this article on the TIME magazine website gives an update on the progress Google made in gaining acceptance of Street View in Germany. It seems the possibility to contest Street View, made possible by German authorities, quelled the anxiety it brought to privacy-conscious individuals.

Hamburg’s Johannes Caspar, the data protection head responsible for making it possible for Germans to oppose Google Street View, said he was happy with the service. ‘The Google camera car was, for many people, a symbol of a digital world trying to appropriate the analog world,’ said Caspar. Giving people the possibility of opposing the service, he explained, ‘diffused the situation and helped Street View gain acceptance.’

This is an interesting debate considering it has been a non-issue in the US where Street View was born. However, technological innovations are often cited in many public debates. Subsequent increase in adoption and usage indicates cultural change, where people form values around the utility of a device, whether it’s a cell phone or a new way of mapping the world. What technologies are at odds with your cultural values?

Josh
RW3 CultureWizard

DenizenMag.com created the above infographic on the modern third culture kid (TCK), a term coined in the 1950s for those individuals who grow up abroad or outside of their parents home country, for example. Click the image or click here to see the full infographic.

I think it’s interesting that 1 in 7 TCKs are dating another TCK. Is this simply because of the shared experience?

Are you a TCK? Let us know what you think.

Joshua

RW3 CultureWizard

A blogger in China uncovered a phony Apple Store in Kunming, China, the capital of Yunnan province in Southwestern China. It is neither an official re-seller nor a true Apple property, although the owners have gone to great lengths to mimic the style and feeling of typical Apple Stores.

Forbes.com picked up on this story and published some commentary.

The most interesting facet of this story is that both sources claim the employees of the store believe they work for Apple and Steve Jobs. I’m wondering if the employees are aware that they work for a store that has no connection to Apple other than the products they’re selling (authentic or not). For the employees to openly admit that they don’t work for Apple when the store is trying so hard to appear genuine would promote disharmony and would cause a loss of face, two things Chinese culture generally prohibits.

This also makes me think of the employment market in China and what attracts young Chinese to foreign companies. From both a cultural and generational perspective, I’d suspect innovative Western companies top the list. Do they? Read my related post on the employment market in China for more insight.

The demand for products with Western brands has had a robust consumer market for so long in China that fakes abound in places where the real thing doesn’t reach. What better place than a second or third-tier Chinese city? I wonder how this store’s management recruited it’s retail representatives. In any case, intellectual property as a concept does not fly so high in China.

Thoughts?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

RW3 CultureWizard has established a Twitter presence to connect directly with CultureWizard site users, clients and anyone interested in global business and cross-cultural exchange.

The CultureWizard Twitter feed will include articles posted on the CultureWizard Blog, tweets and retweets of links to interesting content, responses to our followers, and musings that we’d like to share with the CultureWizard community. Much of this content will be unique to our Twitter feed, so be sure to follow us @culturewizard!

November’s Training+Development (T+D) magazine focuses on instructional design and culture in an article called “Launching a Culture-Based Learning Product”. It highlights the instructional designer’s job to “know the culture of your learner” when building a human-centered learning product. To that end, it prescribes the collection of data, including “ethnicity, race, gender, learning styles, class, demographics, history, experiences, beliefs, values, norms, interests and ideologies.”

The task of knowing a culture takes more than collecting data, although it is a good point of departure. Visceral cross-cultural experience is another ingredient that should be added to this list, but of course it’s not accessible to everyone. CultureWizard is an online intercultural learning platform that addresses the task of building cultural awareness and knowing about the specific preferences and behaviors attributed to cultures around the world. Understanding learning styles can be gleaned from the interactive tools on CultureWizard, directly impacting the designer’s success in blending culture-based content into a learning product. According to the article,

Culture-based content provides for the needs of learners in both anthropological and psychological ways. This means that the learner’s ways of being and seeing the world, as well as psychological ways of being and seeing the world, are addressed in the design of the product.

How have you developed cultural knowledge? What is your favorite way to do this (for example, via books, the internet or travel)?

