Advanced Micro Devices commissioned a survey from Benchmark Research in September of this year to back their belief that the centre of our digital home is the PC, not the mobile phone or hand held organizer. I can't find the original survey but a summary of the results is given by an article in the International Herald Tribune and also The Inquirer.
The respondents were over 500 home PC users from Sweden, Germany, France, the UK and Italy.
When asked which digital device they would most willingly give up, only 1 percent said they would give up their PC, and most opted to chuck their personal digital assistants out , although the British were the most reluctant to bin their PDAs (not this Brit. Biggest waste of 300 quid I ever spent). Landline phones were also high on the list of least wanted, with the Germans being most attached to their landlines. The French and Italians valued their digital music players, the Italians and Swedes their mobile phones and the French and Italians most wanted to keep their digital cameras. So the British are the road warriors, the Germans the homebodies and the Italians and French living up to their artistic stereotype?
The Italian respondents were the most likely to be offended by people sending large or badly formatted files according to the International Herald Tribune interpretation (The Inquirer read the research as being about badly formatted e-mails) and were the most eager for help with digital etiquette (82% saying they would appreciate it, compared to the average of 56%). The French were the most concerned about how they were perceived every time they send something, and the Germans and Swedes the least concerned. So the high context cultures (French and Italian) worry about the hidden messages in the way that electronic communications look whereas the low context German and Swedes don't see any hidden messages, and believe that what counts are the words themselves, however badly formatted or presented.
More confirmation of cultural stereotypes: The French don't like the fact people can get hold of them more easily (high power distance) while Brits and Swedes complain most about the time they waste waiting for the computer to do what it's told (so are the most monochronic).
Netimperative is spinning this story about a survey done by comScore Networks to mean that as British people use search engines more often than other countries, they are confused or lazy about using the net. As a search engine addict, I think it is more about a large number of British people being knowledge workers, and also having a strong tradition of research, as well as being plain old nosy about other people. But then the French, who are also quite 'high context' and therefore like to know the background of people, use search engines significantly less often than the Brits.
They only surveyed five countries, but it was interesting too to note that Google was by far and away the most popular search engine for the UK, France, Germany and Canada, and it was only in the USA that Yahoo was anything like a close second.
A couple of interesting articles in the Financial Times Management Supplement today (subscription required unfortunately).
One article on field service management software features a quote from Phil Dance, CIO of BT Wholesale, who recently implemented A.P.Solve's Taskforce in France; "the technology works, but you need to address its cultural impact... For us, moving from having a human being despatching staff to a piece of software telling them what to do required a big cultural change programme to help the engineering workforce see that the system was meant to help them and improve customer service - it's not 'Big Brother'."
I can just imagine the French engineers' reactions to the software being implemented. For a start their sense of pride would be at stake - being ordered around by a piece of software - pah! And then their fury at not being given the chance to have a really good argument with the despatcher about what work they should be doing, not to mention a bit of chitchat and maybe flirtation with the despatcher first. You'd have to have a lot of very practical reasons and be prepared for a big long logical debate with all the engineers before they accepted the new system.
The other article, which is slightly off-topic for this blog but on my mind at the moment in my occasional search for an amazing job, concerns the proliferation of terms in the personnel/human resources world, which all seem to describe the same thing. First it was personnel, then it was human resources and now it's human capital management. I would add to this list Organizational Development and possibly Organizational Change/Change Management.
If you look at a definition of Organizational Development it has a list of the same activities you would find in a definition of human resource management - leadership development, team development, career development, talent management (currently getting very trendy), change management, e-learning, coaching, training. Maybe they mean OD is HRM without the luncheon vouchers.
HCM seems to involve measuring the outcomes of HRM or OD (headcount, recruitment and termination figures, remuneration but also knowledge and how it relates to performance - hah, good luck with that one). OD is more about changing the culture of the company, using the above list of activities.
Quite frankly though, I am often tempted to do a "search and replace" on my resume for all these terms, interchangeably, depending on what the job ad is asking for.
The Dissident Frogman recently added a quiet version of one of his banners to his blog. Apparently the noisy version was annoying Spartacus, an American blogger.The banner was a Flash movie which played every time you visited his site, complete with spooky music.
The Dissident Frogman's site is still full of distractions and very 'busy' to a Northern European or American's taste. It is bilingual, has lots of graphics, Flash movies, things in boxes, interjected comments in different fonts, obscure references, lots of links... All very well designed and stylish, but, I would say, a classic example of French polychronicity. As the Halls put it in 'Understanding Cultural Differences', "the most important thing to know about the French is that they are high on the polychronic scale. This means they do many things at once, they can tolerate constant interruptions...they use all their senses, visual, auditory and olfactory."
Merde in France, another bilingual French blog also makes a lot of use of cartoons, obscure references and links and is similarly quite difficult to follow for this plodding monochronous Brit. Goodness knows what these guys will do to their blogs if we ever get smellovision on the internet.