INTRODUCTION
Culture Crashing
We are all just one step away from a culture crash—a phenomenon that occurs when someone from one culture unintentionally confuses, frustrates, or offends a person from another culture.
Why are we in danger of culture crashing, and more importantly, why should we care?
In this global era, when people, money, and information are flowing faster than ever across international borders, more and more of the individuals with whom you interact are from other cultures. If you don’t learn how to avoid or recover from a culture crash, you will undoubtedly miss out on opportunities to build better connections and achieve greater success in all your business and personal endeavors. In this book I offer the key to truly thriving in this new global era—a skill set that will empower you to seize opportunities and create more peaceful and prosperous culture crossings in the diverse arenas where we work and live.
Culture crashes have long made headlines, as in 2013, when Microsoft founder Bill Gates insulted the South Korean president by keeping one hand in his pocket while shaking her hand1—or in 2016, when Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi offended an entire nation by donating his used shoes to raise money for an Egyptian charity.2 Apparently no one told Messi that shoes are considered dirty and lowly in Egyptian culture—the ultimate symbol of disrespect.
Of course, international business mavens and sports stars aren’t the only ones prone to culture crashing. With more than 244 million people currently living outside their country of origin,3 it’s little wonder that these crashes are becoming more frequent and the consequences more problematic for all of us—although we often don’t even realize that culture is the culprit. Think about your own interactions. Have you ever written someone off as disrespectful or shifty because he didn’t look you in the eye? Has a salesperson’s communication style ever stopped you from buying something you wanted? Has someone’s way of negotiating or getting to know you ever felt overly aggressive? How about feeling annoyed because your boss didn’t credit you for your accomplishments at work or the feedback you received from a colleague seemed totally inappropriate? While many of us have had experiences like these, we rarely stop to contemplate whether the person’s behavior was culturally motivated—or how our own cultural programming could have caused us to completely misinterpret what we observed.
It used to be that culture crashes occurred mostly when we traveled abroad—such problems arose “over there.” Today, crashes are just as likely to occur on our home turf, where our communities and workplaces are diversifying at an astonishing rate. It’s a trend that’s reflected in countries and cities around the globe. The United States, for example, is home to more than 42 million documented immigrants,4 more than four times as many as in 1970.5
By 2065, immigrants are projected to account for 88 percent of the population increase in the United States, or 103 million people, as the nation grows to 441 million.6 In the state of California alone one in four people is an immigrant, and there are thirty-five recognized nationalities, speaking more than fifty-five languages.7
The changing makeup of California’s population is not exceptional. Consider some examples. The percentage of foreign-born people living in Miami is 38.5.8 Dearborn, Michigan, boasts the largest proportion of Arab Americans of any U.S. city,9 and the Washington, DC metropolitan area is home to a thriving community of tens of thousands of Ethiopians. The U.S. heartland is going global too, thanks in part to an influx of international students. College towns like Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Lincoln, Nebraska, are flooded with foreign students from all corners of the world, with the largest and fastest-growing percentage coming from China. In the college town of Iowa City, Iowa, bubble tea shops (selling a Taiwanese tea drink filled with tiny chewy balls) now outnumber Starbucks three to one, and nearly one in ten students at the University of Iowa hails from China.10
A major rise in the number of students moving across borders in pursuit of higher education also contributes to increased diversity in our communities. Twenty years ago, some 42,500 students from China attended a college or university in the United States. In 2015, that number reached nearly 275,000, with most coming for undergraduate degrees.11 This diversification of our schools and communities brings opportunities for cultural enrichment, but it also brings the inevitability of miscommunications, no matter how fluently someone seems to speak your language.
On the business front, these students—and the hundreds of thousands of others who will continue to settle in the United States in the coming decades12—represent an astounding wave of new consumer potential. Consumer potential is also exploding on other business fronts—including virtual ones, thanks to ever-improving communication technologies and the diversifying global economy. In the coming years, new players will make and expand their mark—countries like Vietnam, India, China, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, whose economies are predicted to grow between 6 and 9 percent a year over the next thirty years (Germany and the United States, on the other hand, are expected to grow only 2 to 3 percent per year).13 Until recently, most of the world’s middle class—with all of its buying power and potential—resided in Europe and North America. But the middle class in the Asia Pacific region is projected to surge from its current 18 percent to 66 percent by 2025.14
The cultural diversification of our national and global marketplaces is a game changer. Tried and true strategies for doing business are no longer working, because of cultural differences related to everything from what motivates buyers, to the way we negotiate, to how we interpret a gesture. The unintended consequences of our cultural obliviousness include conflicts, missed opportunities, and the loss of money, credibility, and trust—inhibiting our ability to build deeper and more trusting relationships with colleagues, clients, and customers.
Try as we might to educate ourselves, it is impossible to know the customs, nuances, and hot buttons of every culture with which we come in contact. And while there are books about what to do and not do when interacting with people from certain cultures, the advice they offer tends to be too specific or superficial to truly offer any benefit in an era in which multiculturalism is fast becoming the new norm.
