The Cultural Advantage

A New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams

By Mijnd Huijser

Dutch edition by Business Contact, Amsterdam 2005

English edition by Intercultural Press, Boston 2006, 2008, 3rd print 2010

Vietnamese edition by Tre Publishing House, Ho Chi Minh City 2009

Revised English edition by Ayn Press, Haarlem 2010

E-book publication Ayn Press, Haarlem 2013

© Mijnd Huijser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN 978-90-821088-0-4

Mijnd Huijser

The Cultural Advantage: a new model for succeeding with global teams

Ayn Press - The Netherlands | www.ayn-press.com

Praise for the Dutch Edition of The Cultural Advantage

‘Very accessible and inspiring, with appealing examples for everyone preferring cultural intelligence to conflict management.’

Floris Oskam, Unilever Europe, Director Supply Management

‘Culture tends to cause a disorderly jumble and little understanding. This book puts an end to all confusion of concepts.’

Paul Meerts, Clingendael Institute of International Relations,

Deputy Director Training & Education

‘I recommend this work to everybody who rises to the challenges of cultural integration and cooperation in alliances or joint-ventures.’

Rob Woldberg, Nissan Europe, General manager

‘Communication is key in the 21st century. Understanding is a pre-requisite to success. The model, presented in this book, is concise and practical, contributing to the reader’s cross-cultural management skills.’

Hennie Stegen, DSM International, Program Manager International

Human Resources

‘This book helped me grasp the challenges we encounter in our global project teams, where East meets West.’

Hans Brouwhuis, Philips Semiconductors Japan, Senior Director & Telecom Product Creation

A Testimonial

To: Mijnd Huijser <mijnd@------.nl>

Subject: Re: Cultural Advantage book review

From: Henk Thijssen

Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 07:16:08 +0800

X-Virus-Scanned: by X-Virus Scanner

Dear Mijnd,

I hope that my review reaches you in time. I was quite busy and, to be honest, your manuscript got somewhat lost in my briefcase. However, when I finally got to it, during a long flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam, I read it in one go. I am not a reading type of person; normally it takes me ages to finish a book. But not this time. I am deeply impressed by its readability. Especially your presentation of everyday situations to illustrate complex cultural issues makes the book fascinating.

This is my succinct feedback:

The book offers insights in complex cultural differences, using recognizable examples. It reads like a novel.

Your model, the Model of Freedom, is presented dashingly, and enhances reciprocal understanding and respect between cultures, cooperating in an organization.

The Model of Freedom, applied in our company, has already resulted into improved cooperation between the Chinese and the Dutch.

To me it seems that the book is very valuable for all European-Asian cooperation, not in the least because of the plainness of the model you introduce. At last, a book that goes beyond the common explanations of ‘loss of face’.

Kind regards,

Henk Thijssen

Director Industrial Technology Center Philips Semiconductors

China Technology Center

Philips Mobile Display Systems Shanghai,

PR China

Acknowledgements

I am heavily indebted to the companies and institutions that called me in for assignments; I could not have written this book without them. Their trust in me has generated a mutual learning process.

My special thanks go to:

Accenture Bratislava, Prague, Paris, London, Lisbon, Milan, Nice; Unilever Brussels, Hamburg, Geneva, Bangkok, New York; Philips Heerlen, Zurich, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kobe; Nissan-Renault Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona; Statskonsult Oslo; IBM Copenhagen;KPN Mobile The Hague; Telephonica Madrid; Rabobank International Utrecht; DZ-Bank Frankfurt; Mitsubishi Motors Amsterdam; PricewaterhouseCoopers Amsterdam; Clifford Chance Frankfurt; Canon Europe Amsterdam, London; 3M-Germany Neuss, Munich; Johnson & Johnson Los Angeles, Brussels; ING Amsterdam; DSM Geleen; Clingendael Institute of International Relations The Hague; University of Amsterdam; University of Frankfurt; VU Academic Hospital Amsterdam; Swedish School of Management Stockholm, and the British Council London.

Contents

Introduction

1 From Hurricane to Drizzle

The case of EmLog Worldwide

2 Beyond Mars and Venus

On cultural identity

Definition of culture

Authority

Rules

Individual freedom

Individuality and role behavior

Universal aspects of culture

3 The Model of Freedom

On the culture model

Individuality and role behavior

Thinking and acting

Authority

Systems of rules

Short but meaningful

4 Perceptions of Reality

On cultural orientations

Action-orientation

Process-orientation

Task-orientation

Role-orientation

Application of diagrams

Culture is emotion

Warning

5 Paterfamilias or Superman

On leadership

Leadership attributes

Charisma

Charismatic leaders in different cultures

Leading an intercultural team

Recognizing differing expectations

6 Living with Barbarians

On communication

Content or context

Information: right or privilege?

