I've seen authors talk about culture clashes and about learning about culture and customs before you go to some new place. Well, that can help a bit, but no matter how much you read and think you know before you reach your Asian destination, you will get a surprise once you get there. These surprises can be several things i.e., gastronomic, like the infamous 'Deli-belly', religious, like someone standing up in the middle of a meeting or conversation because they have to do their prayers, gestural, like the peace hand-sign but showing the dorsal part of the hand (my British friends found this quite amusing), idiomatic, like someone saying 'I like cock' when they really meant to say 'I like Coke' (some very funny here, but will probably leave them for later on my writings), and many more.
Some people call these barriers, I don't, I call them shockers, and the reason I don't agree with the term barriers is because they're not, they're just things that shock you when you first arrived to a different place, and some of them, believe me, will shock you until the day you die. But these shockers happen everywhere, even if you stay in your own country and move jobs or even just departments.
Once you get used to these shockers, they shock you less or they stop shocking you altogether.
But now let's face it, you're the invader in their land and you're the weird one in this place, not them. And if you were to go against them using you physical strength, forget it dudes or dudettes, you'll get your ass kicked, always remember, they outnumber you, this is their country :)
Well, they sent or hired a foreigner to Asia because the locals in charge couldn't understand the way foreigners ask them to do things or just plainly, didn't get along with other people. So, you were sent or hired to:
- Satisfy a necessity related with the Western world
- Work as a link between the Western and Eastern worlds
- Increase productivity
- Reduce costs
So far is all quite obvious, but have you thought how you will do all these things?
That brings us to lesson 1 and the topic of today's blog.
Forget everything you know about managing and all the books you read about it, they may not apply where you are going, you have to be a 'flexible' manager, many things you learned before, may not work in Asia, you will have to find a way to achieve the same or similar results, through other methods or a modification of what you 'learned' before.
In simple words, you will have to become a hybrid, you will have to stay Western enough to be able to receive requirements and ideas from your old life's people and learn your new culture well enough to be able to translate those requirements and ideas in a way your new people will understand them, share them and follow them, and vice versa of course. You will become a 'translation manager' and if you do your job well, you will probably like it a lot, you will feel very useful.
I started this blog talking about authors and how their books will most likely not help you much, I still maintain this, but it doesn't mean you should stop reading managerial books, I'm assuming that, whoever is reading my blog, is a smart person with imagination and all this said, I'd assume that you don't read managerial books to follow them as if it was a rule or a law, you read them to get ideas on what could apply to you and even use these ideas as a spring-board and jump higher than the author with your own 'genius' ideas, and improve ideas the author suggested or even come up with you own theories and management paradigms, I love to read them all!!!
My writings are mostly about me and my experiences managing in Asia, so I won't be recommending books or talk about particular managerial styles, but I will talk about things I've seen which have worked well for me and things I've seen and done that I'm sure don't work in this beautiful part of this gorgeous planet.
I will try to explain you how to become a good 'translation manager' and hope you can criticize me and my ideas as much as you can, so I can learn from this, my first blog ever... For today I think it's enough, I hope you don't find my way of writing boring and my one or two bad words offensive, I can tell them in front of my kids, so since this is partly an outlet for me, I will be saying them here :P
Have a good day everyone and I really mean everyone, reader, non-reader, catholic, muslim, jewish, christian, agnostic, atheist, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment