An assessed project for Masters Yr 1 students to attack which relates cultural differentiation to the understanding of inhibitors to the uptake of sustainability worldwide. Incorporates a four page 'thinkpiece'.

1. Team Workshop &
Report Assignment
“Intercultural Management, International Business and their Contribution to
Sustainability”
Date set: Session 1 in Intercultural Management Specialisé
Date due: Normally the final taught session in the unit (to be confirmed)
Group workshop in English of 60 minutes' duration. [Not a presentation]
(with submission of associated hard copy report) followed by questions from
me and other teachers/invitees in role and a plenary discussion.
Group Base Mark 40% (moderated for conspicuous, individual performance)
Individual Mark 60%
READ and reflect upon the 10-point ‘Thinkpiece’ below which highlights just some of the critical cultural
& intercultural issues which directly affect the attainment of national and global sustainability, then follow
the instructions provided thereunder.
‘THINKPIECE’
This is an extract from a keynote seminar presentation given this year, here in Alsace at Campus
Buondérie, reprinted and reproduced online by kind permission of Herr Professor Doktor M.Ust-
Dobetter B.A (Hons). M.A. PhD. PASTiT (President of the Association of Sustainability Teachers in
Training)
All but 30 years have passed since the publication of the landmark document: ‘Our Common Future’ /
‘Notre Avenir à Tous’ (a.k.a The Brundtland Report) in 1987, the rightly much-acclaimed output of the UN
World Commission on Environment and Development which was followed in 1991 by the famous Rio
Summit and a fledgling global approach to sustainability. But has much (or even ‘enough’) changed ‘on the
ground’ in all that time? … Might ‘culture’ have something to do with it….? If it has, then how should
we best deal with it?
10 important observations relating culture to sustainability:
1. Uptake. Although we hear and see a lot about responsible / soft / alternative / green / low-impact
/ sustainable Tourism (the industry can’t even make its mind up as to a common term!), it barely
accounts for 3% of the global Tourism market and the figure seems to be ‘stuck’ there year on year. The
industry says that there is not a massive demand for sustainable tourism from the consumer so it doesn’t
put much of it in its brochures. When people think ‘holiday’ they think escape from the norm – any
thought of sustainability responsibility goes right out of the window. That’s the mass tourist culture for
you: ‘Catch 22!’
2. Education. If sustainability is an urgent, globally important, ‘cradle to grave’ issue in which we
are all involved (as the recent Paris COP reaffirmed), then why, given it is SO important, does it not
appear in its own right as a subject running throughout the French National Curriculum? It appears to
be consigned to a few lines in SVT in one year at one level. Most BAC graduates have difficulty in
recalling more than a single lesson on the subject …. and often when they did remember something, it
was not ‘mainstream’ and more often than not a language teacher offering an interesting topic context!

