October 26, 2004
It's only me
Techdirt Wireless reports on the Japanese government considering outlawing pre-paid phones in Japan due to them being used for fraud. Their story comes from Gerhard Fasol's blog. He points out (as have I in the past) that this is not such a big deal in Japan, as prepaid services have not been that popular. He also mentions the "ore ore" fraud as being an example of the kind of scams people have used prepaid mobiles for, which is worth explaining in more detail.
Japanese people rarely use first names when they talk to each other. When they are talking to someone with whom they are on intimate terms (relatives, boyfriends/girlfriends) etc they will say 'anata' (if female) or 'kimi' (if male) meaning 'you' when calling out for them - for example if they are in different rooms in the house. They would refer to themselves as 'watashi' (if female) or 'ore' if male when making it clear who they are - for example on the phone or when they've just come home. Like 'it's me!' in English (or 'it's only me' which always sets my teeth on edge slightly as it seems so unnecessarily self effacing).
So what the scammers have been doing is ringing random people from their prepaid phones and saying 'it's me' and then explaining they need money quickly for some emergency. When the victim realises it's a scam and tries to trace the call, they can't - I presume because the pre-paid number has by then been ditched or records aren't kept of who the subscriber is. This does of course raise the question of why the victim can't tell by the voice, intonation, expressions etc whether it really is their son. Are relations between mothers and sons in Japan really that bad? Or - more likely - that a mobile phone is used rather than a landline because the quality of the voice will be more distorted and muffled and easier to disguise? More explanations of the scam here and here.
Manga showing an Ore Ore fraudster at work - from a landline - but wearing a muffling mask - thanks to Nigiri Kopushi (not his real name I suspect).
October 22, 2004
Google - still great but...
I am taking this story with a large pinch of salt. Much though I still love and rely on Google, I don't think even its algorithms can work out whether a man is a CIA spy or not. Being a journalist is a very good cover for being a spy - Whittaker Chambers who spied for the Soviet Union whilst being a Time journalist for example.
And being a journalist wasn't much help to Terry Anderson or Daniel Pearl in denying that they were spies to their captors.
Whittaker Chambers at Time in 1939
October 12, 2004
Virtual ummah
Dr Olivier Roy, professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, has a new book coming out called 'Globalised Islam: the Search for a New Ummah' which he is plugging in an article today in the FT (sorry no link available) and also at Chatham House tomorrow. From the FT article:
The ummah [universal community of Muslim believers] that the fundamentalists are fighting for is not based on a territory: it is a dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chatrooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.
As he says at the beginning of the article "few, if any, among the children of Europe's Muslim immigrants return to wage jihad in the land of their ancestors" and those that join the Iraqi Sunni insurgents tend to be Saudi, Syrian or Jordanian, not volunteers from the west. Salafism (neo-fundamentalist islam) is a tool for uprooting traditional cultures. It rejects cultural dimensions of religion and replaces them with a code of Islamic conduct to suit any situation, from US to Afghanistan. The prime target of the Taliban is not the west, but traditional Afghan culture.
"[Fundamentalism] appeals to an uprooted, disaffected youth in search of an identity beyond the lost cultures of their parents and beyond the thwarted expectations of a better life in the west... a chance to build a new and positive identity."
It brings to mind a fascinating article I read in the Atlantic Monthly a month or so ago called 'Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive' (subscription necessary), written by a journalist who managed to buy an Al Qaeda laptop with all the e-mails and files still intact. From the e-mail correspondence described, you certainly did get a sense of a group of people quite adept at networking with each other, keen to establish their own status and sense of purpose through bickering about budgets and office equipment - just like a multinational corporation in fact. So in their deadly and terrifying pursuit of trying to find a purpose, identity and belonging, these disaffected youths have succeeded in creating a virtual version of the kind of secular organisation they have rejected, or feel rejected by.
Distributed development
One of the biggest barriers people face when working in the overseas operations of a Japanese company is that Japanese corporate culture necessitates consensus building, developing a network of relationships and high context, indirect communication that is best done face to face when decisions are required. Yet the people you need the decisions from are several time zones and an expensive plane journey away. I encourage people to find any excuse they can to visit the Japan headquarters of their companies as often as possible, but obviously this has its practical limitations, so I receive many requests in my seminars for guidance on how to use e-mail etc effectively with Japanese counterparts during negotiations and decision making.