The sound of music

Predictability and trust

7 Gladiators with unequal weapons

On meetings

Styles of meeting

Influencing decisions

Spontaneous reflexes

The golden rule

Conscious approach

8 Crossing the River Rubicon

On change processes

Threat or challenge

Six Sigma

Rewarding change

Conflict management

9 Hunters and Farmers

On corporate cultures

National and organizational cultures

Development stages

Subcultures

Tension as a source of energy

The Model of Freedom for organizations

10 Ceci n’est pas un team

On a winning intercultural team

A team is a living paradox

Team cultures

Characteristics of an effective team

Trust, the cement between cultures

Rational and emotional trust

The cultural intelligent team

Best practices

Appendix 1

The theories of Hofstede and Trompenaars

Appendix 2

The origins of the Model of Freedom

Appendix 3

The Model of Freedom in one view

Appendix 4

Accreditation and train the trainers

Appendix 5

Literature

About the author

Introduction

Blue eyes

While working in Africa as an International Red Cross official, my Swiss colleague Ariane once met a Touareg who said to her: “You have blue eyes.” She felt flattered, as she had at other occasions when people complimented her on her bright blue eyes. Later she discovered that the Touareg was rather expressing alarm. Dealing with blue-eyed camels is the worst that can happen to a Touareg. Those beasts are unmanageable!

We tend to give meaning to words and behaviors referring to our own experiences, in our own social environment. If we do not realize that, we are in for miscommunication and worse.

In this book I aim at making readers aware of their own framework for giving meaning, their own cultural biases, and I offer a tool to find out more about those of other cultures.

The advantage of cultural differences

When pondering upon a title for this book, ideas like ‘Champions in the international arena’, ‘An American in Europe’, or ‘The Profit of Culture’ crossed my mind. I was searching for a banner, expressing that the Model I present here empowers professionals in a globalizing world to take full advantage of the cultural differences they encounter. Because that is exactly what this book aims at: triggering the process of sharpening your cultural intelligence, in order to increase your effectiveness when working in global teams. Cultural intelligence helps us to achieve better results on a national cultural level, on an organizational, vocational and even on a project team level. The final choice, ‘Culture’s Edge’, reflects this challenging tease.

What makes this book different from other, often excellent, books on intercultural cooperation, is that the presented Model of Freedom is rooted in the experiences of professionals in international companies. In over twelve years of international consultancy and training of intercultural teams in Fortune 500 companies, I have been able to create, test and adjust my Model. It gradually developed into a solid tool, visualizing differences between cultures, and delivering an ‘all season ticket’ to different organizational and national cultures.

Who should read this book?

Beware: this is not a book on ‘How to do Business in ...’. You will not find lists of do’s and don’ts. I am not offering you a fish for today’s meal, but a rod to catch fish for the rest of your international career.

I aim at professionals who work in international project and task teams, or who in their daily work in some way or another deal with colleagues of different cultures. People, whose international working environment challenges them to cope with a wide variety of communication styles and convictions about what is right, just or timely.

For practical reasons the examples in this book have a limited scope. I focus on Americans working outside the United States, Brits working on the continent, or Europeans cooperating with other Europeans. As China and Japan have become important players in the international business world, I give special attention to the cultural characteristics of these countries. So this book might well serve Chinese and Japanese readers who want to understand more of the Western management styles. As Takeo Fujisawa, one of the founders of Honda Corporations once stated: ‘Eastern and Western management styles are for 95 percent the same, but differ in every important aspect.’

I am aware of the fact that there are other important nations, whose cultural characteristics I do not discuss extensively. But my experience as a trainer is that also Zambians, Turks, Arabs, Brazilians, Indians and Malaysians, to mention just a few, very well recognize their culture in my Model.

Background of the Model of Freedom

Anyone seeking research, theories and models to sharpen their cultural intelligence, is inevitably directed to two Dutch gurus¹; Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars. Both have founded their own school of thought², and these schools are hard to reconcile. According to Hofstede culture does not change, or ultimately changes so slowly that his data, assembled at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, are still valid in the 21st century. Trompenaars, on the other hand, believes culture to be a process of changes, and learning to adapt to them. He performs continuous research to refresh his data.

