Travels in the Riel World

An overseas assignment can be an exciting adventure for business executives and their families. Unfortunately, it can also be a confusing, stressful experience for families who have difficulty adapting to a different culture or to sharp changes in one’s social network and identity. 

Proper preparation before heading abroad, including cross-cultural training, can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful assignment, but not every company provides such support for its employees. This NY Times article details some of the challenges that are faced by expatriates and their families.

More and more workers have relocated abroad in recent years, but despite the growing numbers, family issues remain a major factor in the failure of overseas postings.

The initial excitement of an exotic new posting can turn to culture shock, loneliness, identity loss and depression, and it is often the employee’s spouse and children — without the familiar routine of work — who are most affected.

“I thought it would be an adventure, and it was,” said Francesca Kelly, who moved 10 times in the first nine years as a Foreign Service spouse, living in places like Belgrade and the former Soviet Union during the cold war. But it “was much more difficult than I ever imagined it would be.”

Brenda H. Fender, director of global initiatives for Worldwide ERC, an association concerned with work force mobility, said “if the family cannot adapt, the employee will likely not succeed.”

And not succeeding can be expensive.

Scott T. Sullivan, senior vice president at GMAC Global Relocation Services, told the story of a man from Cleveland with an important role in building a large manufacturing plant in rural China. He left the work and returned home when his wife and child became desperately unhappy. This disrupted the project, a joint venture with a Chinese company, which then backed out — a loss for the American company of hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Sullivan said, that could have been avoided with a better assessment before the man left home.

Cross-cultural training helps families know what to expect, Mr. Sullivan said, but only 23 percent of companies make it mandatory.

There was a nice op-ed column in the Arizona Daily Star a few days ago by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, pointing out the need for the military to have training in and an understanding of other cultures. It’s nice to know that at least some members of Congress have this awareness. Here are some key excerpts from her opinion piece:

…in this post-9/11 world our military faces new and unconventional enemies. This different kind of warfare requires skills not normally taught in basic training: cultural awareness and language proficiency…

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca is the Army’s only chartered cultural training center for non-special operations personnel. The center is geared toward training Army soldiers to develop cultural expertise and “cross-cultural competence,” not just awareness. It conducts intensive training for soldiers in languages such as Arabic and Farsi.

Unfortunately, only about 3,500 regular Army soldiers, among more than a half-million active duty personnel, are able to participate in Fort Huachuca’s cultural-training program each year…

This is why I am drafting legislation to increase the number of service men and women with these critical skills. My bill would provide financial incentives for cadets in officer training programs, and reservists taking advantage of GI Bill benefits, to study foreign languages and culture as a part of their academic programs.

Success in the conflicts of the 21st century requires well-educated, well-trained and adaptable warriors — men and women who are as comfortable speaking foreign languages and understanding diverse societies as they are in tracking down terrorists.

Now that corporations recognize not only the benefits of international experience but also a real need for managers to have a broad global perspective, a wide array of programs are popping into existence in order to meet these training needs. One of the more interesting programs that I’ve heard about was just profiled in the NY Times. IBM is actually sending budding managers abroad to work as volunteers in various business-related projects.

In July, a team of 8 to 10 I.B.M. employees will travel to Ghana to help tiny businesses make their operations more professional. Another team will help entrepreneurs seek microloans in Turkey, while yet another will create training programs on information technology in Vietnam.

The projects, which were devised by I.B.M.’s citizenship group and are being coordinated through nonprofit organizations, have all the trappings of corporate philanthropy. But that is not why they were created, or how they are being used.

“This is a management development exercise for high-potential people at I.B.M.,” said Randy MacDonald, senior vice president for human resources.

What does I.B.M. hope to gain from sending these employees on volunteer missions abroad? Quite a lot, actually.

“As a development tool, this is a four-for-one,” said Allan R. Cohen, dean of the Olin Graduate School at Babson College, near Boston. “It’s stretching to work in another culture, to work in a nonprofit where the measurement of accomplishment isn’t clear, to take a sabbatical from your everyday routine and to learn to accomplish things when you can’t just bark orders.”

Indeed, Paul Ingram, a management professor at the Columbia Business School, is planning a similar program for this fall, in which executives attending the school’s Senior Executive Program will work with nonprofit groups in New York. Because 80 percent of the students are not from the United States, the New York location is outside their comfort zone.

“The fact that you are an excellent programmer or salesman, or can lead a project in your own area and culture, doesn’t mean you can be a great leader outside of your technical or cultural expertise,” he said.

That is I.B.M.’s logic as well. The company views the Service Corps as a way to learn how well employees work with strangers, in strange lands, on unfamiliar projects.

Business schools in China are growing by leaps and bounds, with more programs and a significant increase in the number of international students, according to this article in Business Week. The expatriate students are there to gain a better understanding of the Chinese business world, which they gain not only with on-the-ground experience in the country but also with academic programs that focus on integrating the unique culture of China with Western business thought.

In a course on competition strategy at BiMBA (Beijing International MBA), readings include Sun Tsu’s The Art of War and cases on military battles drawn from ancient and modern Chinese history. “We are integrating Chinese philosophy and realities with Western management theories,” says BiMBA’s U.S. dean John Yang.

Perhaps no school has gone as far as Cheung Kong GSB, which runs its MBA program from a 70-year-old villa in Shanghai. Courses range from the globalization of Chinese companies to Confucian humanism. While its faculty is drawn from top universities worldwide, the majority of professors are of Chinese origin.

One of them is Zheng Yusheng, associate dean and a professor of operations management. After spending 20 years in the U.S. and becoming the first tenured Chinese professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, he returned to the mainland in 2002 to help set up the school.

