Training International Managers: God Is in the Details

 Hannah Beech, in her informative article in this week's Time on China's population control policies ("How China has pruned its Families' Trees"), notes that the Mandarin kinship terms she had to learn in 1980 have been rendered obsolete by government-ordered changes to the language: "It's probably safe to skip that page with the dizzying array of cousins."

Perhaps. But when preparing US managers for overseas assignments, it's precisely these seeminglty obscure terms that, when thrown in the mix with the business-specific information you're teaching them, can make the difference when it comes to establishing trust and long-term business relationships - and even to closing deals, where trust is a paramount consideration.

Those words for different kinds of cousins are alive and well and are not going away - and knowing them shows an interest that impresses your business partners as a sign of a deep understanding and appreciation of the culture.

After all, no one overseas expects Americans to be knowledgeable about anything but business. That was the secret of President Kennedy's legendary success in dealing with the newly-emerging nations of the time: he took the time to bone up. "How's that new irrigation project near Ouagadougou coming along, Mr. Ambassador?"

There is a downside: so low are the expectations for Americans that even knowing how to say "hello" will get you pegged in some regions as working for the CIA. The disarming response when confronted with that accusation is, "No one in the CIA speaks your language. Does that explain our foreign policy?"

It's easy for us Yanks, growing up in a melting-pot social experiment of a country, short on history, to forget what it's like to have millennia of history in your DNA. Government edicts do not change tradition, which is astonishingly resilient - as in the Afghan Pashtun code of honor which predates Islam. Culture (the "liberal arts") is still an integral part of most foreign countries' education systems, and the cultivation of memory early in youth as part of that education helps keep tradition alive.

So if you think the desert feast scene with Jane Fonda and the Saudis in "Rollover" is old hat, think again.

As the US military found in Iraq, effectively engaging with the local culture means learning the local geography, history, tribe and clan names, music and the arts, proverbs and much more information that we task-focused businesspeople find trivial and unnecessary. Where do you find the appropriate training materials? Start with a good guidebook - the Rough Guides, for example.

So suck it up, cousin - we haole trainers need to get with the program! Don't forget this twist on good ol' Saint Ambrose's dictum: it's not enough when in Rome to do as the Romans do, you also need to know what the Romans know!