2. French Educational culture?
3. Information lack. Walk into any town or even tiny village in Alsace and you are almost bound to
find a Tourist Information Centre. Fine. But where, pray, is the One-Stop-Sustainability-Shop which
can offer free and impartial advice on the who, what, when, where & how of sustainability to businesses
and citizens in their private capacity? By now, most people have got the message that we should be
more sustainable and we should be doing something: but WHAT – and HOW exactly? Taking the
simple AIDA model: Awareness  Interest  Desire  Action.
we may be aware, but do we have the support we need: the ‘carrots and the sticks’ to push us on
through the process to interest, then desire and ultimately action? It is a long journey and we are stuck
at stage 1!
4. Climate Change Performance Index 2015. This is where the nations of the world monitor their
progress against the targets to which they have all ‘signed up’. There are some surprises here.
http://germanwatch.org/en/download/10407.pdf
• Scoring above 70% on the index: i.e. the TOP THREE: Denmark, Sweden and the UK
(N.European)
• France & Switzerland 64 / 65% (W. European)
• Poland & Bulgaria 54% (E. Europe)
• USA 52%, China 51%
• Japan, S.Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, 44% - 47% ( Far East / SE Asia)
• Australia 35% (Oceania)
• Saudi Arabia 24% (Middle East)
Such statistics seem to suggest that there may well be strong national / macro-regional cultural (as well
as economic & political) reasons why climate change (the ultimate feature of sustainability, surely)
compliance rates vary so much. Unless we can strive to understand this and address it we can hardly
call the approach a globally concerted effort to save the planet.
1. Perception & Terminology. The English-speaking world uses the word ‘Sustainability’. The
French translation adopted is not ‘Durabilité’, its: Développement Durable’. Clearly NOT the same.
Sustainability speaks of the intrinsic value of what we have that needs to be sustained and therefore
protected from development. Développement Durable implies that development is desirable and
inevitable but we should try to make it long-lasting. The UK and France: two nations with a broadly
similar culture separated by barely 20 miles of water but with radically different approaches being
adopted as a result of the two different titles! On the French side, might this be because most of our
highest-ranking politicians of the last 40 years share an Ecole Nationale d’Administration, very much
economy-driven, ‘culture’?
2. Civilisation & Cultural History. Someone once said that in comparison with the cave-man we
are hardly ‘civilised’: the caveman ‘worked’ for barely two hours a day to hunt & feed and clothe
himself, whereas today we commute for hours to a place of work, work 8 hours or so, then commute
home with a loaded briefcase only to get bombarded by work emails ‘til late at night. Take a more
recent civilisation / culture: the plains Indians of North America. They lived a sustainable life with an
acute and sensitive understanding of their impact upon the environment. In 1854, Franklin Pearce, the
then President of the USA, wanting to avoid bloodshed and cost in the colonisation of the West Coast,
offered to buy the Indian lands in the North West from Chief Seattle. We have a record of Chief
Seattle’s reply. Although there is some doubt about the authorship of what has come down to us, it
represents a beautiful and accurate perception of one culture of another’s approach to life and the land.
Everyone should read this and challenge themselves.
http://www.essentia.com/book/history/chiefseattle.htm. We think that we are discovering something
new in our age, but we are sorely mistaken: it is something we lost! Look at a few of Chief Seattle’s
assertions:
• How can you buy or sell the land?… The idea is strange to us.
• We are part of the Earth and it is part of us.

3. • One portion of the land is to him (the ‘White Man’) the same as the next … for he is a stranger
who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother,
but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on…. His appetite will devour the Earth
and leave behind only a desert. …. He kidnaps the Earth from his children.
• Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth. Man did not weave the web of life: he is
merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
• Contaminate your bed and you will one day suffocate in your own waste
• …… The end of living and the beginning of survival.
In living memory, President J.F. Kennedy said the following in his address to graduating students at the
American University on 10th June 1963: “Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can be solved
by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do
it again. … Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same
air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” [JFK Speech from 06.25 mins].
If ever there were a speech entirely in keeping with the challenge presented today by Global Warming
and Sustainability, then surely this is it. JFK was trying to ‘crack’ the nuclear arms race problem
which had nearly propelled us into WW3 barely a few months before his speech. [Watch the amazing
Roger Donaldson film ‘Thirteen Days’ [ should you want to know more about this.] Despite the
seeming impossibility of the task, the world has, for the most part, dealt with massive nuclear build up
through non-proliferation treaties and disarmament & verified dismantling programmes. Now, as
Kennedy said, we are going to have to: “Do it again”… Do we have enough in common between the
world’s cultures to be able to do so is the question…
1. Insulation. Q. “Where does milk come from? A. The supermarket. We have cultures which,
together, produce a global civilisation dominated by a consumption ideology. We even accelerate the
waste by incorporating built-in obsolescence. It may not be broken, but it is not ‘the latest’ so we throw
it away rather than repair and buy anew to create wealth and jobs. The media has made us more
concerned about our image than reality. Marketing is the key agent in the process as it becomes a way
of getting us to desire and buy things we don’t really need. Our ‘wants’ (which we are made to believe
are ‘needs’) are unlimited, but not so the resources of the planet needed to provide these wants. There
is no brake on the system – we don’t feel guilty because everyone else is doing it and because we don’t
see our personal impacts on the environment as there are so many intermediaries and so much distance
between us and the source of production. When was the last time you made something to wear, made a
pot from clay, grew your own food??? We are insulated from the results of our own consumption
decisions – we don’t have any idea what damage we do. Go and do the carbon footprint test: to
determine how many planets would we need if everyone were to consume like you? How many tons of
C02 do YOU produce? Go on: shrug off your insulation!
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/
2. Top-down & Bottom-up Cultures, Carrots & Sticks. Given we are going to have to change the
way we think, act and to substantially moderate our consumption to really address the challenge
presented by sustainability as a whole (not just human-driven climate change), how can different
cultures be persuaded (carrots) or forced (sticks) to adapt? Do some cultures respond better to the one
than the other? The Vauban Quartier of Freibourg in Germany is globally recognised as THE world
leader in sustainable home and community living. [DO go and see it]. The Directors of the programme
explained their success in terms of ‘bottom-up’ demand and drive: like- minded individuals got together
and persuaded local community managers who persuaded the city which, in turn persuaded the Land
and the state such that the funding and political support came together and the project has moved
forward spectacularly. Asked if they could see this happening just a few kilometres away in France
provoked the reply (from a French Marketing Manager): ‘Culturally impossible – in France one waits
for the top-down system to decide and state what must be done – it’ll never happen in time.’ A case of