According to this article (direct link to pdf download) by academics at the University of Victoria, Canada and the University of Technology, Sydney, there is an increasing requirement for this kind of e-mail based negotiation and decision making between teams located in different countries in software development. Software engineering is making a transition from traditional co-located develpoment to a form where global software teams collaborate across national borders. From my experience with clients I would say this is true of hardware too - where the information sharing, project management and negotiation that goes into globally distributed product development is done by e-mail, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and 'virtual' meeting software.
As the article points out, there are many challenges faced by teams doing this:
1) Diversity in customer culture and business
For some cultures stability is very important. So when it comes to requesting requirements for a new release, customers may ask for requirements purely because they were in the previous release of software. Customers from other cultural backgrounds may ask for entirely new features just because they want to be up to date and progressive in their approach to technology. It seems to me this is especially a problem if there is a dominant customer culture (usually the Japanese domestic market for clients I work with), because it may lead to the sense that other customers are being ignored.
2) Achieving appropriate participation of system users
In other words indirect communication from end-users/clients sometimes gets distorted or misinterpreted on the way to the developers. Customer visits to development sites are rare and there is a tendency to rely on written communication - which was "very poor" in communicating clear requirements according to the companies studied for this article.
Again, the hardware people I've met had a few stories like this too.
3) Lack of informal communication and reduced awareness of the local working context.
No corridor/water cooler/coffee machine chats, which means assumptions are made without any basis. In the article they mention that the Australian development group kept asking for requirements to be defined by the US Project Office and the US project office members were waiting for system components to be delivered, based upon 'understood' requirements.
4) Reduced level of trust
A project manager is quoted as saying that 'the most trusted people are those that are most accessible or available'. So when meetings happen between people who have not had access to each other very often, they tend to be extra cautious and conscious in making commitments and worried about 'hidden agendas'. Again, something I hear a lot of from participants in my seminars.
5) Difficulty in managing conflict and having open discussions of interests
6) Difficulty in achieving common understanding of requirements
7) Ineffective decision-making meetings
Due to the degree of pressure in setting up meetings - a lot of preparation and time, and the participation of key decision makers add to the tension. Those that take place via teleconferencing need documents to be sent well in advance and participants must express themselves concisely and clearly. Different time zones mean somebody somewhere is inconvenienced. People come and go, the mute button is used - all adding to a loss of trust. Sometimes the pagination of documents do not match, leading to confusion.
8) Delay
A small issue with a requirement can take days back-and-forth e-mail discussions over e-mail to resolve, which could have been resolved immediately face to face. Not helpful in the fast moving software industry.
The authors point to a couple of cultural differences - that perhaps the American managers had a more top-down management style and did not involve the Australian stake holders in the development team as much as the Australians would have liked. (A power distance issue). Also that trust was more important to the Australian teams than to the American teams, so perhaps Australia is a more high context culture than the USA. But as they acknowledge, most of the research that Hofstede and others have done show little cultural difference between Australia and the US in communication preferences, so in the end they conclude 'that perhaps national culture is being used as a scapegoat in both organisations to cover up ineffective management practices at various levels.'
So, when I talk about how the purpose of a meeting is different in Japanese corporate cultures, hence people should not expect decisions to be made in those meetings, I might also refer to this article, especially points 4) and 7), to show that it might not just be a 'Japan' thing, but a 'distributed product development' thing too.
October 08, 2004
Corporate IM in Japan
A recent comment on this blog asks if there are any statistics on usage of Instant Messaging by nationality and age group. I've had a look for Japanese statistics and found the following two articles (in Japanese I'm afraid).
One dated 28th March 2003 is entitled "Is this the Big Year for corporate instant messaging in Japan?", which implies it hasn't been much used up until 2003. It quotes an Internetcom and Infoplant survey of 300 people who use IM in the workplace (50/50 male/female). By age they were 34% in their 20s, 44% in their 30s, 18% in their 40s, 3% in their 50s and 1% in their 60s. When asked if IM usage was allowed in the workplace, 66% said it was not officially allowed (but hadn't been forbidden either), but getting the software and working out how to use it was up to the individual user. 27% said that a usage policy was decided for some or all of the company. 7% said it was forbidden.
