Barnes & Conti Newsletter: February 2002

For the New Year: Building Bridges to Other Cultures

The year 2002 is—symbolically speaking—the most welcome New Year I can remember. Yet with the events of September 11th not too far behind us, and the threat of international terrorism still before us, issues of cross-cultural communication and understanding have gained even more importance.

We’ve long maintained that the ability to exercise influence can and does translate to other cultures (and languages!). The benefits of taking intelligent risks and creating a culture for risk and innovation also apply to any culture and language, although they may develop in different ways. Barnes & Conti has a long history of building bridges to other cultures. We’ve had our materials translated into several different languages including Spanish, Thai, Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, and French. Janne Rochlin and I have worked with participants and trainers in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America, crossing the cultural boundaries with Exercising Influence and Intelligent Risk-Taking. Although there are many different cultural approaches to influencing and taking risks, the globalization of business means we all need to develop greater flexibility in applying these skills.

This newsletter—the first of 2002—has a cross-cultural focus because we want to encourage you to use your skills globally. We’ve included a report from our Latin American expert, Paula Swanson, as well as helpful information on basic cross-cultural communication. We also want to introduce a new team member, and tell you about some other changes at Barnes & Conti.

B. Kim Barnes

“When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart;
  and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”

—Rabindranath Tagore

In this Issue:

Risk-Taking, Innovation, and Influence:
Barnes & Conti in Latin America

Paula Swanson, Barnes & Conti Senior Associate

Paula Swanson is our expert on Latin American culture, and one of our Spanish-speaking trainers. Paula has been teaching Intelligent Risk-Taking and Creating a Culture for Risk and Innovation in Argentina and Brazil.

In Brazil, Intelligent Risk-Taking was selected to be part of Procter & Gamble’s First Level Managers College for managers of their Louveira Plant (located outside of Sao Paulo). The Intelligent Risk-Taking training concluded a two-week off-site experiential learning opportunity.

The group had spent two weeks on team building in its truest sense. Now that teams had been established, they were more than ready to embrace the principles of risk-taking. Their example demonstrated that trust within the team is a key issue in order to institutionalize risk-taking. They also proved that even an intelligent risk may fail, but the learning experience of taking an intelligent risk serves to promote other “outside the box” thinking for the business.

While I was training Intelligent Risk-Taking in Argentina, in order to promote a direct application of intelligent risk taking within the client company, one of the participants volunteered to present a risk-taking plan. His plan “clicked” with another participant’s idea, and these two combined their intelligent risks and presented the synergized idea to the class. The combined plan set off a chain reaction of interest with the participants as the proposed intelligent risk revolved around a solution to a very real and pending company problem.

Here in California, I presented Ejercer Influencia, or Exercising Influence, at the Latin America International Family Planning Leadership Program under the auspices of UC Berkeley. Twenty-five people—including teams from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—learned how to strategically influence and negotiate with others. The participants enjoyed the “Wheel of Influence” containing the Exercising Influence Behavior Model, and looked forward to taking it back to their work environments. Throughout the course, very stimulating conversation emerged around the issue of gender based communication with respect to influencing others.

To read more about Barnes & Conti in Latin America, click here.

See also the news article on our Mexican partner, below.

Four Cultural Dimensions and Their Implications for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (Summary)

B. Kim Barnes

The “Four Cultural Dimensions” model is based on research by Geert Hofstede, Ph.D., as described in his classic book, Culture’s Consequences, International Differences in Work-Related Values.

Four Dimensions of Culture

Power Distance
The degree of fixed inequality of power between the more
and less powerful members of a group

Uncertainty Avoidance
The degree to which members of a group prefer to
avoid uncertainty or ambiguity

Individualism
The degree to which members of a group prefer to operate
and make decisions independently as opposed to collectively.

Competitiveness
The degree to which members of a group are motivated by
achievement and competition as opposed to service and cooperation.

The complete article—less an article than a tool—contains indicators to estimate where a group lies on each of the four dimensions, along with some implications of each for negotiation and conflict resolution.

To use the tool, go to the link below and compare your own preferences on the four dimensions with the preferences that characterize an organization you are part of or with which you work closely. Note your own observations to the “implications for negotiation and conflict resolution” for each dimension. Note any difference in preference, then adjust your approach taking into account those differences.

Click here to go to the complete article

As a postscript, watch this newsletter for our newly revised program on negotiation and conflict resolution.

Recommended Reading on Cross-cultural Communication

What to Know Before You Go—or Before Your Customers Arrive: Ten Tips To Communicating Effectively With Customers Around The World

Communicating Successfully In Today`s Global Marketplace

Both these articles are by K.C. Chan-Herur, MBA, who is a recognized expert in business globalization, communication, marketing, and management and the author of the book, Communicating with Customers Around the World: A Practical Guide To Effective Cross-cultural Business Communication. Ms. Chan-Herur also co-authored the article “Dealing Effectively with Cross-cultural Issues in Influence and Negotiation” which we’re proud to include with our Exercising Influence program.

