Transcription
I sometimes describe myself as a culturally conflicted Englishman. I am first-generation born in the UK. I was educated at the French Lycée in London for 13 years. I spent a lot of my childhood in Italy and 30 years as an international lawyer, and I've always been fascinated by cultural differences. But I think it was arriving in New York as a 21-year-old student that I got my first taste of the oxymoron I'd like to share with you today: Global Village—not global village in the way brilliantly described by Marshall McLuhan when he predicted the Internet in the 1960s, but more as a word that we use, an expression we use a lot now.
My New York experience was not momentous, but it left a huge effect on me. I spent my first day walking the streets in—or the word "awesome" had not yet become fashionable—and at the end of the day, I decided to take a cab to have dinner with some family friends. I knew about cabs; I'd taken cabs in London. And so I got into the cab, and in my very English, polite, maybe apologetic way, I said to the cab driver, "Good afternoon. Do you think you could possibly take me to—" and I read him the address on the piece of paper. He looked around; his eyes had gone funny at this stage; his brain was clearly working overtime. His answer was unforgettable: "Sunny Joe, wanna go? What, don't you wanna go?" Well, of course, at this stage I was confused because I didn't want to go, because I was expected for dinner. But I thought for many days and many hours about that encounter. Rude? Confused? Was it me? Was it him? And it made me realize, for the first time, how very different we all are and how differently we communicate. That "Sonny, do you want to go or don't you want to go" was followed by many other examples during my career as a young and not-so-young lawyer.
I remember, as a very young lawyer, negotiating with the Japanese, and I went back to the office very proud—they agreed to everything I said. And my boss looked at me and said, "Peter, are you sure?" "Oh yes," they kept on saying "yes." And he explained to me, of course, that "yes" meant that they had heard me, not that they agreed. I realised with my Dutch, my German, and some of my American clients, the directness doesn't necessarily mean rudeness, a bit like my cab driver in New York. And I also, of course, learnt that the English really do talk in a code that nobody understands. I could cite many examples if we had time, but one of them always reminds me of the Italian who, when he was told by an Englishman—but the Englishman was slightly disappointed by something the Italian said—the Italian said, "Why did he even mention it?" I explained that "slightly disappointed" in English meant extremely angry and probably you will never be forgiven.
I learnt about negotiations and the fact that displays of emotion, of anger, don't necessarily mean that a deal is off, even walking out of a room. I learnt about time. Now I'm one of these people who, if I have a conference call at half past eight, because I'm what's called monochronic, I will dial in at 8:26, just in case the password doesn't work first time. Some cultures don't do that. Some cultures—time is, how shall I put it—a guideline. The world won't end if the meeting starts twenty minutes late. Relax. What are you getting so excited about? I also learnt about lunches and negotiations, so that in some cultures a long lunch—in the Middle East, in France, for example—can be an integral part of a negotiation. And I always remember a Frenchman who once said that when his New York colleagues suggested that they have a working lunch with a sandwich, he actually felt physically sick. I learnt about the use of silence in Finland. I'm still learning every day, you see.
My belief is that the idea that there's a global village is a myth. There is no single village; there are many villages on our globe. We talk about global warming, global economy, global crisis, global communication, but village life, village culture, still rules. I don't make any value judgment when I say that, but I do believe that we have to stop believing in the quasi-mythical powers of globalization, and we have to start remembering how very, very easy it is to misunderstand each other. We live in paradoxical times, and what I call the 21st-century paradox has got two pillars to it. The first is the dominance of English, certainly in the world of commerce, as the lingua franca of the world. The second is our unrelenting and total reliance on digital communication. Both of those lead to what's called a cross-cultural dilemma—the belief that because English is spoken so much and because it's so easy to communicate, that we really do understand each other. But we sit in boardrooms—Brits, Americans, Chinese, Russian, French—after negotiating in English, but do we always understand each other? But often not. We interpret subjectively; we jump to conclusions; we look at the world through eyes and lenses that are designed to correct our vision and not the other person's. We stereotype; we also think and react very quickly. And the question we may want to ask ourselves is: Do we even talk enough? We send one hundred billion—one hundred billion—business emails every day. I sit in my own isolated cultural space—in X, in London, in Paris, in New York—and I write my email, and within seconds it arrives in another person's cultural space, a space different to mine, one where the context is different. But email doesn't have a loopback; there is no visual or even oral clue that my words may have been misunderstood, my tone may have been misinterpreted. I write that email in a vacuum, unaware of cultural variables. So culturally, we're not global, you see. It's all about context; it's all about the individual or the cultural group to which he or she belongs. My context, your context, their context. We communicate, or rather we have contact, but does contact mean communication? You know, it's a bit like internet dating. You can meet somebody online, but at some point you've got to have dinner with them. And I also ask myself a question you may have asked: Have we forgotten the telephones were originally designed to have conversations on and to have dialogue? Are we relying too much on purely data?
At its origin, cultural shock was a term which we probably remember, used to describe that feeling of disorientation that an expat felt when they went for the first time to another country. He or she experienced it firsthand and in situ. But now something different has happened. Cultural shock has become invisible; it's become virtual; it's hidden behind our technology, and the learning experience which we would have gained from either a conversation or face-to-face communication is missing. The psychologist Paul Watzlawick once said, "What is true is not what I say but what you understand." I can't see you that well, but I bet you if I ask the following question, "How many women in the room think that men always understand them?" how many hands go up? Not many. Interesting. And if I then change the question, say, "How many men in the room think that women sometimes don't understand us?" Are there any men's hands yet? There are hands going up. You see, it's all about programming in this world of ours. We're not all Macs or all PCs, and even the same computer may have a different keyboard. We need to focus now on creating new software so that those of you who are Macs in this room and those of you who are PCs in this room can communicate effectively and harmoniously. And the key to that is cultural intelligence; the key to that is understanding different cultures and learning techniques to adapt in order to improve it. It's not about taking away; it's not about losing our own cultural identity. Cultural intelligence is about realizing, quite simply, that we don't all reason and think the same way; that culturally we look at a variety of important things very differently: risk, uncertainty, leadership, power, hierarchy, relationships, trust. But it's also about understanding our own culture within those parameters. There is a lovely saying: "The last thing the fish notices is the water he is swimming in." Cultural intelligence can be taught, and I believe it is one of the key instruments to help us navigate the 21st-century paradox.
My conviction is simple: We need to make cultural intelligence part of our education system at all levels. It must become a foundation stone. We need to teach it in our homes; we need to teach it in our schools, in our universities, in our business schools, in our places of worship, in our community centers, in every one of our villages. Our children need it; I need it; you need it; our colleagues need it. And there I also venture an idea: Maybe our politicians and our leaders also need a strong dose of cultural intelligence. Yes, this is a call to arms, if you like. We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to each other. You know, the dream in me believes that if we make cultural intelligence teaching at all levels part of the education system, we may combat bigotry a bit more and increase tolerance. Who knows? But at least let's make it part of our daily interactions. The French writer, or 20th-century savate, said something beautiful: "Si tu diffères de moi, mon frère, au lieu de me nuire, tu m'enrichis." If you differ from me, my brother, rather than harm me, you enrich me. And so the next time you send an email, or the next time you get into a cab or an Uber in New York, remember that your village does not represent the world. And maybe, if collectively we all do that on an everyday basis, we may, we may create a better, a richer, and let us hope, a safer world.