Multicultural Blinders, Marketing Myopia Continued

The San Francisco Chronicle recently carried a special section on outsourcing. On adopting to the inevitability of international business, one recommendation in this article stood out.

As the world becomes one marketplace, it's important to think globally.

"It doesn't hurt to have courses in history, world cultures, macroeconomics and world religions," says [managing director at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive recruiting firm, Paul] Zellner. Learning a foreign language is not as important as developing "a cultural open-mindedness."

If you have an engineering, accounting or back-office job that is at risk, "if you have added to your technical skills a cultural awareness, a willingness to embrace differences, manage through them, suddenly you find yourself in a favorable position," says Zellner.

[An executive director with Russell Reynolds, Shawn] Banerji's advice: "Show passion and enthusiasm, show results, view yourself as a citizen of the world.

I have been massaging this post for a week now. It's actually a follow-up to the marketing myopia post. I had noted recent posts on the international nature of business at VentureBlog and multiculturism at Lip-Sticking.

Developing this "culture open-mindedness" is ultimately about developing the empathic mindset I spoke of in the previous post. Empathy starts to get trickier when others don't even have the same set of codes and belief systems you were raised with. Although fundamentally at the core human level there are universal similarities, the glaring differences at the cultural level will leap out at first. Maybe this actually makes it easier to not assume that all "people are just like me" or maybe not.

These codes [set of codes by which people behave and relate to each other] are caught, however, not taught. They are caught from the examples that we find in the different "families" we meet over time. The genetic family is the first of these, soon augmented by the school and perhaps more crucially, by the peer group of our schoolmates. These early groups establish the framework through which we view our world. Their importance cannot be exaggerated, because young children accept whatever they are given as the way the world is. As they grow older they need more models to choose from. They should, therefore, be exposed to as many different groups and associations as possible. Until I left college I had not met any adults other than my parents and their friends, or my teachers. Cosy universe though it was, in my case, it was also a partial world. Other worlds are not so cosy or so decent, yet they set the rules and the codes for the young who grow up in them. - Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit

Don't wait until your next opportunity to travel overseas to practice your global awareness and the "cultural open-mindedness" spoken of in the SF Chronicle article.

If you can't do it right at home, it doesn't get easier abroad. There is a tendency I noticed for people to search out like-minded people in strange cultures. I noticed this when I was traveling solo through Mexico and Guatemala this past winter. Everything is new - the food, the language, the transportation schedule, the lodging, the sights, the weather, everything in short - and the over-stimulation can be dizzying. I was crying out for something I knew, something familiar. And so for a couple of days I traveled with a Swiss and a Czech whom spoke perfect English. It eases the stress to cling to what you know. Now I totally understand why ethnic neighborhoods develop in the U.S. -- there is a strong urge to cling to something you do know, to preserve some stability when confronted with a totally foreign world.

Resist the temptation to stick close to people like you and you will be pleasantly rewarded. I have met and talked with teachers, politicians, stay-at-home mothers, storekeepers, taxi drivers, economic development workers, businessmen, activists, laborers, lawyers, students, Mayan priests and more just in that Mexico/Guatemala trip alone. I've had fascinating conversations that reveal more about the people and the culture that is ever possible to ascertain merely by observation alone. Participate, interact, engage.

You can try out your "cultural openmindedness" and empathy right in your own town. There are plenty of foreign (to you) viewpoints to expose yourself to wherever you are.

It's too easy an example in the Bay Area, so I'll use an example from the past when I lived in Salt Lake City, which is not often lauded for its diverse population. And yet, there are neighborhoods that are predominantly Hispanic, there's a fairly good-sized Pacific Indian community (mainly Tongans, Samoans), and if you're not LDS, you can always get to know your Mormon neighbors. There are Republicans to talk to if you are Democrat. There are the underground "ski-bum" counter-culture types whom trade the corporate 9-to-5 grind for odd jobs and the flexibility of hitting the slopes on a powder day or riding a single-track trail at noon on the first warm spring day of the season. There are gay community happenings and even a gay church tucked in my sister's neighborhood, or you could opt to visit the polygamist enclave near the Cottonwood Canyons. You can chat to the rancher just a little further south whose cows are grazing on BLM land and the staunch Whole Foods-organic, Southern Wilderness Alliance defender-environmentalist. You can hang out with millionaires in their ski lodge mansions in Summit County (also affectionately known as Colorado, Utah) or the less affluent in Rose Park.

You can strike up a conversation with people on the bus or while taking the light rail system into downtown. Wherever you go, there are people whom aren't on the surface like you. It will expand your mindset to see for yourself what beliefs are culturally conditioned, what models of living you yourself assumed were universal for lack of direct experience with others different from yourself, your own assumptions and stereotypes about others, and most importantly what core values and deep desires are universal in nature and resonate with people everywhere.

Comments

[Yvonne DiVita]

Exciting post. Yes, so important...and overlooed in the American business world. I'm meeting and interviewing people of other cultures and one common thread is that, although many of their cultures are becoming Westernized, they wish Americans would not think of the U.S. as the center of the Universe, because it is not. As Nat Yogachandra, author of Beauty, Bureacrats and Breaking the Silence wrote in the autographed copy of the book he gave me, "The Earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."