62% said 'hardly anyone uses IM at work' or 'only 25% of employees use it at work'. Comments pointed to a generational digital divide or that the image of IM is that it is just for chatting or private use. Most people saw it as a substitute for e-mail or a phone call and 30% had not used it for anything but a one-to-one communication. However a significant percentage could imagine that in the future it could be used for file exchange, multiperson chat and calendaring.
A more recent survey from March 2004 found that around a quarter of people who had IM at work only used IM to contact work colleagues and another quarter of people only used IM to contact private friends. In total 45% used corporate IM to contact private friends.
As for other nationalities, I have not seen any research yet, but will post it as soon as I do.
October 06, 2004
Deductive, inductive
I always get myself into a twist (not good training practice) when I reach the part in my seminars about cultural differences in conveying information, trying to remember which method of logic is deductive and which is inductive.
Thanks to this blog entry from Chris Correa:
A teacher wrote me a letter, saying, "I found it very interesting that the Japanese teachers have students struggle with a problem before they teach them how to solve it. We never do that. We teach them how to solve it first, and then let them work on examples." She said, "I'm a very traditional teacher - I just get up and lecture - but I decided to try something after reading your book. I now start my lessons by letting students try to solve it on their own, and then give my lecture." She said this small change had worked brilliantly for her. She saw a huge change in motivation and engagement in her students.
I am prompted to remember the distinction by writing up this blog entry and also forcing myself to explain to myself that:
INDUCTIVE: is a process of reasoning by which a general conclusion is drawn from a set of premises, based mainly on experience (which is often how things are taught in Japan)
DEDUCTIVE: a systematic method of deriving conclusions that cannot be false when the premises are true - ie start with the theory and then find the examples to back it up, which is often how things are taught in the West.
Just to make absolutely sure I don't forget again, I shall mentally link 'induction' (which is what they threatened me with when my son was two weeks overdue) with 'experience' (which giving birth most certainly is).
That should do it.
Hat tip to Brian Micklethwait.
October 04, 2004
Multicultural e-learning
Some points that caught my eye from an academic article from the journal Language Learning and Technology, on the results of a study of a group of multicultural Canadians undertaking an Intercultural Studies course online.
They paraphrase Castells' The Internet Galaxy (one of those books that I have on my shelves in the hope that their contents will enter my brain by osmosis rather than actually having to read it) in saying that
'like all technologies, the internet was and is socially produced -- and all social productions are informed by the cultural values of their producers. The creators of the Internet were predominantly Anglo-American engineers and scientists "seeking quick and open access to others like themselves". Their ethnic and professional cultures value aggressive/competitive individualistic behaviours. In addition, these cultures value communications characterized by speed, reach, openness, quick response, questions/debate and informality.
They also draw attention to Genre Theory, which analyses how cultures apprentice their members in preferred genres of realizing everyday communicative acts (introductions, apologies, jokes etc) and illustrate this with the way that the students introduced themselves. One introduced herself online by describing her family and other groups she belonged to, another introduced herself by giving a potted professional resume.
They particularly noted that the aboriginal Canadians participated significantly less than other ethnic groups, and wondered if this was to do with the different attitudes towards direct communications, as shown in a study of Athabaskan communication, which found Athabaskans thought English speakers 'talk too much', 'always talk first' 'interrupt', ' ask too many questions' etc in contrast to English speakers who felt that Athabaskans 'do not speak', 'avoid situations of talking', 'only talk to close acquaintances', 'deny planning' etc.
Sounds similar to some of the comments I get about the differences in American/European and Japanese communication.
October 03, 2004
Text messaging in Kabul
Accoring to an article in the FT magazine yesterday (no online version, sorry), young middle class urbanites in Afghanistan are in the grip of an SMS craze, as a way of flirting with each other without it becoming public.
Farzan, a 22-year old engineering student, says he has seen his girlfriend on only a handful of occasions, when they snatched a few minutes together at the shop where he works, but he peppers her with messages."I send messages saying 'I love you; I miss you; I can't live without you.' Sometimes we fight over SMS for 10 minutes or so," he says. "If I have an hour to spare, I'd spend the whole hour sending messages."
Much of the romantic wireless traffic is kitsch picture messages (ready-made, such as a kitten's face surrounded by hearts) and soppy poems. Afghan men also trade ring-tones, jokes and poems on SMS, including Koranic quotations in Arabic script.
