A compendium of current news and headlines with commentary providing unique cultural insight into global affairs, business and daily life around the world.

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Check out CultureWizard Digest #29 here!

* New TV Show: OUTSOURCED
* Global Leadership
* Advertising to Muslims
* “For rent in China: White people”

CultureLinks
+ Push and Pull in Learning Technology
+ Women’s Economic Opportunities
+ Legal Outsourcing

CultureTips
+ Panama

RW-3.com

How do food and customs surrounding the acts of eating and drinking inform culture (and vice versa)? How is one’s awareness of culture developed through cooking, eating, buying and talking about food? Below is something my colleague, Grayson Leverenz, told me about how she likes to tie gastronomy into her travels:

Whenever I visit a new city, I search for an authentic eating experience. On a recent trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I discovered a Philly Cheese Steak as the culinary choice of locals. Jim’s Steaks has been serving the classic cheese steak sandwiches since 1939, and with its prime location on South Street, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

Cooks prepare sliced beef and onions on a grill, slather a hoagie roll with Cheese Whiz, and top it with the meat and onions. Hot and delicious, it goes well with Yuengling, a local PA beer. John Denver, an American folk singer popular in the 1970′s folk singer, said it best in his autograph on Jim’s wall (pictured below): ‘I’d be a vegetarian if it wasn’t for your cheese steak.’

An authentic Philly Cheese Steak

A cheese steak is a truly cultural representation of Philadelphia and of an American innovation: “cheese whiz”.

Personally, I like to visit grocery stores and food markets when I travel to new places, which reveal a lot about an area’s history, society and, of course, typical cuisine. When I’m find myself in new cities and countries, I ask questions like: do you bargain for food? Do you bring with you to the market your own bags to take food home? Do people eat a lot of street food? Do people prefer to eat in their homes? With whom can you share food? Questions lead to more questions, all of which paint an appetizing cultural portrait.

How do you think about food when experiencing new peoples and cultures? How much can you learn about a culture from it’s food and drink? Please share your stories and tell us about your favorite gastronomical experiences!

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

Outsourced is a new show on NBC, which will air on September 23 in the US. The show is a comedy based on the cross-cultural interaction between an American manager and his Indian staff in a Mumbai call center. If you haven’t heard of the show, watch the trailer below to get a sense for the humor, which amounts to serious yet hysterical intercultural disaster (you’ll have to wait for the obligatory ad to play first).

The cultural faux pas and critical misunderstandings laden throughout the show are unfortunately so common to most everyone who has experienced outsourcing in India, they’ve called the attention of the US mass media.

How do you see this show impacting viewers’ cultural awareness? Is comedy an effective way to disseminate cultural perspectives and values? Do you predict the show will be popular or offensive?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

+ Panama City is the capital of Panama and is purported to be one of the most modern cities in Central America. The skyline is reminiscent of major cities in the US, while the old part of the city has narrow, cobblestone streets and colonial buildings.
+ If you were to think about the most important cultural attributes that you will see operating in business in Panama, they would be:
- A hierarchical structure
- Group-oriented interests
- The importance of interpersonal relationships
- An indirect form of communication

+ Panamanian society and business are highly stratified and vertically structured. People respect authority and look to those above them for guidance and decision making. Rank is important and those above you in rank must be treated with respect.
+ When greeting one another, women often pat each other on the right forearm or shoulder, rather than shake hands. If they are close friends, they may hug and kiss on the right cheek. Men shake hands until they know someone well, at which time they progress to the more traditional abrazo, a hug and back slapping.
+ Panamanians do not require a great deal of personal space when conversing. If you back away, you may give offense or the person may step forward to close the gap.

- from RW3′s CultureWizard® Country Profiles

RW3 CultureWizard

According to the New York Times, outsourcing legal services to India has grown in the past few years, and is poised to expand at an even faster rate in coming years.

Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Legal outsourcing firms are also hiring experienced lawyers from Western countries to handle more complicated projects, something many lawyers would not consider in prior years based on a general aversion to outsourcing legal work and relocation to India. The article highlights the challenges of moving to India and working with Indians:

Moving to a legal outsourcing firm, especially in India, is not for everyone. About 5 percent of Western transplants cannot handle it and move back home, managers estimate.

Some find it hard to adapt to India. Other times, the job itself does not suit them — after spending years working nearly independently as a litigator, for example, it can be hard to transition to managing and inspiring a team of young foreign lawyers.

Cultural preparation is supremely important to living and working in a new culture. While many people are inherently suited to assignments in countries around the world, the vast majority of people won’t be equipped with the skills to succeed without sufficient intercultural training. How will this new trend impact internal needs for cultural training? The article predicts legal outsourcing will climb to over $1 billion in revenue by 2014. What are organizations doing to support global initiatives like this? What are the challenges of virtual, global teams that span time zone differences of 10 hours or more and cultural, linguistic and religious barriers?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

Click here to read an article in ASTD’s Training + Development magazine about RW3 CultureWizard’s Virtual Teams Survey Report 2010—The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams.

