The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

Life Globalized

Published by Esteban Glas on January 22nd, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Business, Work, long term thinking

6:30AM, dragging myself out of bed. I’m not a morning person, and ever since the Government decided to apply daylight savings time I’m still off the clock hours. It feels like 5:00 or 5:30 AM rather than 7. I quietly drag myself to the living room, power up the suspended ThinkPad and try to bring my senses back to life. It usually takes me about 1 hour to feel coherent enough to cope with any logical arguments. This time around I don’t have that option it is already 7:00AM and I must dial into a conference number to talk to our guys in China.

Only half hour into the meeting (which I lead) I start to feel like I’m grasping some sort of sense and getting to communicate some concepts. Communication is a problem all by itself. In this instance I have an interpreter on the other end of the line translating my words into Chinese and asking the team’s questions for me, then translating those back to English. The impression I always get is that when I say things like "This is not going to get approved" it’ll get translated to: "we need more spaghetti".

It is not a minor task to try to bring teams from different parts of the world together. Language barriers and time zones are limitations that are hard to cope with. I don’t expect people in China to talk in English (or Spanish), quite on the contrary I feel in debt because I wish I knew some Mandarin to enhance our dialogs instead. As for Time zones, I’ll just say that wife has already learnt to ask when we can have dinner or go to sleep, since I usually have some appointment with the other end of the planet at the oddest times.

But it is all well worth the efforts, in most cases. There is such an underlying richness and potential behind the sheer fact of counting with all those differentiated human backgrounds that make me gladly do those things, even when I hate the world around me as I turn off the alarm clock at 6:30 AM for a conference call.

Cultural clashes are a significant portion of such interactions. What one can regard as a smart comment, or a funny allusion might be interpreted as insulting or not understood at all. Words must be chosen carefully and the tone in which statements are thrown out through the impersonal phone line must be well tuned and orchestrated. Engaging is also quite defying. I know how to wind up people in my own culture, but that does not quite work the same way for people with a completely different background. I struggle to motivate people from across the globe, people whom I’ve never seen in my life.

The difference that cultural background makes on the way people solve similar problems is a power that only a handful of companies are able to unleash. What usually happens is that a certain way of doing things is choked down the throat of everyone, the results are usually not pleasing.

If imposing methods and ways of doing things is not the answer, what would that answer be. To watch and learn. An acute observation of the subtle differences of a way people in distinct cultures work and interact can yield as a result some changes and tweaks on how to improve methods and processes to fit perfectly. It is only through that that a good result can be achieved.

I’ll use an example that is close to me. Argentina is an odd country in many ways. Our everchanging political panorama, economic crisis and sparse resources force most of us to be in a continuous state of adaptation. Since there is not a maturity (from society or government) to plan with more than a couple of months we become great improvisers. Thus, semi-chaotic situations seem to fit best the "Argentine Breed". On the other hand long term planning and process set up are not our best strongholds and neither can we adapt well to structured processes (this, of course, is a very broad generalization, you get the point).

In a world where working with colleges with the most differentiated backgrounds is an everyday thing only those companies who are smart enough to adapt to the particularities of every place will have a leading edge in terms of service and production.

The Challenge | WP Theme by HSO MM based on Gathering
Site prodly powered by WordPress