Takeshi Natsuno, managing director and founder of i-mode for NTTDoCoMo spoke at the Mobile Music Forum yesterday at Midem in Cannes. As well as yet another plea for all parts of the wireless supply chain to work together cooperatively (handset manufacturers, operators, content providers, software providers) and stop thinking one player can rule the world (Vodafone take note), he asserted that there were less differences in user behaviour with regard to mobile content and services across countries and regions than had been expected. As I and others have been saying repeatedly - Japanese consumers are not a weird exception to be ignored in global product development and marketing.
An article by Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune last year called 'Is PowerPoint the Devil?' has extensive quotations from Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT and director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self.
"We have a technology that is encouraging us to see things in black and white - but is this a time when we need to see things in black and white?"
"PowerPoint doesn't teach children to make an argument. It teaches them to make a point, which is quite a different thing. It encourages presentation, not conversation. Students grow accustomed to not being challenged. A strong presentation is designed to close down debate, rather than open it up."
"It's part of a general trend. It's one element among others that keep us from complexity. We face a very complex world. History is quite complex. Current events and literature are complex."
Other people quoted in the article give the counter argument (which I usually agree with) that technology is not inherently good or bad. Only its usage can be labeled that way.
And then the article quotes from Neil Postman, a professor at New York University who wrote the anti-TV book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'. "To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidly plain and simple."
I use PowerPoint in intercultural training sometimes, but more as a jumping off point for discussion - especially by including photographs in the slides, but also to give people comfort (including myself) that there is a structure, and the handouts give them something to scribble on and take home with them. And in intercultural situations, it is necessary to be aware, as I've mentioned before, that many high context cultures are going to find a PowerPoint presentation reductive and untrustworthy. But the level of debate and interactivity seems to depend more on the layout of the room and the people present than PowerPoint itself.
Clearly I need to add Sherry Turkle's book 'Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet' to my wishlist. Not so sure about the Neil Postman one though, as Amazon tells me that people who bought his books also bought books by George 'Moonbat' Monbiot and Michael Moore - shudder.
A quotation from Betrand Russell appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the book I am currently reading - John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.
"My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't."
Lanchester doesn't reveal who this German engineer is (at least not so far in my reading of the book) - it turns out it's Wittgenstein.
I wonder if there's a PhD thesis out there on the influence of cultural background on a philosopher's work?
Emily Nussbaum wrote a lengthy article (subscription required - here's an excerpt from it) for the New York Times on LiveJournal, a blog site much used by American teenagers, and the former home of this blog.
She points out that the vast majority of bloggers (across the board, not just LiveJournal) are teens and young adults. 90% are between 13 and 29 years old, 51% between 13 and 19. As I have noted before, this meant that the seemingly multicultural treasure trove of blogs on LiveJournal is partly due to ironic or ignorant US teenagers claiming to be from Iraq or Georgia.
Looking at the LiveJournal blogs claiming to be owned by people living in Japan, I've come to realise that LiveJournal is being used by a lot of people (not just teenagers but mostly Americans) who are living as expatriates around the world, to keep in touch with families, boyfriends and girlfriends and friends. So when I was helping a couple of Japanese girls with their adjustment to living in Germany at the end of last year, I recommended that the older one (13 years old) looked at starting a LiveJournal as a way of recording her experiences and also keeping in touch with her Japanese friends. I kept a scrapbook when I lived in Japan as a child, so this is the digital equivalent.
Nussbaum talks about the privacy issues surrounding exposing a teenage diary to the world, and ends on a positive note that keeping a LiveJournal blog might even help teenagers to become less inward and more sociable with each other, through the medium of leaving comments on each others blogs, using the drop down emotions menu to be more open about their feelings and posting instant messaging dialogues for all to see.
Adult bloggers tend to be a bit sniffy about LiveJournal and its ilk, I discovered, which is one of the reasons I've moved to Movable Type (yes, I admit, I was concerned about my reputation). I suppose the big distinction is that LiveJournal blogs are primarily about the blogger, whereas we adults like to think that our clean, plain, forensic blogs are purely about our ideas. Yeh, right.
When I conducted a training programme for a Japanese engineer seconded to Nokia in Finland in September last year, one of the presenters characterised the typical Finn employee as a "solitary worker ant" but I think this might be taking a national stereotype a bit too far!
There seems to be a great deal of difference in people's willingness to pay for outsourced data and research, depending on their cultural background.
It is well known that employees in German companies value their own status as 'experts' and therefore when presented with an issue requiring data, will go off and do their own research in some depth in order to reach an informed decision.
What I hadn't realised was that it is therefore very difficult to find any generally available sector wide databases in Germany. Each company does their own research and does not value publicly shared data. This may in part be due to Germany being a low context nation. High context cultures are much more likely to share information inside and outside a company. But other companies from low context cultures such as the US and the UK seem willing to outsource and pay large sums of money for research. This may have something to do with their monochronic 'time is money' attitudes, although Germans are also quite monochronic. British and Americans are less concerned with guarding their status as experts too, perhaps.
Japanese companies are different again, in that they have plenty of industry association databases and shared information to draw on for overall data, but are not prepared to pay very much for this. They also tend not to commission expensive in-depth analyses, believing that it is their role as business people to get close enough to customers, suppliers and other people in their networks to be able to get their own in-depth gut feel about what is going on. Obviously this is part of being in a high context culture too. Japanese employees also tend to be generalists rather than specialists, and regularly move across functions and market sectors within a company.
The high/low context dimension and the polychronic/monochronic dimension therefore do not on their own explain willingnesses to pay for different levels of data and research.
It may be that the time orientation dimension also has to be factored in. Germans weight the past more in decision making, so feel it is necessary to back up decisions with analyses of, for example, the past 5 years of sales. The Americans are very future oriented, so don't want to spend too much time looking at past data but are keen to bring in outside analyst views on what past data might predict about the future. The Japanese are present and future oriented, but pay little attention to the past in making decisions, so they want to know what is going on right now, but as external data will always be a little behind, they want to back it up with their own immediate impressions from talking to other people in their industry.
Each approach has its problems it seems to me. I remember when I had just taken over the sales of particular building material in Japan, and suddenly a key customer turned round and said they did not want to purchase any more from us because we were too expensive. It was completely unexpected to the team leader and my predecessor, but after I went back and pulled out all the files from previous years and put together the data in spreadsheet (which noone had done before!), the gradual decline in sales became very apparent - the customer had been losing interest for some time.
Similarly, if the various players in a sector do not have some kind of easy and cheap mechanism for sharing information and getting a general view on how the industry is moving, it is difficult to build the kind of mutually supportive ecosystem that enabled, for example, the Japanese wireless data market to develop.
I posted an article on my official consulting website explaining why videoconferencing doesn't work between different cultures. The same can be said for conference calls, much favoured by US multinationals. A Japanese manager pointed out to me last week that not only do high context cultures dislike them because they can't see the other person's body language, but also that even people from more low context cultures can wreck their efficacy. He said conference calls at his US/German chemicals company regularly grind to a halt when a German participant disagrees on a very narrow point in his area of expertise, then goes off on this tangent at great length, totally throwing the US HQ boss, who only has a thin overall grasp of all the issues.
I had more confirmation last week of my assertion that PowerPoint doesn't work in high context cultures from a Japanese manager in a German/US chemicals company. He said he views PowerPoint presentations as "smokescreens" and always feels that the presenter is trying to deceive him in some way.