10 gaffes to avoid with respect to Chinese culture

My latest post at Tech Republic:

If you’re doing business in China, meeting with people from China, or planning to work there, you’ll want to avoid certain missteps. Calvin Sun explains a bit about Chinese culture and provides a heads-up on a few common mistakes and misconceptions.

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– You walk into the party wearing jeans — and everyone else is black tie.

– You’re the emcee at a banquet, and as you’re introducing the speaker, you forget the speaker’s name.

– You write a check to your mother-in-law — and it bounces.

Gaffes are bad enough in your own circle of friends, associates, and family. They’re infinitely worse when they occur in the context of another culture. According to the Everest Group, the market for outsourcing of information technology and other business processes to China is growing at 38% a year. By 2010, according to Everest, that market could reach $7 billion.

These numbers mean huge opportunity, but also huge opportunity to make mistakes. If you’re doing business in China, or meeting with people from China, or want to work in China, watch out for these trouble areas, and avoid problems.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

[to read the entire entry, please visit http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=385]

Someone posted a comment in reaction to the article, discussing how in fact there IS a written form of Cantonese. One learns something new every day...

Non-transparent technology

Tomorrow I am going out of town, on a Delta flight that is a Northwest code share. In other words, I made the reservation through Delta, and the flight has a Delta flight number, but the actual flight is operated by Northwest. I had purchased the ticket about two weeks ago, and received my e-mail receipt.

This morning, I signed onto the Delta site, brought up my itinerary, and tried to check in. No way, because the "check in" command button was greyed out.

I called Delta, and after about twenty minutes on hold, reached a live person, who of course said she couldn't find my reservation. After more searching, she finally did find it. However, she apologized and said even she couldn't check me in. Rather, I had to have my NORTHWEST confirmation number (which is different from my Delta confirmation number) and I had to check in at the Northwest web site.

I then visited the Northwest site and checked in. However, the experience left me puzzled and got me to think. Here was an example of where technology failed to mirror business processes. In order to have code sharing, Northwest and Delta had to have gotten together to negotiate the arrangements. There had to be communications between them and between their reservations systems. However, that communications and transparency didn't carry over to the Delta web site. If it had, that web site should have provided at least a link to the Northwest web site, and provided the Northwest confirmation number. In fact, to take transparency to its greatest level, I simply should have been able to check in at Delta.

Keep this incident in mind if you're developing a system. Make sure it mirrors the business process you're supporting. Make the technology as transparent as possible.

Cultural communications issues: high vs. low context styles

I recently came across some fascinating work by a man named Edward Hall. The research took place years ago, but still is relevant today. Hall developed the concept of high context vs. low context communications styles. The former refers to an environment in which communications occurs more by context and less by words. For example, I come into a room and see that everyone but one person has a beverage. So, without saying or asking anything, I give a beverage to that person. I obtained my information by looking and observing, i.e. from context.

Suppose, instead, I went to that person, and said, "would you like a beverage?" Then suppose I said "OK, I'll get you one." Then, after giving it, I said "Here it is." This second example illustrates low context communications. There's more use of words, and less on observation.

Problems can arise if a person is expecting one context level of communications and gets another. This issue arises particularly with people of different cultures. Hall posited, for example, that many Asian cultures have higher levels of context, while the US has lower levels. So, on the one hand, we could annoy people by telling them too much, but also by telling them too little.

Keep this concept in mind when communicating with people, especially from different cultures.