Joshua

RW3 CultureWizard

Globish (a word coined from the union of global + English), a simplified approach to speaking English, is in high demand for the employees of Japanese companies looking to spark new growth in a stagnant economy. According to Bloomberg, company encouragement to learn English may be the best way to strengthen Japan’s workforce. Globish teaches people to speak using a collection of 1500 business-relevant words and simple grammar. The video below is from the Globish website, which states “The simple goal of Globish is to reach only a level — a common ground — where everyone understands everyone else, everywhere in the world.”

Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo, says in the Bloomberg article that “Emphasizing English is definitely the right direction to go, as the domestic economy has peaked…Companies need more sophisticated English speakers for their globalization, which is crucial to spur profits.” Many English-language schools and training companies have also seen a recent surge in activity, as companies and individuals seek to prepare themselves for international expansion.

It seems that a collection of 1500 words and simple grammar makes the language accessible to a larger number of people while legitimizing the use of a reduced form of English in the marketplace.

Do you speak Globish? I imagine people learning Globish will use it with non-native English speakers who have a similar understanding of the language. How effective is this way of speaking English in terms of effective intercultural communication?

Josh

RW3 CultureWizard

Kapil Sibal (above), India’s human resource development minister, told the media the first group to receive the touchscreen computers, which resemble Apple’s $499 iPad, are over 100 million schoolchildren. The goal is reduce the cost of production to $20, and ultimately to $10. India’s development of this computer is symbolic of the country’s power to influence and change the world. How will this affect the country’s enormous illiterate population? According to UNICEF, 34% of the adult population and 18% of youth were illiterate in 2007, compared to a rate of 7% and 1%, respectively, in China. With a total population of over one billion, these numbers exceed the total population of the United States.

How do you think this will change India’s burgeoning population and workforce? How will an increase in literacy and access to internet affect India’s role in the global marketplace?

Read more on Indian Express.

RW3 CultureWizard

HP recently cut 9,000 jobs and will hire 6,000 new employees outside the US. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, HP is shedding the sizable portion of its workforce to be more competitive with IBM.

This story, like many others, underscores the continuing effects of globalization and the increasingly crucial need for managers to develop global business skills and intercultural competency. We now understand companies can no longer rely on a national approach to the market to be competitive. Developing economies around the world have created an environment multinational corporations find hard to resist. Can their global endeavors be sustainable without acknowledging significant cultural differences before establishing operations in numerous foreign countries?

Joshua

RW3 CultureWizard

The May issue of Training + Development magazine describes a sales coaching initiative, “Sales Coaching Across Cultures,” that was successful at one company’s offices all over the world. According to the magazine, it was successful with people from the US, Norway, Argentina, Japan, Italy and Australia.

What design methods can make a standard program effective in a number of culturally distinct locales? In the above instance, it’s clear that the delivery of the sales coaching lessons was flexible enough to allow for culturally-specific tactics, which are different from country to country. Oftentimes we hear about the failure of global initiatives created in one culture that didn’t reflect adjustment when delivered in another culture. It’s important to understand cultural gaps in learning styles when training around the world. For example, how would a German group of sales managers best learn how to coach their team versus an Indian group? How does the value placed on relationships make the sales process different in these countries? How do norms of communication affect the ways in which a sales manager would coach a salesperson?

The magazine states the company learned that “a global initiative is most effective when there is a standard program that is delivered locally and with flexibility.” How would you factor cultural differences into a global program design? What would you use to support the global integrity of widespread initiatives? Please let us know.

RW3 CultureWizard

A New York Times piece highlights human culture as a positive evolutionary force. In the recent past, evolutionary scientists only believed disease and the effects of the environment drove natural selection.

Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics.

How do you see culture impacting the evolution of humans? What have customs and traditions had to do with our survival?

Click here to jump to the article.

RW3 CultureWizard

In the Wall Street Journal, an article highlights the “secretive” culture of Toyota in relation to a series of recalls.

“Toyota is still very much run by its Japan headquarters, despite being active in the U.S. since 1957. Top leadership doesn’t include U.S. executives. The Toyota officials who run the recall process are in Japan.”

