1. O Slide 1
True story. A director for a Fortune 500 company walked into a room to do a presentation for a dozen
colleagues. This director was from Mexico and had just relocated to the United States. He prepared to
highlight motivational management techniques by pointing to the strengths of the left and right brains in a
team, identifying the logic of the left brain in contrast to the creative and artistic nature of the right brain.
He chose to use numbers and equations to represent the logical left brain and then drew a rainbow to
represent the colorful and creative right brain. All of a sudden, a member of the audience, another
manager, exclaimed, "I’m surprised you haven’t been fired yet" and continued to react angrily at the
representation used by the manager.
2. O Slide 2
The Mexican manager was stunned. For the life of him, he didn’t understand the problem. To him, a
rainbow merely represented something benign and creative. Little did he know that this archetype had
taken on significance in the U.S. as the symbol of the gay rights movement. Depending on the context, a
rainbow is no longer just a rainbow. Luckily, the manager did not lose his job; some levelheaded colleagues
calmed the situation and wrote it off as a cultural misunderstanding. And it was exactly that: a cultural
misunderstanding. What lies behind it, however, is the reaction of each individual when they first saw the
rainbow.
3. O Slide 3
Cultural training has traditionally focused on behavior because that was all that could be seen. Trying to
understand a culture through its behaviors is basically reverse engineering. But it may not be the best
approach. It’s like trying to learn a new language in a different way from the way you learned to speak your
native tongue. You are insisting that it must be done in a different way. You see, as we all have our own
culture, we already possess the tools to understanding the underlying forces of other cultures. Maybe not
the behaviors, maybe not the rituals, but the forces and values.
4. O Slide 4
Companies spend a lot of energy and capital trying to reverse engineer the behaviors of even a single culture
to get an understanding of the meanings behind behaviors. The process of going from behaviors, to the
emotions behind the behaviors, to finally understanding the meaning of the emotion behind the behavior is,
to say the least, a daunting task.
In the case of a truly global corporation, to reverse engineer behaviors, each employee would need to have
trainings tailored to them as well as to each person, group, culture, or region they may encounter.
But there are over 150 countries with thousands of regional variations and countless environments in which
people interact. It becomes logistically, financially, and physically impossible to use this type of approach to
prepare a corporation to function successfully at home and abroad with all of this variability. If you are just
about to say you don’t do business in 150 countries, then you probably never will.
5. O Slide 5
Remember, diversity doesn’t only exist outside your home culture. We tend to forget that in the U.S., by
structuring work around rules and goals, companies aren’t constantly reminded of the enormous tide of
cultural diversity swelling under the surface. Some rules and goals can eliminate much of the visible
diversity, but the cultural elements are still there.
In preparing the workforce for global interaction, the cultural training industry usually applies the reverse
engineering approach, often leaving participants with a "deer in the headlights" reaction, not after the
training, but when they have to put the training to use. A person will seem to know everything about a
culture, yet has no idea of how, when, and where to act in unpredictable conditions.