What’s New at Barnes & Conti?

Introducing our Partner in Mexico: Competencia Organizacional

Competencia Organizacional is a Mexican-based consulting firm whose clients include both Mexican and multi-national corporations. Their trainers and consultants are experienced, bilingual, and have impressive backgrounds in psychology and human behavior. In mid-November we completed a Trainer Training process in Exercising Influence with them. Competencia Organizacional is the exclusive representative for Barnes & Conti in Mexico.

To read more about Competencia Organizacional, click here.

Barnes & Conti has new partners in Poland; also our Irish partners will be launching their website soon. Watch this newsletter for details.

Blended Solutions Coming Soon...

We are currently developing blended solutions for our most popular programs, including a suite of online tools. In fact, tools for Exercising Influence are just about ready to go. Watch this space for more information!

Upcoming Public Programs

Exercising Influence
April 9-10, 2002; Milpitas, CA
June 25-26, 2002, San Francisco, CA

Constructive Negotiation
May 14-15, 2002; Milpitas, CA

Intelligent Risk-Taking
June 4-5, 2002; Milpitas, CA

For more information and the complete schedule of public programs, click here.

Cross-cultural Cooking: Feijoada

Next to language, the best bridge to another culture is food. To go along with our Latin American focus, we want to share a recipe for feijoada (pronounced FAY-zho-WA-dah), a stew of black beans and meat which is the national dish of Brazil. Feijoada is a hearty and warming dish, perfect for a late lunch or an early dinner on a very cold Sunday—in Brazil, feijoada is eaten midday so everyone can take a nap afterwards.

Our version of feijoada is something of a cross-cultural compromise. Real Brazilian feijoada has about 4 or 5 kinds of meats (for the truly adventurous, these would include the ears, tail and snout of a pig!) plus sausages, and feeds at least eight hungry Brazilians.

For our California health-conscious “gringo” version of feijoada, click here.

Technology, Learning and Planned Obsolescence (excerpted)

Joel Kleinbaum, Information Systems

Barnes & Conti has a commitment to using technology; technology can not only enhance the learning experience, it can put a host of useful tools at the learner’s fingertips. We had a learning experience of our own when we attempted to use a laptop—a very light, small, portable laptop—to run a presentation to an external projector. We hadn’t yet used this particular laptop for a presentation...

Our laptop, I discovered, is suffering from carefully and deliberately planned obsolescence. In fact, I must congratulate the manufacturer on such a superb job. In less then two years, they took a perfectly good laptop, and made an Edsel out of it. Wow!... (Ed. Note: see illustration if you don’t know what an Edsel is!)

The Call to Tech Support

The laptop was created to run in tandem with a gizmo called a “port replicator”; the port replicator is about 1/3 as big as the laptop, and contains any plug you could ever need, including standard video output. “Aha!” I thought, “that’s how they made it so small and light”; if you want to plug it into a network, or hook up a projector, you have to schlep around a gizmo that’s 4 x 11 x 1.5, and adds two or three pounds to the total weight of the otherwise light, compact, laptop.

One problem: the port replicator for our prehistoric model may not be available; I couldn’t figure it out from the website. Well, there’s always the telephone. Except that when I got through to a live human, the person turned out to be part human and part droid—he took my name, address, computer model, entered it in the database, and gave me another phone number to call.

The second call turned out to be tech support. The phone tree was less a “tree” than a banyan forest; you branched out until the mechanical voice started reciting all the laptop models by number in groups of five. That’s right, every single laptop model ever made, “if you have model 533Q, 533R, 534Z... press one, otherwise stay on the line...” After three or four rounds of this litany —“tech support, in your mercy, hear our prayer!”— The oh-so-pleasant mechanical voice informed me that “the warranty on this product had expired” and I’d need to call a special 900 number for the low cost of $19.95 per call.

Well, back to the website. After clicking through about a dozen pages, I found the form to Email tech support. I had to check off a dozen options before getting to my question; “Can I still get a port replicator that is compatible with this laptop, and if so which port replicator?” I’m still waiting for a reply...

What Can We Glean?

Technology is useful, helpful, and convenient, but today’s breakthrough is fast becoming tomorrow’s Edsel. We have a commitment to content; to keeping it fresh and relevant. Our focus can and will change because the market, the economy and the business world are continually in flux; but our content has carefully planned endurability.

Copyright Barnes & Conti Associates, Inc. 2002. All rights reserved.

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