Because of this, Toyota’s US operations have not been able to react swiftly to safety issues that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has identified.

According to a person familiar with the matter, “what has really happened is a breakdown in communications within Toyota” between its D.C. office and Japan headquarters. “The Washington office didn’t have the information it needed to provide to the government.”

Around 130,000 Toyota Prius cars are involved in a global recall because of its braking system.

Why is this? While many of the facts are missing, a comment about cultural norms would shed some light on this issue. Communication in Japanese culture is quite indirect, and very hierarchical, which creates an obvious gap in understanding, e.g. when an American team is working remotely with a Japanese team. Certain information may be only for privileged executives, thus leaving a foreign team of less senior individuals out of the loop. Mistakes are viewed in a more negative light by collectivistic or group-oriented cultures, as in Japan, thus people will strive to avoid giving bad news or making direct confrontations to save face and to maintain harmony.

It will be interesting to see where exactly communication broke down for Toyota. Where do you think is may have occurred?

Click here to jump to the article.

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The front page of The Hindu earlier this week featured an article called “In China, Avatar finds unlikely resonance.”

“…Many film critics and bloggers have…been struck by the close resonance the film’s plotline has had for many cinema-goers here.” Powerful real estate companies in China have forcefully moved residents off land in some of the worst human rights offenses on the country’s record. The article displays some interesting opinions Chinese viewers have had on the movie, including one person that found the movie unoriginal from a Chinese perspective.

Click here to jump to the article.

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An Investor’s Business Daily article this past weekend poses the following question: Why is it hard for American companies to expand overseas? Simply put, “mastering cultural differences and understanding European, Asian or Latin American customers affect bottom-line results.” So, if nothing is invested in cultural learning, business will not build the momentum it needs to achieve the success it took to expand in the first place.

“Americans think if they are well-intentioned and go overseas or anywhere, they’ll be successful. Being well-intentioned isn’t enough,” said Charlene Solomon, EVP of RW3 Culturewizard who co-authored Managing Across Cultures with CEO Michael Schell. Solomon says that “businesspeople need to understand cultural differences and pinpoint what global customers want from their product.”

Wal-Mart considers local tastes in selling crocodiles at a Sam's Club in Guangzhou, China. AP

One of the most important tips Schell and Solomon offered is to “honor the local culture as exemplified by McDonald’s buying local produce and ingredients rather than having them shipped in.” Knowing the customer in an intimate way, as one would more naturally do in their native country, is absolutely essential. Developing a global mindset is a core competency for all members of an organization, management especially, in the 21st century.

Click here to jump to the article.

Josh

RW3 CultureWizard

The way people communicate is a vital part of understanding a culture. It’s crucial to recognize an indirect communication culture because the words someone uses are only a portion of the message being conveyed.

Cultures in countries like India, Thailand and Japan are very indirect in their style. This means that individuals often speak in a roundabout way by adapting the language to be somewhat general and extremely tactful. Non-verbal communication, such as facial expressions, tone of voice and posture, take on a very important role as clues about the full message. While the goal of an indirect communicator is still information, he or she strives to maintain harmony, avoid confrontation and save face for all parties.

If you work with indirect communicators in your business activities, be careful to pay close attention to these signals.

- from RW3′s CultureWizard®

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An article in The Daily Beast highlights the numerous culturally astute personalities that comprise the current US presidential administration. The confluence of like-minded individuals is “…more than a trivial coincidence. So-called ‘Third Culture Kids’—and the adults they become—share certain emotional and psychological traits that may exert great influence in the new administration. According to a body of sociological literature devoted to children who spend a portion of their developmental years outside their ‘passport country,’ the classic profile of a ‘TCK’ is someone with a global perspective who is socially adaptable and intellectually flexible. He or she is quick to think outside the box and can appreciate and reconcile different points of view.”

Now that the current administration is nearing the one year mark, how has it fared in comparison to past administrations that hadn’t the same cadre of multicultural members? What is the value of international, intercultural experience in political leadership?

Click here to jump to the article.

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