By William R. Dodson
I love working in hot places: the pace is slower and
I get to take naps. In Mexico, I got to take two hours for lunch, which
seemed more natural to me than hurriedly eating a squishy tuna salad sandwich
at my desk while pecking with a single finger at the computer keyboard.
Of course, on that particular Mexico project, I hated how long it took
for the blindingly-fast Sun Unix computer to be delivered to the client
site. I think we lost about one month off the project plan we hadn’t
taken into account during initial scheduling. The machine had gotten to
Mexico OK; I guess folks had a lot of lunches to catch up on.
Time is a deceptive, slippery sort of thing that is
directly linked to the degree to which an individual is able to multi-task.
In general, the cultures that lay in the temperate and mind-numbingly
cold zones to the north of the equator are lousy at multi-tasking. And
the more Anglo-Saxon-Jute-ish the culture is, the less likely it is able
to juggle concerns like a circus performer keeps balls and chairs and
small dogs simultaneously tumbling through the air, without dropping any
of them.
And this, really, comes down to a culture’s experience
and outlook on the phenomenon of change. Asian, Mediteranean, Latin American
and African cultures see change as inevitable, as something that should
and must be accommodated for all stakeholders to come out winners in a
transaction. Those Anglo-Saxon-Jute-ish (forthwith ASJ’s) cultures
I mentioned before not only juggle terribly, they expect everything to
be fixed in place with a piece of paper and a signature. ASJ’s like
the British and the Germans and the French and especially like the Americans
expect time to stop; they expect entropy to end. Now every physicist knows
you can’t stop entropy; that is, the universe’s inevitable
movement toward disorder—chaos, even. High-energy physicists know
it, chaos theorists know it, and the Mexican deliverymen responsible for
our Sun Unix server know it, too. In fact, most cultures that prefer to
stay in tune with nature know very well that things change.
Which is why I sometimes have a job as an organizational
change management consultant. In America. Americans don’t know that
things change: schedules change, budgets change, and most especially,
people’s minds change. Even the thinking of those very executives
who originally signed the mandate to make a project happen; they seem
to change their minds the most—or is it, really, that they’re
backtracking as Change itself (note the capital “C”) fills
in the blanks of their otherwise inadequate understanding of the conditions
that prompted a new project in the first place?
I’d never be a successful organizational change
consultant in China. First of all, my Chinese is not at a level at which
I’d be able to convince Chinese people that the changes at hand
were good for them. They'd know I was lying. Second, and most important,
they talk amongst themselves way too much for a change management consultant
to be able to convince them in time for management to perform its magic
trick on the organization.
Cultures with a multi-faceted view of time support
societies in which the people communicate with one another constantly,
about everything, as though everything were equally important. These information-rich
environments know change is inevitable because that’s what they
talk about all the time: things changing—their relationship with
their spouse, their daughter’s fiancé, the latest episode
of a favorite TV opera, the boss’s affair with the secretary, the
silly consultant trying to get them to change.
ASJ cultures on the other hand spend a lot of their
time trying to stop time from flowing, morphing, evolving life, us, business
and human relationships. The “good life” that ASJ cultures
are living, though, is influencing other cultures to get things done within
the agreed upon schedule, to take fewer naps and to eat shorter lunches.
It also means fewer people engaging one another in an effort to ride the
waves of change and to take the time to benefit each other, instead of
to out-compete one’s fellow man (or woman) more efficiently. Life—and
business—should be so simple. Now where did I put that Corona beer?
Author Bio: William R. Dodson is Managing
Director of Silk Road Communications, L.L.C., an international markets
research consultancy that helps businesses develop and place successful
products and people in foreign markets. He can be reached at wdodson@silkrc.com
or +1 (847)722-7817.
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