How - Dov Seidman [18]
You are riding in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know he was going at least thirty-five miles per hour in an area of the city where the maximum allowed speed is twenty miles per hour. There are no witnesses other than you. His lawyer says that if you testify under oath that he was driving only twenty miles per hour, you will save him from serious consequences. What right has your friend to expect you to protect him? What do you think you would do in view of the obligations of a sworn witness and the obligations to your friend?3
Before you read the results, take a moment to think how you would respond.
In countries with a strong Protestant tradition and stable democracies, like the United States, Switzerland, Sweden, and Australia, nearly 80 percent thought the friend had “no” or only “some” right to expect help, and would choose to tell the truth in court. In South Korea and Yugoslavia, fewer than 20 percent felt this way; 80 percent felt that helping their friend was the right thing to do. “When we posed this question in Japan,” Hampden-Turner told me when we spoke, “the Japanese said this was a difficult problem, and they wanted to leave the room. I thought this was an unusual way for people to answer the question, but let them leave the room to discuss it. They came back in 25 minutes and said the correct answer is to say to your friend, ‘I will stick with you; I will give any version of events that you ask me to, but I ask you to find in our friendship the courage that allows us to tell the truth.’ I thought this was a wonderful solution. They wanted to be universalistic—to tell the absolute truth, a characteristic of the Western world—but their culture is particularistic and values the love and loyalty to a particular friend. They made the move from one to the other, but approached it from the opposite direction than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant would.”4
Complicating these differences in perception is the concurrent tendency of each culture to view negatively the values of the other. A Swiss person might tend to distrust a South Korean because, in the Swiss person’s view, Koreans don’t respect authority, and that Korean might in turn disrespect the Swiss believing that they do not sufficiently value friendship and loyalty. How does that bode for your ability to communicate to the wide variety of people throughout your global supply chain or on an e-mail distribution list? How about a company trying to disseminate and acculturate a uniform code of conduct throughout its global organization? How do you get people to do the Wave if, at a foundational level, they either mistrust or don’t understand your values?
When software development company Lotus sought to expand its well-known business collaboration products—Notes and Domino—to support a global user base, it ran headfirst into these questions. To extend its “global virtual watercooler” to successfully interface with business in Japan, for example, it designed a space within the software for users to share the extensive social pleasantries that Japanese culture demands prior to doing business.5 Bridging these gaps can be a mind-boggling task. Imagine how many different options it would take to accommodate the bridging requirements between every possible pair of cultures, and then remember that a single group meeting on a project might involve representatives of four or five different cultures.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
Business is an ecosystem, distance no longer keeps us apart, the ties that bind us are looser than ever, and there is a new us whose members change almost daily; and it is all made possible because electronic communication fills the synapses between us. Electronic communication is both a boon and a bane. It makes these new, powerful networks of collaboration possible, but does so in a strange and fractured language.
What separates humans from other creatures is our