Learn about the shortcomings of virtual work, and how to support virtual teams with the training they need to succeed despite the lack of context face-to-face interaction provides.

RW3 CultureWizard

A commercial about shampoo sans hair. Unilever

A New York Times article details the culturally aware techniques Western companies are using to sell their brands to non-Western audiences, in this case women who wear tudungs, a traditional head scarf used by Muslim women in Malaysia (the shampoo product in the ad specifically addresses the effects of the tudung on hair and scalp). In the past, many companies would enter new countries and offend consumers through advertisement and marketing that lacked sensitivity to societal and religious norms. Now, marketing experts know “rule No.1 is to avoid causing offense.” Furthermore, the global Muslim population is over 1.5 billion, and John Goodman of Ogilvy & Mather says there is no excuse for not considering culture when building brands and marketing campaigns:

It’s like being in 1990 and telling people that China doesn’t matter. Twenty years ago you might have said that, but now you’re being foolish.

A lack of cultural knowledge is clearly unacceptable to consumers in any market, but how can we learn to sell to and interact effectively with people from around the world? How do we develop and sustain cultural competency in a world that is constantly changing?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

In China, according to the CNN video above, companies hire Caucasians to pose as employees or even business partners, which effectively bolster the “face” or reputation of the company. In the video, one man posed as an Italian jeweler for a Chinese jewelry company producing pieces inspired by Italian design, which in the eyes of the Chinese customers made their products more authentic. However, the man was in actuality an American actor. In another case, a young Caucasian male was hired to sit in an office that faced the street to visibly show passersby the company had people from the West working there.

The employment of Westerners in this way is less surprising considering the importance of face in Chinese culture. How does this strike you as an approach to the marketplace in China?

Is this way of marketing and doing business unlike advertising of the 21st century where illusion and exaggeration play a key role?

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

Listen to The American Entrepreneur radio segment “Crossing That Cultural Chasm: ‘The International Capitalist’ Talks With Two Experts” (be sure to click on the second clip), in which David Iwinski interviews RW3 CultureWizard’s CEO, Michael Shell, and EVP, Charlene Solomon. Below is a blurb from the show’s website:

So how do you take your business global? “The International Capitalist” David Iwinski has some answers, as he takes over the hosting reins on American Entrepreneur Radio to discuss that very topic. He’ll talk with the authors of two of the hottest books on the market when it comes to globalization. First, Charlene Solomon and Michael Schell discuss how to effectively manage when your people are scattered around the globe, as covered in their book, “Managing Across Cultures: The Seven Keys to Doing Business With a Global Mindset”.

RW3 CultureWizard

A compendium of current news and headlines with commentary providing unique cultural insight into global affairs, business and daily life around the world.

Interested in receiving the CultureWizard Digest every month? Click here to sign up.

Check out CultureWizard Digest #28 here!

* “Festival of Errors”
* Asia Focuses on Inheritance Planning
* Thinking in Other Languages
* Refugees of Forte Wayne

CultureLinks
+ India’s $35 Laptop
+ Would you outsource yourself?

CultureTips
+ Negotiation in Brazil, Japan and the US

RW-3.com

Here is a brief summary of a tactic Japanese organizations are utilizing to save money, according to the New York Times, which poses an interesting employment model for other countries:

Under fierce pressure to cut costs, large Japanese companies are increasingly outsourcing and sending white-collar operations to China and Southeast Asia, where doing business costs less than in Japan. But while many American companies have been content to transfer work to, say, an Indian outsourcing company staffed with English-speaking Indians, Japanese companies are taking a different tack. Japanese outsourcers are hiring Japanese workers to do the jobs overseas — and paying them considerably less than if they were working in Japan.

This strikes me as an issue of culture and language: Japanese companies are motivated to hire native Japanese speakers, of which there are few outside of Japan, to service Japanese-speaking customers in low-cost cities and countries. Culturally, customer service is unique to Japan, and the satisfaction of Japanese customers is hinged on mutual expectations. Cities around Asia like Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei have been chosen for these outsourced individuals. According to the article,

“Even foreign citizens with a good command of the Japanese language…may not be equipped with a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the manners and politesse that Japanese customers often demand.

While Japanese companies could save even more if they hired only locals overseas — some experts say locals could be hired at half the cost — the preference for Japanese nationals is likely to endure, said [Kazuyuki Ichikawa of Pasona Global].

‘You say one thing and Japanese employees will understand three things,’ he said. ‘In Western cultures, you might be straightforward with what you want your staff to know, but a Japanese manager would want you to understand it without having to say it.’”

Thus, a Japanese team working in a call-center in Bangkok already has the necessary cultural awareness a team of Indians would have to learn in order to successfully interact with the American customers of its US-based client. However, the cultural experience of relocating to a new country is another topic.

