hightext

Intercultural netiquette

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).

National differences in public sector IT failures

According to an article in Prospect magazine this month, there is a survey due out next year of seven countries which finds sharp variations in the proportion of government IT projects that are eventually scrapped. Britain emerges as the world leader in cancelling or producing non-functioning government IT systems. Japan and the Netherlands had the fewest failures. The researchers say the reason Japan only had one cancelled project in the past twenty years is that failure is unthinkable there, so there is a strong incentive to make systems work. Contractors will put more resources into a project, even if they end up making a loss. Civil servants will draft in more staff and allow contractors to recoup losses in the future. So it has a low scrap rate, although it may end up paying higher prices. This definitely has a ring of truth to it; the Japanese emphasis on long term relationships over cost.

As for why British government projects are particularly prone to failure, the author of the article identifies five factors. Firstly scale - big government organisations like the NHS seem to seek out large suppliers, whereas in the Netherlands, large scale projects are split up into small packages of work. Secondly lack of professional skills in software engineering, particularly within the civil service. Thirdly the procurement process is very lengthy, locking public bodies into a technology which is already obsolete by the time the system goes live. Fourthly - multiple stakeholders, cutting across many different agencies, making leadership difficult. Finally, vulnerability to policy swings and mission creep. An example of this is the introduction of tax credits, sprung on EDS with little notice.

Blogueurs

According to a Business Week article the French are the keenest bloggers in terms of number of blogs as a percent of the total population - 4.9%. It's 1.4% for the British, 3.5% for the Dutch and 0.2% for the Germans. Even American bloggers only make up 3% of the US population.

Loic Le Meur, founder of Ublog.com says it's because "French people love to tell everyone exactly what's on their minds - far more than Germans, for example." I would add to this that they also like to have a really good argument about it too, and the comments on a blog provide an excellent venue for that.

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Ton Zylstra (Interdependent Thoughts weblog, http://www.zylstra.org/blog) sent me this comment which he was not able to post (I'm sorry, I still haven't been able to fix the problem that has led to my disabling the comments):

Those numbers come from my partner Elmine (http://elmine.wijnia.com/ ) who added them to the wiki of Loïc when he asked numbers for the European blogosphere. She took the estimated totals in those wiki-pages for all countries mentioned and divided them by the number of inhabitants (those numbers taken from the CIA Factbook website) So all percentages are speculative at best, as the number of blogs in any country remains speculative (France's position is due to 2.4 million blogs at Skyblog, a contested figure e.g.). Also note that this list only covers European countries, not what's happening in Asia for instance.

You can find the whole list here:

http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/index.cgi?summary_page

UK's poor employee communication

Managers in the UK and France are the worst in Europe at communicating with their employees apparently, in the sense that employees say they are more likely to hear about changes in the company through rumour. Danish managers are the best at 'beating the rumour mill' as the ISR press release puts it. It should be pointed out that the countries involved in the survey were France, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, so quite a lot of European countries were missing - I'd like to have known the results for Italy and Spain for example.

Apparently the rumour mill is especially bad in the UK in the IT and manufacturing sectors, which links nicely to a comment made by the UK Managing Director of a large Japanese car company at a dinner I was at the other night. He said that once they discovered that their British shopfloor supervisors were communicating with the shopfloor workers by e-mail, they got rid of the computer terminals and e-mail accounts. Unsurprisingly this caused a big fuss and initially a drop in confidence of the shopfloor supervisors, because they had to address staff face to face again. But he believed that communication has improved since.

John Peel

OK, I realise that the death of a radio DJ in the UK has nothing much to do with information and communication technologies or intercultural issues, although you could argue that radio is a communication technology.

You could also say that John Peel was very very English - in his self deprecation and his use of irony and as one of the obituaries pointed out, his nerdish enthusiasm and trainspotter tendencies in the way he kept up with new music, no matter how obscure. His enthusiasm for the music he played was very obvious to listeners, but was nicely underplayed - again a very English trait.

At the same time he was "intercultural" in his music tastes, even if he was not as closely associated with promoting World Music as other DJs who followed. He even played a record of mine once, when I was 14. I had been listening to his show under the bedsheets from about the age of 12 and had sent in two records, one of traditional Japanese music and one from the Candies, who were a very popular girl band in the 1970s in Japan. He played the traditional Japanese music one and read out my postcard, which I had chosen because it came from the Liverpool Art Gallery - his home town. One of the coolest boys at school heard this and came up to me the next day to ask if it was me (as there aren't that many people in the UK called Pernille). I didn't get permanent promotion to being cool though, just a one day backstage pass from swotdom. I've still got the record he scribbled his thanks on, along with the postcard which he sent back to me.

He also provided one of the reasons my husband and I fell in love. In the early flirty days we found out we had both recorded Peel sessions under the bed clothes - finger hovering over the record and pause buttons on our cassette radio players. And we had both ended up recording an Altered Images session where John Peel talked over the ending of "Song Sung Blue" saying 'when I die you'll find the words tweedle eedle um pum engraved on my heart'.

He was on our fantasy wedding guest list (along with Robyn Hitchcock (for my husband), David Bowie (for me), Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and various others that I can't remember off hand). According to one reminiscence I heard on his BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths, he might well have come if we had asked him - as he did turn up to someone's 60th birthday party when her son invited him out of the blue.

