I have lost count the number of times people have told me or I have read the story of the crucified Santa in a Japanese department store window. Snopes, as always, is the voice of sanity on this, deciding, on balance, that the story is untrue, and has its roots in our xenophobic fears that "these foreigners can't be trusted with our religion and our traditions," especially as the earliest sighting of this story dates to the mid 1980s, when the Japanese Economic Miracle and consequent Japan bashing was at its height.
Check out the queue (Quicktime video - over 30MB, starts playing after about 9MB downloaded) for the new Apple store in Ginza, Tokyo. (Link from Joi Ito.) Apparently Apple were giving away a few thousand T-shirts but even so, that's quite a queue. It's the kind of thing that makes first time foreign visitors to Tokyo say "what recession?!"
Makes me nostalgic (natsukashii) for Tokyo and brings back memories of when I was working at Mitsubishi Corp in Tokyo in 1992, and for some reason one of our lines of business was sales of Powerbooks. It didn't do very well I seem to remember, but I did buy a very basic Powerbook at close to wholesale price. I've still got it somewhere. And then I got myself a 14.4kbps modem I think, and started participating in newsgroups, about sumo, Monty Python - all done via the ISP's cache, rather than directly reading or posting to them. It seemed very exciting at the time.
Other random observations on seeing that video:
In order not to ruin the austere grey clean lines of the Apple building, they shunted all the garish floral decorations that you send to new businesses if you're a supplier in Japan to the other side of the pavement.
The queue is of course mostly trendy young men, but a gratifying number of ordinary looking older people, women and even some young children.
Hurrah for mobile phones and the Japanese mobile internet - the only way to keep sane in queues like that I'd have thought!
It looks like crosscultural IT marketing success for Apple, even if Mitsubishi's initial forays were not very promising.
I've finally read the whole of the latest UK think tank The Work Foundation's iSociety report, "Getting by, not getting on: Technology in UK workplaces". I can't say it told me anything I didn't already know, but it's good to have some impressions confirmed by research. (The report is 92 pages long and has to be printed at normal quality to be legible, using a lot of colour ink, so it may be worth spending the GBP10.00 to get a hard copy.)
There's no particular cross cultural angle to the report as it focuses more or less entirely on the UK. It does, however, examine why there were lower returns to investment in IT in the UK compared to the US in terms of productivity over the past few years, suggesting that is due to UK investment in IT having happened later than in the US, so the benefits have not been fully realised yet. It also talks about the network effect, that there are simply not enough uses for IT for companies in particular sectors (law was highlighted) for there to be an industry pressure to adopt and benefit from various IT tools.
These may be the main reasons, but I also wonder whether it isn't because US corporate cultures tend to be much more project focused ("Guided Missile" as Trompenaars/Hampden Turner put it) so employees will happily take up new IT if it helps get the job done. UK companies on the other hand fall into the "Incubator" type, where self fulfilment and respect from others are the motivating forces for the employees, so if IT tools seem to be undermining their job satisfaction and status, they are likely to resist.
Other points I highlighted were:
- a study of a Californian hi-tech research firm which showed that there were three broad emailing styles corresponding to different positions in the firm, even though very little formal hierarchy existed. Senior staff tended to send short, terse messages, often with poor spelling and grammar. This could be an indication of a busy and important job, but also a way of expressing it.
Lab workers mostly sent joke mails round friends. Middle managers tended to send long, jargon rich messages, often providing over-complex answers to simple questions. They were also most likely to use the 'cc' line. Ah, brings back memories!
- a lack of formal IT training in the companies studied, which meant that it was important to have informal learning available, from colleagues or in the case of the consulting company studied, from designated technology champions.
- how useless most companies are at implementing the change management that goes with introducing new technology. They tended to go for a top-down approach, with little consultation or understanding of the organisation and its various local components. And problems were most extreme when change was driven by IT executives or implemented solely by IT staff. Apparently IT recruitment consultants are therefore stressing the importance of IT staff being good communicators. Oxymoron?
- the report also suggests that outsourcing the IT function or having the IT function in a separate location breeds "ignorance and at worst, contempt" - both ways. (I take back that oxymoron comment then)
- finally the report summarises its findings in three myths - the myth of integration (that a vast range of the organisation's resources can be integrated using IT), the myth of control (that IT will allow managers easy control over staff) and the myth of solutions (the vendor claim that IT will provide a complete unifying solution to various management problems).
I've been meaning to post about the Japanese use of emoticons (called kaomoji in Japanese = face letters) - mostly in e-mails. They use them far more than we do in the UK and I suspect the rest of Europe and North America. One that particularly caught my eye was this:
m(_\\_)m
I think it's supposed to represent a balding man (just two strands of hair) bowing on his knees (the context was a grovelling apology), head to the ground, with the m's representing his hands.
Now I've found a whole website devoted to them. You can get smiling faces here, sweating faces here (to denote embarrassment or effort), crying faces here, gesturing (yawns, bows) here, expressive faces here (pain, winking etc) and miscellaneous (mostly animals) here.