According to the article, many young Japanese are choosing to move overseas to work for companies based at home, while those same companies opt to send their younger employees abroad. Would you elect to move or “outsource” yourself to a city outside your home country for work? Would your outlook on this change if you were unemployed? What would you expect in terms of training or preparation to do so?

Click here to read the story on the New York Times.

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

Use Expatistan, an interesting web tool, to compare the cost of living across a number of areas between two cities. It’s easy, and it is also based on the input of users around the world. The tool describes itself as a

Collaborative database of prices around the world. You enter the prices, we make the comparisons.

RW3 CultureWizard

Let’s take a look at a New York Times article on inheritance planning in Asia, and more specifically in China. According to the article, many of the “modern first generation of wealthy Asians” are interested in estate planning for their children.

William Lexmond, a managing director with UBS in Singapore, said that because family values were stronger in Asia, high-net-worth individuals between 30 and 40 years old — those with at least $1 million in investable assets — were more likely to do estate planning than their Western counterparts ‘because they feel they have the obligation to do so.’

Why is this obligation felt so strongly? Below is the Chinese character for family, which can also mean home. The character itself, etymologically, represents a pig under a roof, symbolizing the importance of avoiding scarcity as the most important function of family. The very center of Chinese life is family, and each person within a family has a specific role, of which the objective is to maintain their well-being. In most cases, there is a great sense of mutual dependence across members of a family. So, the idea of inheritance and estate planning is amenable to the Chinese ethos.

The Chinese Character for family or jiā.

‘Rather than to rely on someone else, i.e., the state, to take care of your family, there is more of a desire to make sure something is set aside,’ [Lexmond] said. ‘It’s more of a self-help type situation to provide some support.’

Lexmond underscores the centrality of maintaining stability for the family, even after one passes away. The article also mentions the relative sophistication of inheritance planning in Asia because of the stronger demand for the service. What is your take on the role of the family in China and the measures taken after a member passes away? It would be interesting to know if the Asian finance industry in general would benefit from an awareness of these aspects of culture, from which more attractive products could be created and marketed.

Sean

RW3 CultureWizard

Home to a large refugee population, and the largest Burmese community in the US, Fort Wayne, Indiana has experience teaching new arrivals about local culture, as NPR tells us.

Nearly all refugees in Fort Wayne frequent the Refugee Resource Center. It offers services and classes in everything from how to clean a home, to proper indoor plumbing etiquette. These are sometimes new concepts for people who have only lived in rural villages or refugee camps.

While the Refugee Resource Center has focused on the basic building blocks of etiquette and protocol, where are the lessons that provide a deeper level of understanding? How can immigrants and refugees begin to understand the reasons behind typical behaviors in the US without some orientation to its history and values? And, how can those helping refugees from places like Burma, Darfur and Bosnia better understand the culture in which they’ve been socialized? We often receive questions from businesspeople working across cultures like “what should I do and not do?”, and the answer is generally a list of actions or expressions that exist outside of a cultural context. As a result, individuals have to memorize the do’s and don’ts, versus gathering a certain sense of the key values and beliefs of a culture, which informs etiquette, protocol, behavior and more.

The image below was taken inside a laundromat in Fort Wayne, where ethnic Burmese frequent. Betel nut, or the areca nut, is the seed of a palm tree native to many parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. It is chewed, much like tobacco, for it’s effects as a stimulant, much like the effects of drinking coffee. However, the nut is chewed and disposed of, not swallowed. If a coffee-drinking individual were to walk into a laundromat with a sign displaying “No Drinking! No Coffee!”, I believe the person would be compelled to question why the sign existed.

Erika Celeste/NPR

Fort Wayne has won the All-America City title thrice, and the work of the Center is an important resource to refugees. Do you have experience with a similar center? Have you worked with refugees? If so, what are some of their dilemmas in relation to cultural adjustment? Please let us know!

Click here to listen to the NPR story online. Click here to learn more about the tradition of chewing betel nut.

RW3 CultureWizard

An Iranian official talks about men's haircuts to an audience in the grooming business. Reuters

A recent New York Times article reminds us how extensive the government’s influence is in Iranian society. A “haircut catalog” was published by the Ministry of Culture outlining the types of haircuts appropriate for men in the Islamic republic, and impermissible haircuts, which generally represent a strong “Western” style. According to the article,

The haircut catalog is part of the Iranian government’s long-running battle against Western cultural influence. Every summer, the country’s morality police renew their crackdown on ‘un-Islamic’ dress and styles, including loose veils on women and long hair or ponytails on men.

Jaleh Khodayar, a member of the Ministry of Culture, told the semiofficial ILNA news agency:

We do not intend to reverse the culture…we want to preserve our culture and respect Iranian tradition and come up with hairstyles that confront Western cultural invasion.

These acts to fortify Iranian culture, which demonstrate a widespread control over daily life, are met with resentment by many young individuals in Iran who prefer to make these decisions without the government’s input. What do you make of this? Is there a similar example of this kind of government-cum-cultural arbiter role in other countries?

Click here to read the article on the New York Times website.

RW3 CultureWizard