Since 1993, I have worked for about three years with the Hofstede-associated Institute for Training in Intercultural Management (ITIM), and for about the same length of time with Fons Trompenaars’ organization, Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Culture for Business (THT). Thus, I had the chance to learn first hand all the subtleties of the models and training methods of both gurus. Yet, more important is that, during my assignments, I could watch my clients respond to Trompenaars’ and Hofstede’s concepts, providing me with valuable insights in both their wealth and limitations. The limitations partly originate from the fact that both researchers use questionnaires to collect their data. No matter how ingenious questionnaires are, people remain unpredictable in their interpretations of questions, and the validity of their answers becomes biased. That may explain, for example, why the French score high on ‘individualism’ in Hofstede’s model and low in Trompenaars’ model.

In the work of researchers like Schein, Quinn, Kolb and Leary, I found concepts that served as the basic components of my developing Model³, the Model of Freedom (MoF). I refined these components using my clients’ responses to the data of Hofstede and Trompenaars. To solve the problem of distorted answers to questionnaires, and therefore ‘inadequate’ scores, I applied the Appreciative Inquiry-method⁴. This means that, instead of working with questionnaires, I talked tp professionals directly, emphasizing the positive aspects of intercultural situations, perceived by them as complex. I’d simply ask: Where were you successful? In such discussions the issue is not merely personal intentions, but veriﬁable

implementation: what did I do to bring about this success? In my experience, the Appreciative Inquiry method is an excellent way to prevent people from hiding behind politically correct answers, and from

over- or underestimating themselves. With the feedback of some 5,000 internationally operating managers, gathered through this method, I could adjust the scores of both gurus.

The MoF contains four dimensions in which all national and organizational cultures can be categorized. The value of the model lies not in the categorization itself, but in how it allows us to visualize the differences between cultures. Not the precise scores of individual managers are of interest, not even the precise scores of organizations or nations, but the determination of their cultural orientations as opposed to those of others. This has proven to be an enormously advantageous learning method.

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 launches the book with a hypothetical case study, which introduces us to an interesting group working for an international organization.We learn about their various expectations, aspirations, and ambitions as they prepare to realize a common goal. As we will see, the differences in their cultural orientation will make this quite a challenge.In Chapter 2, I describe elements of culture that are universal and will be recognized by people from all over the world. Despite the huge variety in cultures, common values definitely exist. We are not from different planets.

In Chapter 3, I assemble the Model of Freedom, and present its components and characteristics.

Chapter 4 explains about the four cultural orientations - four different perceptions of reality - that are represented in the Model of Freedom.

The following chapters discuss topics that require a high level of cultural intelligence. I will show how to achieve this level.

A critical topic is Leadership (Chapter 5). The achievements of an organization highly depend on its leadership, especially since leaders nowadays are expected to be future oriented and capable of managing complex operations. We will discuss what makes a good leader in an intercultural setting?

Next, in Chapter 6, we’ll discuss how communication in intercultural teams can easily degenerate because of misunderstandings and friction among members of the group. I will show you how you can use the MoF to deal more effectively with a range of culturally biased styles of communication. Chapter 7 is about meetings and decision-making processes. The gathering of various cultures can easily turn a conference room into a battle field. I will clarify the preferred styles of certain cultures and indicate how meetings can be conducted more effectively by recognizing and anticipating these styles.

Chapter 8 explores how to manage a change process in an intercultural context. For some cultures, change is a source of inspiration; for others it is a threat. Without using cultural intelligence, you will spend most of the time managing conflicts instead of moving your team or project forward.

Chapter 9 deals with Corporate Cultures. Each organization has its own corporate culture, and within the organization branches and departments have their own subcultures. Furthermore, every phase in the life cycle of an organization has its own typical culture. The MoF offers managers and other professionals the tool to convert the tensions in a corporate culture into a source of energy.

In conclusion, all acquired cultural knowledge will be integrated in Chapter 10, and we will take a look at how a winning intercultural team functions.

For readers who may be interested in the concepts of Hofstede and Trompenaars, I present their ideas in boxes. Those readers who do not wish to be distracted by scientific backgrounds, may skip these boxes.

Our cultural preferences obviously do not only manifest themselves in our work; often they are even more clearly visible in other social and artistic ways of expression. Take the way people in different cultures enjoy their meals, or the way in which products are presented in commercials. Throughout the book are boxes with “Cultural Highlights,” which examine these kinds of expressions and their significance in a particular culture. These cultural highlights can help you have a better understanding of national cultures and their influence on management styles.