It's a wonderful example of how a high context culture tries to find ways to communicate body language and feelings in a low context medium.
I've been wondering if anyone is looking at the cross cultural differences in e-learning and finally I've found a good, basic article on it by Patrick Dunn, an independent UK consultant and Alessandra Marinetti, of DigitalThink. They have some handy frameworks for analysing what needs to be changed in e-learning materials and delivery for different cultural preferences, including a nice story about the e-learning guru Eliot Masie creating an extra student (who was actually Eliot Masie) with whom his Far Eastern students were very willing to share their questions, being unused to asking questions of their authoritarian teachers.
At the end of the article they really got me nodding enthusiastically with the comment that "many leading thinkers in our industry are now advocating the view that the best way for people to learn is from other people. Although this hardly comes as a shock, its true impact has, we suspect, yet to be fully appreciated [...] this goes some way to explaining the current explosion of interest in communities of practice, informal learning, computer supported collaborative learning, and the rapid convergence of elearning and knowledge management." They point out that this will be a challenge for organisations founded in North American or West European cultures, because they are too individualistic, and find learning with and from others difficult. It comes back to encouraging spanners, straddlers and bridges in an organisation, as previously discussed.
I'm not a big fan of the theory that what works for the mobile phone markets in Japan and South Korea won't succeed in Europe because of nebulous 'cultural differences', but a (not so recent - but recently mentioned by Joi Ito) report for Motorola (warning: link leads to 1.3MB 45 page pdf being fired up) by Dr Sadie Plant pointed to one cultural factor that I will admit is important - mobile phones are a "useful tool in strategies for managing the competing demands of traditional family and individual identity."
Plant mentioned a British Asian young woman using her phone to mediate familial power in the arrangement of a potential marriage. If she likes the suitor she will give him her mobile number, otherwise, he will be confined to the more traditional fixed line phone. It is definitely the case in Japan (not sure about South Korea) that young people, who mostly live with their parents, use their mobile phones as a way of creating a virtual space or virtual privacy around themselves and to socialise with their friends when they can't invite them home.
Much rejoicing at the release of Stainless Steel Mouse, Liu Di, 23, a psychology student at Beijing Normal University, who was detained for a year for what she wrote and posted on the internet.
Bloggers have been quick to claim her as a blogger. Other news articles suggest her activities were: writing a satire of the Communist Party, posting essays critical of the Communist Party on her website and posting comments to internet chat sites calling for the release of dissidents. Washington Post calls her an internet essayist, blogger Peking Duck calls her a cyber dissident.
Ditching the pedantry for a moment, let us note there are still 35 or so Chinese people in prison for what they posted to the internet, and Reporters Without Borders estimates that China employs 30,000 people to watch what its people are doing online.
Some British research scientists from a client of mine (Large German Chemicals Company) who work with their Japanese counterparts on R&D, confirmed on Friday my previous assertion that PowerPoint doesn't work with high context cultures like Japan. Past attempts to wow their colleagues with snazzy presentations were greeted with indifference verging on hostility, and when they visit Japanese customers who actually make projectors, like Epson, they have to order the projector for the meeting room well in advance, because there are so few of them in the office. They have found the best solution is to reformat the slide presentation as a report, and circulate it to participants before the meeting takes place.
When I posted about bloggers in Iraq using LiveJournal, I namechecked Rebelcoyote as one of the US soldiers in Iraq who had a LiveJournal blog. It turns out (thanks to Norman Geras) he's called Private First Class Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and is now in hospital after a bomb went off under his transport, blowing off half his left foot, lodging some shrapnel in his eye and killing one of his colleagues.
The article also explains a question I had, about how far the US army allows its troops to blog:
"Soliders have the freedom of speech to express their own personal views. As long as it does not threaten anyone personally or denigrate the national chain of command, which is illegal, or claim to be from a standpoint of policy, that's fine," says Major Gary Tallman of the US Army Public Relations Office.
I wonder how many other countries' armies would allow such freedom of expression for their troops - I'm not making this point particularly to praise the US Army, just wondering if it's another cross-cultural difference. Specific differences that come to mind are, firstly, an American attitude that rules are rules, explicit and universally and rigorously applied, therefore soldiers will be well aware of them and will comply. Secondly, there also seems to be an American attitude to information that is quite different in higher context cultures, and is reinforced by the spread of internet access - that information is everywhere, so there is no point in worrying about shared organisational information becoming public. If you don't want it publicly known, don't share it within the organisation - viz Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq. Higher context cultures are much more paranoid - they worry that the unspoken rules may not be observed, and that putting even benign, shared corporate information into explicit form may subject it to all kinds of misinterpretations.
Apparently some questioned whether his blog was a fake, or just part of US Army propaganda, but as you can see from my previous list, he was one of several US soldiers in Iraq blogging on LiveJournal. And I would imagine, if he was a US Army PR flack, he wouldn't have got blown up, or at least it would not have been admitted that he had.