book: the culture map

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Have you read a book that every chapter resonates with your past experiences?

I have because I have just finished reading the Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, by Prof. Meyer. I am fortunate to have a hardcover copy of the book and I am going to keep it. Typically, I give my books away to the public libraries or friends after reading it. But I am going to keep this one for future references.

A few weeks ago, my manager introduced this book to us because we have a team of software engineers from different parts of the world. We migrated to the United States, and we spent most of our educations and early careers in our countries. We have 6 people in the team and almost everyone from different countries.

When I was little, my mother told me that children have “eyes, ears, and no mouth”, we were supposed to observe, listen, and not speak (unless someone gave us the permissions) when adult were talking. This jumped out of me when I was reading about “the wisdom of Mrs. Chen” in the introduction chapter of this book. We were not even allowed to ask questions. We whispered our questions to the adult sitting next to us, and be careful not to interrupt the conversation. The adult determined if the questions were valid prior to bringing them up. After many decades, I still have this “eyes, ears, and no mouth” thing in me. I am quiet in most of the meetings, and I speak when I am invited to, or when there are some important things that I must immediately bring up. I stop talking when I am interrupted, and ask the moderator’s permission to continue after the other people have stopped talking. As an immigrant from Singapore to the United States for over 20 years, I am still the little boy who my mother has raised. Some of my thinkings have changed over the years however most of them are still intact.

Among other things, I love the high and low context languages part of the book because I struggle to gather information when people are speaking in high context. I am the KY (read Chapter 1 of the book and you will understand what I mean) guy. I think my brain is wired in a manner that information must be sent directly to me. It may be because I live and work in multi-culture environments in Singapore and California. Singapore is a multi-culture country, we are taught to cultivate a harmonious society. We try to be conscious and tolerate culture differences. In order to avoid mis-communication, I think Singapore has low-context culture relative to the Asian countries.

Regarding giving feedbacks, I remember my Singaporean friend who has migrated to Australia mentioned that his kids were getting very nice feedbacks and awards from their schools. These are uncommon in Singapore. We have the same thing here in California. In most competitions, kids have some forms of awards to bring home because the organizers do not want to demotivate them.

At work, bosses likely to say things like “good job”, “way to go”, “we cannot complete this task without you”. Then, we know that they are just being nice. We are also taught to sandwich bad feedback with good ones. All these are not natural to me, and I picked them up over the years in California. (When in Rome, do as the Romans do)

Another interesting thing is decision making. We shall not have technology advancement in autonomous vehicles if we must gather all the information before implementation. In many occasions, we focus on the big rocks and start the ball rolling. It is impossible to get big projects started if we wish to nail down the micro details. We can see a picture of Apple’s iPhone initial prototype in the book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda. This prototype is something that I cannot imagine because it is so far away from the end product. Of course, we may end up with imperfect products if we do not cover all the details. And, it is alright as we can improve them over future releases.

There are a lot of great ideas in this book to help us to be successful (or survive) in diverse cultural environment. In this book, there are many stories and they help us to understand the concepts. And, there are suggested solutions too. The author does a good job in making the book fun to read, and most importantly provided us a framework. This framework helps us to understand the different scales, and prepare us for situations where there are culture differences.