The Blog for Culture Vultures

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 in the USA or with Americans remotely.

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 and some of the key cultural differences viz-a-viz other cultures.

In this blog, we hear from someone who spent some time living in Thailand and her reflections on Thai culture; in particular how it differs to US culture.

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 Commisceo 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 and/or outside your own country is exciting and much of the time fruitful.

However, international business is not always a bed of roses as American companies starting up in Germany seem to be finding out.

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. 

What are the top ten trends in training and human resource development that are expected to dominate in 2008?

With all the attention given to the Middle East today, it is important that the Western public receives a complete picture in order that their opinions and sentiment toward Arabs and their homeland’s is a responsible one.