A Home for Culture Vultures

Cultures build relationships in different ways.

Understanding these cultural differences can be the difference between success and failure.

Every country has its quirks, right?

Well, the Land of Hope and Freedom is no different.

Depending on your own culture, working with Americans can be challenging.

When delivering cross-cultural training we get to hear many of the challenges facing professionals when working  with Americans.

Imagine you’ve been asked to play an unfamiliar board game and that you’re instructed to play it without any understanding of the rules.

You soon begin to irritate other players by making mistakes and getting things wrong and, after a while, the game becomes a stressful and confusing experience.

Living abroad gives you some excellent insights into foreign cultures.

Especially in terms of being able to compare them viz-a-viz with other cultures.

Did you know that the USA is one of our most in-demand countries in terms of cross-cultural training?

We support a diverse spectrum of business professionals from across the globe who work with Americans by helping them understand the culture, and specifically the business culture.

We spend most of our time at here working on serious cultural stuff, such as, how to negotiate successfully with the Americans, or, how to give good service to American customers.

Every so often however, we feel that need to go off at a tangent and indulge in some of the quirkier aspects of culture!

Doing business internationally can be exciting and fulfilling.

It can also present opportunities to learn new approaches to the workplace. 

With unemployment soaring in the USA, students graduating from American universities are more likely than ever to try their hand at gaining employment in Shanghai and Beijing. 

Joshua Arjuna Stephens, a 2007 graduate of Wesleyan University, works in Beijing for XPD Media, which makes online games.

Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the challenges of immersing oneself into the Chinese culture, learning a well sought after language and bypassing some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States. 

Critically, individuals moving to China from the USA, find they have far more spending power due to China's lower living costs. This is a great pull for recent graduates with student debts to repay. 

This blog was originally written in 2008.  Revisiting this in 2021 makes for interesting reading.

It's fair to say that HumaNext certainly got it right as everything they mentinoned came to fruition and these topics - particularly cultural competency for leaders, are still trending training topics!

Despite all the attention given to the Middle East today, it's fair to say that stereotypes and misconceptions still make a lot of noise!

The perception of one country in particular, Saudi Arabia, is clouded by mystery and stereotypes due to the country's strict adherence to the Islamic faith.