Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Download MP3
American business doesn’t end at America’s borders. It hasn’t for a long time: in the 1980s, the trick was figuring out how to do business in Japan or Europe. Now it might be China or India or Brazil. There’s a boom in online software to help international businesses cross the cultural divide. Alex Gallafent surveys a couple of them.
Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.
MARCO WERMAN: American business doesn’t end at America’s borders, it hasn’t for a long time. In the 1980′s the trick was figuring out how to do business in Japan or Europe. Now it might be China or India or Brazil. Here is The World’s Alex Gallafent.
ALEX GALLAFENT: It’s an old problem. When you’re doing business overseas, you often have to bridge some kind of culture gap. But many intercultural trainer, cultural bridge builders if you like, say a set of modern illusions is making things worse. Technology can connect anyone to everyone at any time. So the business world seems smaller and more uniform. But culturally the world isn’t flat, it’s bumpy. Here’s intercultural trainer Lisa LaValle-Finan.
LISA LAVALLE-FINAN: People who are doing business with each other, Americans and Chinese or French and Indian, they become disillusioned because they don’t quite read each other. They don’t quite understand what make the other guy tick. Working out what makes the other guy tick is just good business, especially in today’s economy. This is part of an animated intercultural video from the training firm Kwintessential. It features a flirtatious Brazilian man who’s maybe a bit too informal for his Western visitor. For instance, he’s sitting on a couch with his legs wide apart. It’s one example of a boom of intercultural training online. The offerings go way beyond simple lists of cultural do’s and don’ts. One company, Aperian Global, invites you to complete a personal cultural profile. You do your profile, your colleague in Korea does hers and the software does the rest.
MALE VOICE 1: By clicking on the gaps that appear between your profile and that of the cultural colleague you’ve selected, you’re presented with detailed information on how you can adjust your style to be most effective with that culture or colleague.
GALLAFENT: But then there’s Global Emotion, a German outfit based in Munich. It’s targeting Western businesses trying to succeed in China and it’s got a totally different approach. This is the online ad. Here we see a photo of a Chinese man. And now a picture of a Chinese woman? The founder of Global Emotion, Ansgar Bitterman, says its work is based on a marriage between culture and science.
ANSGAR BITTERMAN: If you go to a different culture or a different country, and the people look different from you, we could show that your perception process actually shuts down.
GALLAFENT: The argument is that underneath the culture gap, there’s something deeper going on, a kind of racial gap. Bitterman says that when you look at someone from another race, your brain doesn’t pick up as much information as it does when you’re looking at someone from your own race. You can’t empathize properly or do business effectively because you can’t read emotions accurately. Social psychologists call it cross-race bias. It’s a tricky thing to talk about without making people uncomfortable.
BITTERMAN: For example, Chinese eyes, they are much, much thinner. And if you’re a European or American culture if you’re laughing your eyes getting smaller. But with Chinese their eyes are already small, so your brain has to adapt.
GALLAFENT: Now, Bitterman says the cross-race effect is lessened if you come from a racially diverse community. But it still exists. Global Emotion claims that over a few weeks, its online games can train your brain to process Chinese faces and emotions with greater speed and accuracy. By the way, if you’re still feeling uneasy about this, Ansgar Bitterman can relate. He spent a year of high school in Hawaii and he admits he was embarrassed when he couldn’t remember the faces of his new friends. Kids with Japanese or Korean heritage the day after meeting them.
BITTERMAN: And I said geez, who did I meet yesterday? And I didn’t want to ask did we meet or did we meet? And then after six weeks I could really tell who was from Korea, who was Jill, who was Jack and this thought never left me.
GALLAFENT: Not an easy thing to admit in a country where talking about race and research is especially loaded.
BITTERMAN: You know, people here in Germany, I can’t even translate the cross-race effect to Germans. They ask me if I’m a racist and I never got it. I was like why do they think I’m a racist? And they said well, you’re talking about that. You’re talking about that you can’t read the Chinese face as good as a German face. And I say well yeah, we have to talk about that because that’s the basis for racism so let’s change it.
GALLAFENT: Ansgar Bitterman isn’t on a mission to make the world a better place necessarily. He’s running a business and the pitch is helping outsiders get some kind of tactical advantage in China. Incidentally, Bitterman tried to sell his intercultural training software to the Chinese too to help them recognize emotions in Germans or Americans. They weren’t interested. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.
Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.
Discussion
2 comments for “Crossing the cultural divide to do business”