4. culture and the system it has created (or the system and the culture it has created?) rendering the
desired outcome all but impossible. So how should we address culture if it is standing in the way of
change we all desperately need to see happen in the short term?
[http://www.vauban.de/en/topics/history/276-an-introduction-to-vauban-district]
3. Business Culture. The Brundtland Report defined FOUR preconditions for making sustainability
a reality. One of these was that businesses should subscribe voluntarily to a culture of moral
responsibility for the use of the planet’s resources which goes beyond the strict requirements of the law.
To what extent is this within the bounds of prevailing and highly-competitive business culture?
Friedmanites will instantly cite his: ‘The business of business is business’ maxim: the law defines the
‘pitch’ upon which business can be played – if the law wants to change this because society considers it
to be important, then fine, but until then business can do what it wants on the legal pitch and should not
be told to do more (i.e. to deny itself the opportunity to occupy part of the legal ‘pitch’). Friedman went
further, suggesting that when businesses do not take on this extra moral responsibility they are still, in
fact, being moral and socially responsible in that they are: creating and sustaining jobs; paying VAT
and taxes on profits; training the workforce to a higher level; helping produce a ‘multiplier effect’;
saving the state unemployment benefit costs and thus contributing significantly to society at large. In
such a type of business culture Brundtland’s additional moral responsibility to go beyond the confines of
the law clearly has no role. It might even be deleterious in the sense that it could distract the business
from its primary role. But if business doesn’t adopt such a culture of voluntary responsibility, then one
of the four pillars of sustainability has fallen… [If you want to learn about the other three: read ‘Our
Common Future’ / ‘Notre Avenir à Tous’].
4. Cultural inertia. Inertia is about the propensity of a body to continue at the same speed in the same
direction unless another force be applied thereto. We are born into a culture: national, regional,
local, family and we ‘acquire’ it literally from Day One. Almost by the time we reach school age the
key values that make you you and me me have been ingrained naturally, seamlessly and without
much in the way of resistance [Hence the old Jesuit saying: ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I
will show you the man’]. So even before senior school and university our values are mostly solid
and in place and (to overplay the religious leitmotif earlier), it is a devil of a job to change us – it is
going to take a lot of persuasion and/or force to get us to change our ways – but changing our ways
is exactly what sustainability requires of us. The question is: how can the culture acquisition
process be made to incorporate an almost quasi-religious zeal for a way of life which, as Brundtland
put it, lies ‘within the planet’s ecological means’? I make no apology for the religious overtone as I
am thinking of the end of the renowned Professor James Lovelock’s book ‘The Revenge of Gaia’
where he imagines a future where humanity has to reconstitute ‘a feasible way of life’ based upon a
tangible, daily respect for ‘Gaia’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis (Earth):
“What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right.
Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us – a manual for living as well as
for survival. The quality of writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional
reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. […. ] In its time the Bible set the
constraints for behaviour and for health. We need a new book like the Bible that would serve in
the same way but acknowledge science. [… ] It would give school children today a proper
understanding of our civilisation and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age
when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It
would also be the survival manual for our successors. [… ] What we need is a book written on
durable paper with long-lasting print. It must be clear, unbiased, accurate and up to date. Most of
all we need to accept and to believe in it… [….] A book of knowledge and authority… it would
earn the respect needed to place it in every home, school, library and place of worship. It would
then be to hand whatever happened.”

