The business of culture
Today an old friend and I had dinner at a quaint little spot in southeastern Beijing. We talked shop about an American organization we both know well, and some of its latest China moves — and how little sense they make.
It's easy for "intercultural communication" to sound like an abstraction, or some sort of fancy extra, or window dressing, to what organizations "normally" do. Yet every time I witness the sort of, for lack of a better term, shenanigans that American organizations try to pull in their dealings with China, I go a little nuts, because what could be more important to an organization than money, time, and goodwill? Yet these most prized of resources are what go down the tubes every time when intercultural savvy is missing.
In the present case, I can safely say that there is no ill will on the part of the American organization. There rarely is. In their eyes, they are merely "doing their job." It's up to interculturalists to make the business case for our services. What gets my hackles up here is that overtures have been made multiple times over the years about the advantages of entertaining other perspectives — overtures which have been rebuffed time and again. And over these years this organization has spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold hours of precious human capital, all in service of angering or alienating exactly the people most crucial to the long-term success of their venture.
The way I see it, ultimately we are responsible, individually and collectively, for honoring what we have been given. Among other things, organizations are in possession of limited resources with which to accomplish something in the world. Like any form of organizational consulting, intercultural consulting aims to help organizations make the very most of their resources, so that they can go about their business and get things done. The ongoing challenge we face as interculturalists is to bring our work into the mainstream of business practice. When you have a legal problem, you call a lawyer. No one thinks twice about that. What if, every time you dealt with someone from another culture, you called an interculturalist? We'd get more done with a lot less, and we'd all be happier for it too.