Fortunately, there is a better and more personally enriching way to navigate culture crossings with savvy and success. It’s a method that depends on your willingness to look inward; to unpack your own cultural baggage and learn how to get control over your cultural reflexes.
Culture is an aspect of our psychology that we often overlook. Although some of our behaviors are attributable to influences like personality traits and individual experiences, many of our communication styles, perceptions, and expectations are also the result of deep-rooted cultural conditioning. Like any other habitual behavior, our cultural habits are hard to break—right up there with coffee and cigarettes. Culture has blazed neural pathways in our brains that trigger automatic responses over which we exert little control.
In this book I offer a proven method for uncovering and gaining control of your own cultural programming, which in turn will enable you to significantly improve your cross-cultural agility. Like anything worth doing, it takes some time and practice, but it is wholly achievable and increasingly vital to your success in this global era. Through a mix of stories, insights, and self-investigation exercises you’ll acquire a basic but essential understanding of many ways that we are all influenced by culture, which will enable you to enhance your interactions with people from all cultures, professions, and walks of life. I’ve successfully used this approach over the past two decades to help individuals from Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and many other kinds of communities around the globe to build stronger and more profitable relationships across cultures. It’s a methodology that I actually began developing when I was fairly young, as a means of preserving my own sanity.
Although I was born in the United States, I spent fifteen of my grade school years in Latin America. I attended three high schools over the course of four years in three different countries—an experience that forced me to endure repeated bouts of culture shock. Every summer after school ended, I returned to the United States and hung around with kids who didn’t know where countries like Brazil and Colombia were on the map. They would ask me how I got to school in these exotic places, and I would answer by telling them with a straight face that “we swung from vines,” as their eyes widened in disbelief.
Of course, to get to school in those countries I took a bus or rode in a car, and I spent my days doing the same things that they did. But there were some differences. By the time I was a teenager, I realized that it wasn’t just that my U.S. friends couldn’t relate to many of my experiences (and didn’t really care to); our interactions were often puzzling to each other. We had different expectations and actions related to everything from greeting etiquette, to the value we placed on time, to how we dated. It made me hyperaware of my own cultural programming and adept at adjusting my behaviors so that I wouldn’t be teased for my “foreign” ways.
It was these early experiences that charted the course for my career, leading me to earn a master’s in cross-cultural studies and establish my own consulting firm. Those early years and my later studies instilled in me a deep passion for exploring other cultures. My work enables me to continually expand my knowledge and deepen my understanding of different cultures, and consequently of my own. The insights I share with you in this book are the same ones that have enabled me to see myself and others more clearly, and to move through the world in a more mindful way. My hope is that in reading this book, you too will enjoy the process of becoming more culturally mindful and laying the foundation for your own personal success in the new global era.
Got Culture?
Before you read any further, let’s make sure we are on the same page about the meaning of culture as it pertains to this book. Look at any online dictionary and you’ll find several meanings. One relates to “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” There are also the more biologically associated meanings, including “the growing of plants or breeding of particular animals in order to get a particular substance or crop from them,” and “a group of cells or bacteria grown for medical or scientific study.” The meaning of culture that we employ in this book does in fact have to do with the process of cultivating something, but is thankfully free of microbes and mold spores:
culture [noun]
The customs and beliefs, art, way of life and social organization of a particular country or group.
This vast definition of culture includes tangible behaviors such as eating, dress, language, customs, and traditions as well as intangibles such as beliefs, values, assumptions, expectations, and attitudes. Collectively cultivated and reinforced by a group over time, these factors combine to create the basis for cultural identity. They dictate how we interact with each other and with our environments.
Culture isn’t restricted to people’s ethnic, national, or regional identities. Companies, organizations, schools, summer camps, families, and other groups have their own cultures too. Cultural traits can also differ between genders and across economic lines. This definition of culture isn’t even unique to humans. Studies of primates, cetaceans (like whales and dolphins), birds, and other animal communities have shown that these species cultivate cultures of their own.15 What is unique to humans is the complexity of the cultural webs that envelop and influence us and that define our lives.
Our cultural identities are a mash-up of all of those groups with which we associate. That said, I’ve chosen to focus largely on national and ethnic cultures because of their formative and often sustaining impact on our beliefs, values, and behaviors. Engrained from an early age (starting in the third trimester in the womb, when we begin to hear language16), people almost always unconsciously bring the influence of their national and ethnic cultures to the table when they get involved with smaller subgroups. I’ve also chosen to focus on national and ethnic cultures because they have been studied and documented so extensively, providing us with a credible platform from which to explore, compare, and contrast tendencies.
Nevertheless, the lessons offered in this book are applicable when it comes to improving your interactions within any kind of culture, and they offer surprising insights about the way we as individuals perceive the world. In the following chapters, you may discover things about yourself and your culture that you never knew or fully acknowledged. I hope you will develop a deeper understanding of how we are all impacted by culture in profound ways. You hold in your hands the key to creating your own personal road map for successfully navigating today’s multicultural communities and marketplaces, and to cultivating a new kind of self-awareness that will serve you in all facets of your life.