5. To repeat the words of JFK: …. Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We
all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” If I were to
update this for our epoch, which JFK, sadly, did not live to see, I might say: ‘Our most basic common
link is that we all inhabit this same [plundered and over-populated] planet. We all breathe the same
[polluted] air. We all cherish our children's future [which generations, including ours, have
mortgaged]. And we are all [more] mortal [than we think].” Let’s not forget it and DO something
(cultural & positive) about it!
INSTRUCTIONS.
Preamble:
In his documentary film and book: ‘The Fog of War’, The US Secretary of State for Defence during the
Vietnam War, Robert S. Mc Namara revealed that of the eleven principal reasons for the US’s dramatic
failure in Vietnam, more than half of these (6) were major cultural mis-judgements and issues which
prompted inactivity or the wrong strategic decisions and actions which, in the end, lost the war and cost
hundreds of thousands of lives. …. Maybe most of our failures to sufficiently advance sustainability and
climate-stabilisation causes are perhaps cultural. Perhaps we need to address these before we lose the final
global ‘war’ for the future of humanity the world has declared since the Rio Conference in 1991…..
Questions for you to address:
1. to what extent are matters of culture and inter-culturality inhibiting citizens, communities,
businesses, public bodies and nations of the world from doing better in the global and local ‘battle’
(‘war’?) for sustainability and climate stabilisation?
2. How might the cultural inhibitors (identified in N°1 above) be most effectively addressed at the level
of individual citizens, communities, businesses, public bodies and nations?
NBs:
1. In all cases, cite evidence in justification of your assertions and provide examples of best practice.
2. This is not to be merely ‘some thoughts on a theme which someone, somewhere should do something
about’ – rather you are to provide a step-by-step ‘Action Programme’ (in report form), which means,
for each inhibitor, consideration of the following:
• The nature of the inhibitor: what is causing it and the inhibiting effect thereof
• Who might best give the necessary leadership and direction to the implementation
• Timeframe (immediate, short, medium, longer term): start AND finish dates
• Specific feasible and viable actions matched to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• Budget approximations – considering ways and means in which costs might be kept ‘to the
minimum’.
1. You will illustrate your key Action Points by means of a workshop designed not just to transfer
information, but to produce instant understanding of the inhibitor and best solution and to generate a
strong motivation for invitee delegates to adopt and implement your turnkey solutions in their
respective capacities and positions.
2. Delegates invited include, inter alia, (hypothetically at least). Part of your workshop audience,
then…
• Mme Ségolène Royal (Minister of Ecology)
• M. Nicolas Hulot (Foundation for Nature and Mankind)
• Sir David Attenborough. Naturalist, broadcaster & global influencer.
• The UK Local Government Association. Body representing 99% of councils in the UK

6. • Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Former leader of the European Green Party. Influencer.
• Mme. Najat Vallaud-Belkasem Minsister of Education.
• Gro Harlem Brundtland. Architect of modern sustainability, ‘Our Common Future’ and Rio.
• King Salman of Saudi Arabia.
• Prince Charles. Influencer. Ecologically convinced. Community Commitment. Trainee king.
• Juwang Zhu. Director of UN Sustainable Development.
• Directors of International Marketing Professional Associations
• Key members of Greenpeace International, The Worldwide Fund for Nature
• International Panel on Climate Change.
• A range of Ministers, NGOs, local government bodies, faith representatives etc….

7. • Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Former leader of the European Green Party. Influencer.
• Mme. Najat Vallaud-Belkasem Minsister of Education.
• Gro Harlem Brundtland. Architect of modern sustainability, ‘Our Common Future’ and Rio.
• King Salman of Saudi Arabia.
• Prince Charles. Influencer. Ecologically convinced. Community Commitment. Trainee king.
• Juwang Zhu. Director of UN Sustainable Development.
• Directors of International Marketing Professional Associations
• Key members of Greenpeace International, The Worldwide Fund for Nature
• International Panel on Climate Change.
• A range of Ministers, NGOs, local government bodies, faith representatives etc….