We nearly featured on Home Truths ourselves. I wrote to the researchers suggesting they covered the celebration of the 8th of the 8th that my husband and his brothers invented to liven up their village of Halford in Warwickshire. (It's a long story, but involves Vikings, a cheese factory, a rat the size of a Volvo Estate and throwing cheese in the river at 8 minutes past 8pm on the 8th of August every year). They were enthusiastic and suggested I recorded the event myself but they didn't get back to me until the event had passed.

Although I was shocked to hear of his death I was not tearful until I heard the Home Truths tribute by Roger McGough, particularly when he played the clip of how John Peel felt holding his grandson in his arms for the first time. Then the floodgates really opened last Saturday when I watched a BBC TV programme about him, and Phil Jupitus (a great big bumptious bear of a DJ to those who don't live in the UK) looked like he was about to cry during his vox pop, on top of all the memories unleashed by vox pops and music clips from Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks, Pulp, Ivor Cutler and then of course that midnight sign off music he used to finish his Radio One show, with me half asleep under the bedclothes, starting awake to turn the radio off, feeling guilty that it was midnight already and I had a school day the next day...

The indefatigable English sense of humour

Apologies for the long break - trip to France to see my father, then somewhat lost for words post Beslan.

Anyway, have been distracting myself by reading Kate Fox's amusing and useful 'Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour."

She points to an indefatigable and sometimes incomprehensible (to other nationalities) sense of humour, including in the workplace, as a defining characteristic of the English. So, to keep up the English tradition, and because by giving in emotionally to what these terrorists have done by changing my behaviour, I would be helping them to achieve their ends, here's a funny clip (on a not work-friendly site - sorry), from a British comedy show, possibly "Ali G", of a terrorist complaining about being subtitled in a news report, when his English is perfectly comprehensible. A familiar grouse for anyone who is reasonably bilingual and has watched subtitled news interviews in the languages they know.

The one about the Brit and the Dane...

I always warn when doing cross cultural training for non-British people working with the British, about the British urge to tell jokes in the workplace. It seems we keep telling them even when we know they can backfire and the medium might be inappropriate (ie e-mail). Recently I was working with a Danish family moving to the US and they said Danes are just as bad too, in particular they have a penchant for telling jokes about sex in the workplace. They realise that they have to bite their tongues now they will be in Redmond Washington (no prizes for guessing which company they are working for).

Seasonally appropriate naughty British seaside postcard (which reminds me of Brighton, where we live)

Unhelpful advice for visitors to London

I recently attributed the 'unhelpful advice for tourists in London - try the famous echo in the British Museum Reading Room' to a New Statesman (UK political magazine) competition. My husband disagreed (ever so nicely of course), saying it came from I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the long-running BBC Radio 4 comedy programme. I've tried Googling it and it turns out it could even be from Gerard Hoffnung, artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist, musician and tuba player, broadcaster and raconteur - born 1925 in Berlin, died 1959 in London.

1. Evidence for it being Gerard Hoffnung
According to Victor Lewis-Smith
and a site with other unhelpful advice
and Wikipedia

2. Evidence for it being from I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue
Transcript from July 30th 1979 - lots of other unhelpful advice from various editions of the show on this page such as:
It is customary when using the gents lavatory at York station, to greet visitors with a friendly pat on the bottom
If you're visiting Glastonbury, the last weekend in June is quite quiet
The fields around Longleat House are ideal for camping
If you're invited for a game of croquet, it's traditional to give your host a gift of a dozen moles
Millwall fans are known as 'Fairies'
Wales is nice

3. Evidence for it being from a New Statesman competition
Article in the The National Review
From the Tug Boat Potemkin blog who confirms that there was a 1976 New Statesman competition called "Helpful advice for tourists visiting the UK" which included 'London barbers are delighted to shave patrons' armpits' and 'bus conductors like to be paid in 5 and 10 pound notes as they hate carrying heavy coins up and down the stairs', but he does not mention 'try the echo in the Reading Room.'
And from someone who is obviously a fan of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, who says that these are from a New Statesman competion:
Never attempt to tip a taxi driver
Try the famous echo in the strangers' gallery at the House of Commons
Any passer-by is welcome to intervene in a game of cricket

I've found no back up on the web to say that it's the strangers' gallery not the Reading Room... I suppose I'll have to buy all the New Statesman competition compilation books to find out for sure.

The British Museum Reading Room

British surfers confused or nosy?

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.

Getting by, not getting on

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).

PowerPoint is evil (2)

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.

PowerPoint - not just evil but also monocultural?

I've just been re-doing a PowerPoint presentation that was originally created by a Japanese businessman. I couldn't see it working with a British audience so I replaced the dark blue swirling background with plain white, made all the fonts the same (arial - sans serif seems to be the best for a British audience?), cut down the number of colours used and dropped some of the less necessary text.

So I wonder, is it just me applying my own aesthetics or is this a crosscultural difference between Japanese and British taste in slides? When I was working for a Japanese company in Japan a few years ago, we hardly ever used PowerPoint - I got the impression such presentations were regarded with suspicion. Rightly, Edward Tufte would say.

Maybe high context cultures like Japan find slide presentations too unsubtle - they give lots of low context information and therefore not the real story. And perhaps I am appealing to the high context side of British nature, by ensuring that the presentation is aesthetically pleasing (subtext to the presentation is therefore - I'm intelligent and a person of taste and education, so you can trust my products).