The article in TheFeature by Howard Rheingold reminds me of how important neta is in establishing credibility in Japanese society - and that I must incorporate this point into my training. He talks about the research (pdf file link) done by Keisuke Okabe of Keio University into how Japanese people use the photos they take on their mobile phones as a social currency - taking pictures of something they can then show their friends - a cute dog, an interesting urban landscape detail, something they cooked, a trick played on a drunk friend, their new haircut.
'Social currency' is my loose way to translate neta - in my dictionary it is translated as 'material' as in for a novel or a news article. It mentions the American slang expression 'dope', as in 'get the dope on something'. Other meanings given are 'proof', 'trick' or even ingredients for food. Social currency is important in any society but I wish that there was more appreciation by Japanese working with Europeans that Europeans might have useful neta and conversely perhaps Europeans should be more forthcoming about the neta that they have to their Japanese colleagues. It would help build trust and respect.
Olaf Brugman highlights a factor often ignored in knowledge management - egotistical motives for knowledge sharing. We don't like to see our actions as being selfish, or acknowledging that even our unselfish actions may be governed by the hope that we will receive a reciprocal kind deed in return. I remember having some good discussions about this when studying Thomas Hobbes' 17th century work 'Leviathan' at school (for History A Level - for Brits old enough to remember those exams).
Japanese companies are supposed to be good at knowledge management and knowledge sharing. I came to the conclusion that this was partly due to the seniority based lifetime employment system - seniors don't feel threatened by juniors, so are happy to share their expertise with them. Also, as companies with such employment systems tend to promote people through horse trading between factions, faction building - finding and being seen as a strong mentor - is important, and sharing knowledge is a way of building factions.
The Japanese education system also has something to do with it - the more academically gifted are encouraged to help the less able in class. And some "Japanese Uniqueness" people would start talking about village rice farming societies and the need to cooperate at this point but I'm afraid that's where I start to lose interest. I don't see that rice farming is any less collaborative than other kinds of farming in other societies.
Putting text into Adobe Acrobat pdf format has been one of the few ways to be absolutely sure that people using Japanese operating system computers can read files created by people using computers with other language operating systems. It's noticeable that many Japanese websites offer their press releases and brochures in pdf format, to ensure maximum readability.
Alas I have had to uninstall Adobe Acrobat version 6.0.1 as it always crashes my Opera version 7.3 browser with my CPU running at 100% usage levels and doesn't seem to work too well with IE either. Apparently version 6.0.1 will allow me playback multimedia content and read e-books. I really don't care about that, I just want a quick, reliable document reader. So I'm back to version 5.0 and right clicking pdf files to save from websites rather than trying to open them on the spot. It's not just me that's cheesed off either. 70% of CNET user reviews give it the thumbs down too.
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'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 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.
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.
An oldie but a goodie from Clay Shirky in 1999 talking about a Dentsu Institute for Human Studies report which showed that people from Asian countries who speak English are more likely to be online than those who don't. I wonder if this study was done again, whether anything would have changed. Access to the internet via mobile phones may well have shifted the balance away from English speakers in South Korea and Japan...
I am intrigued by his idea (or is it Dentsu's) at the end of the article about gateways - places where large numbers of multilingual people live such as New Delhi or Hong Kong, smoothing the transition between language networks. It ties into the exchange between Olaf Brugman and Ton Zijlstra last month about the need for individuals who are network straddlers or connectors, where you are trying to get knowledge to flow across language divides. As Ton says, the solution is not to centralise the translation effort or try to adopt one language in an organisation. Mechanical translation is not sufficient yet either and in any case, may never be sufficient, given that knowledge, not data is what needs to be transmitted, and knowledge needs human intervention to be transmitted successfully.
Similar concepts exist in knowledge management - that each team (if it's functioning well), has a member who spends a lot of time communicating with team members and other teams, and is the hub for knowledge transfer - the kind of person who's always forwarding interesting articles to people (yes, I confess, I do it all the time). And you find people like this being identified in intercultural theory too - called 'cultural spanners', who are able to switch between two national cultures inside a company, interpreting what is going on to different interest groups.