His understanding of both Western and Chinese business cultures has made a mark on the MBA program. “In the U.S. there is almost no manufacturing, so what we teach there is how to manage retailers,” he notes. “China is a center of manufacturing, so we focus on manufacturing here. I say: You need to produce the right product, at the right time, for the right customers. That’s exactly what we have been doing.”

The U.S. military apparently recognizes the need to train troops in cultural awareness, so it has developed some virtual reality technology that enables soldiers to practice interacting with people from different societies. At the moment, not surprisingly, this is particularly focused on learning about Iraqis and Arabs. According to an article in the Arizona Daily Star:

The U.S. military historically has been weak at understanding the mind-set of enemies, Proffitt said. By promoting cultural awareness, the new training system may help change that, he said.

“I think that’s the hard part for the Army. We tend to go over there and fight with our machinery and our tactics without a really innate understanding of the psyche of the other guy,” he said.

Remarkably, not only does the technology give individuals the sense that they are talking to a real person, but it is designed to warn about potential cultural mistakes being made during the conversation.

To increase the chance of gaining Iraqi cooperation, soldiers also need to be on guard for cultural pitfalls such as inquiring about the well-being of an Iraqi man’s wife, which is considered extremely rude. The virtual translator is programmed to warn interrogators when they stray into that kind of sensitive territory.

There was an informative article in yesterday’s NY Times about the unique work culture at Toyota and the automaker’s challenge now as it tries to transfer that culture to plants and offices in other countries.  For example:

It does not occupy much space on the office wall, but Latondra Newton calls it the hardest thing for Toyota’s new American employees to accept: those colored bar charts against a white bulletin board, in plain view for all to see.

No, they are not representing the company’s progress toward goals. Rather, they are the work targets of individual workers, visibly charting their successes or failures to meet those targets.

This is part of the Toyota Way. The idea is not to humiliate, but to alert co-workers and enlist their help in finding solutions. It took a while for Ms. Newton, a general manager at Toyota’s North American manufacturing subsidiary, to take this fully to heart. But now she is a convert.

As part of its efforts to ingrain this culture in its far flung enterprises, the company has developed a Toyota Institute, where executives are trained in the corporation’s management style.

“Before, when everyone was Japanese, we didn’t have to make these things explicit,” Mr. Konishi said. “Now we have to set the Toyota Way down on paper and teach it.”

“Mutual ownership of problems,” is one slogan. Other tenets include “genchi genbutsu,” or solving problems at the source instead of behind desks, and the “kaizen mind,” an unending sense of crisis behind the company’s constant drive to improve.

The whole company prizes visibility. To nurture a sense of shared purpose, Toyota has open offices — often without even cubicle partitions between desks.

Latondra Newton is one of the executives who has attended the Toyota Institute.

One tenet that she studied was “drive and dedication,” a practice of always seeking out problems and then solving them by breaking them into smaller, more manageable pieces. The class also discussed other slogans, like “effective consensus building” and “respect for people.” …

Toyota’s culture, she said, is still grounded in a Japanese-oriented brand of group-think. But in some cases, Toyota has also adapted it to fit American culture, she said, dropping group calisthenics at American factories, for example, although that is still common at Japanese plants.

The U.S. military has endured its share of bad news in Iraq of late, and it appears that some of the tragic mistakes made by individuals have come despite a concerted effort to provide cultural training to troops, as recounted in this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor.

Lt. Thomas Tompkins had a decision to make. His unit had come under fire from a band of insurgents, who had just fled for cover in a mosque. Strictly speaking, the rules of engagement allowed Lieutenant Tompkins to storm the front door and spread through the mosque in search of the enemy. But there was another option, it turned out: Knock on the door and talk to the imam.

Tompkins’s test came not in the furnace of Baghdad or Baquba, but in a quiet classroom exercise on the lush countryside campus of Marine Corps Base Quantico. The lesson is one example of the US military’s efforts to instill in troops the notion that - in a war where support from the local populace is as important as raids and airstrikes - cultural awareness can be an effective weapon.  In addition to their core training on the rules of engagement, US troops of every stripe are learning how to lunch with sheihks and conduct raids without offending the man of the house.

The dean of Stanford’s business school says cross-cultural knowledge is an important skill for a successful career in management.  Robert Joss made his comments during a webchat sponsored by the State Department.

“A key element in today’s preparation for management careers is to acquire a deep appreciation for other cultures and practices, and a commitment to lifelong learning about how to achieve world standards within a multi-cultural workforce that operates on merit,” said Joss.

An overview of the chat can be found here.  Or you can read the entire transcript here.

Some cross-cultural trainers in India are being asked to teach employees to be more direct in their communication style. This goes against the Indians’ traditional approach of being indirect, but it’s an effort to accommodate the Western business style and to continue growing the country’s outsourcing industry.

Junk the fake accent, young workers in India’s booming outsourcing industry are being told, and instead speak up, speak clearly and get to the point.

Indian workers are known to shrink from being direct with customers or bosses, a cultural trait leaders of India’s booming outsourcing business say must change if the industry is to make the leap from merely providing low-cost services to helping clients build stronger businesses. …

They are teaching “everybody to talk back and to be aggressive - that’s not a piece of Indian culture,” she said, adding that Indian workers are polite to a fault. Instead of telling a client, “there’s a problem with this file,” Thorne says most Indians would say, “Excuse me, I know you’re busy, but do you mind if I bother you?”

Interesting article in US News and World Report about cultural education classes for businesspeople in China.

In real life, they are successful executives, wealthy and well educated, says the article. “Some are millionaires. But they all have one thing in common: They are too Chinese. So these Shanghai executives take classes (from a Japanese woman) in “international standards of decorum.”