How (6 page)

Authors: Dov Seidman

BOOK: How

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Returning to our organization-as-stadium metaphor, a Wave must work with everybody in the stadium. Full-time employees are like season ticket holders, with a significant investment in the success of the team, and that stake might be sufficient motivation for them to participate in your Wave. Others—consultants or on-site contractors, say—might completely depend on what you pay them, and they, too, might stand up when you ask. But there are many people, five rows down, who do not and will not. They depend on other things. Some came just for this one game. They might have a lesser stake, or even competing interests. Some might be cheering for the visiting team. They can all stop your Wave. If all non-season ticket holders refused to get up with your Wave, you might be left standing and raising your arms alone.

Organizations have always been constituted of complicated interrelationships of mutual interest. Today, however, we have both thinner and thicker bonds with our various shareholders, stakeholders, and partners. They are thinner because the diverse types of relationship and connection we form with suppliers, freelancers, part-timers, outsourcers, free agents, and cooperative partners are no longer strong enough on their own to impel total cooperation. They are thicker in the degree to which we now may depend on these bonds to achieve critical goals. Despite newly complicated and quickly evolving relationships, we still need to reach out and connect with our related communities in a way that can unite us in a common goal, to make a Wave powerful enough to sweep up and unite the many competing interests in play.

DISTANCE UNITES US

Business in the information age is complicated not only by the myriad new forms of relationship upon which it is built, but also by the increasing remoteness of those with whom we build it. The philosopher David Hume once said that the moral imagination diminishes with distance.
¹By this he meant you don’t feel the same sense of connection or obligation to someone halfway across the world that you do to someone halfway across the room, halfway across town, or even halfway across the country. In fact, our personal survival systems
depend
on not feeling implicated with things that are far away. Doctors, for instance, do not drive around randomly from county to county treating people. They say, “My responsibilities extend to this hospital, and over there is another doctor’s responsibilities.” A person in Senegal lives so far away from most of us that we can think of him in the abstract and believe we do not need to feel responsible to an abstraction. This is the logic, if you can call it that, behind Joseph Stalin’s horrible formulation, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

For centuries, local proximity determined the majority of our social functions, containing us in relatively homogenous environments. We dealt on a day-to-day basis with people with whom we generally shared a common culture and therefore understood easily the behaviors and signals that occurred in the spaces between us. Global connectivity sets that whole idea on its ear. We now find ourselves in a world where we are thrust together in all aspects of our lives without borders and without the homogenizing pressures of locality. The fiber-optic strands that enmesh us pierce the protective membranes of local culture like needles popping soap bubbles. They create a whole new set of interrelationship challenges. From purchasing items from a seller on eBay to online dating to video chats with team members halfway around the world, at any time you might find yourself interacting with people with whom you have never before broken bread, who don’t necessarily speak the same language you do, who don’t necessarily recognize your patterns of behavior, and vice versa. That guy in Senegal? Your company just bought the Internet start-up for which he works and folded him into your business unit. You will now manage him and his team in Dakar remotely.

Before all information became zeros and ones, our lives moved at a slower pace. We had more time to get to know each other and the luxury to value personal contact in nearly all our dealings. Now, multinational companies commonly form teams of employees chosen from various divisions, various countries, and various cultures. Global supply chains and international customer bases multiply and mutate faster than a flu virus. Mergers and acquisitions fuel growth and value creation with little regard to how the individuals involved will interrelate each day. We often build our business relationships in a collage-like construct of flyby hotel meetings, video chats, cell calls, e-mails, and faxes. While I was editing this chapter, one of my researchers working across town instant messaged me about a file she was looking for, and I was able to drag-and-drop it to her faster than if she had been working across the hall. We take such things for granted.

Opportunity conjoins us faster than we have developed frameworks for understanding each other and getting along. Distance no longer separates us; new communications capabilities render distance irrelevant by connecting us instantly. In this proximal world, the opportunities for misunderstandings abound. How do you write an e-mail to someone if you can’t tell from their e-mail address if they are a man or a woman, what country they are from, what upbringing they had, or if they believe cows to be sacred or just lunch? In the United States, if two managers of different seniority find themselves in conflict they are most likely to approach each other directly and communicate frankly to try to resolve the issue. In Indonesia, the direct approach will only make it worse. In Jakarta, the concept of
asal bapak senang
, keeping the boss happy, comes into play.
²Indonesian subordinates typically feel personally responsible for solving problems without notifying their superiors, even if it means lying about a situation rather than addressing it directly.

Dr. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, authors of
Building Cross-Cultural Competence
, conducted a worldwide study of cultural attitudes that revealed startling differences among the countries now commonly linked in global enterprise. They posed the following problem to workers in dozens of countries in order to better understand cultural dispositions toward loyalty and regulation:

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.
⁵Bridging 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 uniquely complex ability to create symbols. Symbols allow us to understand the world, and are the primary means by which we create social and psychological relationships. Human interaction is a symphony of symbolic gestures of which language is just a small part. Physicality, intonation, facial expression, volume, and body language play an important role in our ability to interrelate and understand the intention behind the words we use. In the days before electric communication (telegraph and telephone), the majority of our communication took place face-to-face. We were generally able to look someone in the eye and interpret what he or she was telling us. Over the past 75 years or so, technology systematically removed many of these interpersonal behavioral cues from our dominant modes of interaction. First the telegraph and then the telephone allowed us to hook up more easily—but only partly, as many symbolic social cues were missing. The slower pace of change characteristic of the industrial age, however, gave us time to adapt to these new modes of communication and to develop the new symbol decoding ability they demanded of us. Still, we never came to fully trust them. The unwritten rule was that much could be accomplished on the telephone, but when it came down to really important communications, nothing beat looking someone in the eye and shaking that person’s hand.

Step back for a moment and think about the myriad and fantastic ways business communicates in the twenty-first century: e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), text messages. Each mediates our message in subtly different ways, distorting some parts, magnifying and diminishing others. Each technology works like a filter allowing some symbols to pass through and others to be left behind. Now think about how fast these changes have come upon us. E-mail, as strange as it is to think now, has been with most of us for around a decade. In the mid-1990’s, some of us wore numeric pagers, and if we even had a cell phone, it was often larger than this book.

When we communicate electronically, we communicate less dynamically, with less give-and-take. Electronic communication tends to be unidirectional and sequential. When it does overlap, like in an instant message chat, it often ceases to make sense: