The Culture Map

by Erin Meyer

  FIGURE 8.1. SCHEDULING

  As usual, all positions on the scale should be considered in relative terms. Germans may complain bitterly about the British lack of punctuality, and Indians often feel the French are rigid with their scheduling. However, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and Northern European countries generally fall on the linear-time side of the scale. Latin cultures (both Latin European and Latin American) tend to fall on the flexible-time side, with Middle Eastern and many African cultures on the far right. Asian cultures are scattered on this scale. Japan is linear-time, but China and (especially) India practice flexible-time.

  When you work with people from varying cultures, you find that the scheduling dimension impacts a remarkable number of aspects of daily life, from how meetings are run to how people wait in line.

  A LINE IS NOT A LINE: QUEUING IN STOCKHOLM VERSUS SWARMING IN INDORE

  It was a December morning in Stockholm—pitch-dark and very cold. I was going to meet with a client at the Swedish company Seco Tools, whose office was close to the route of bus #42. As I waited, I barely noticed the other people gathered at the bus stop, since I was mostly focused on moving my legs briskly in a vain attempt to stay warm. So when the bus pulled up, I was eager to get on. The woman closest to the door got on first, and then I stepped forward, happy to follow her. However, although I had been oblivious to the loose queue my fellow passengers had formed, I could scarcely miss the angry coughs they directed my way when I boarded before them.

  Cutting in line—even inadvertently—is a cultural crime in Sweden. This rule is a natural outgrowth of the linear-time belief in managing items one at a time, in proper order—including people who are waiting in line.

  By contrast, before traveling to India several students had explained to me the “evergreen tree culture” of waiting one’s turn. When it is necessary for a line to form, for example when waiting to purchase a ticket, some eager individuals will form the initial trunk of a tree. Then, when the trunk begins to look too long to some, a few individuals will create their own lines by standing next to, say, the fifth person in the trunk and implicitly suggesting that others line up behind them. This process continues until you have a human evergreen tree, a single-file trunk of people waiting with restless branches sprouting and growing on both sides.3

  This, at least, was the preparation I had received before my trip. My own experience suggests that Indian queues can be even more flexible than the “evergreen tree theory” implies.

  I had just spent two days in Indore, the most populous city in central India, working with a group of undergraduate students at the Indian Institute of Planning and Management. When I arrived at the check-in counter for my flight from Indore Airport, I carefully positioned myself at the front of the line in order to avoid any branch-sprouting.

  Soon, however, dozens of other passengers began to arrive, swarming behind me. Within minutes, I was surrounded by people with questions, lost tickets, and oversized bags. One woman put her ticket on the counter next to mine, explaining some urgent problem related to the name on the ticket. An older gentleman caught the check-in woman’s attention by describing in Hindi some urgent matter to do with his bag. The kind woman behind the counter began tending to several customers at once, making phone calls, printing new tickets, and answering questions from people pushing forward on my left and my right.

  Somewhat to my surprise, all of the customers’ needs were met and we departed more or less on schedule.

  That evening in New Delhi, I regaled my Indian host with the difference between waiting in line in Indore versus Stockholm. “You are right,” he laughed.

  We are more flexible in India. Because we grew up in a society where currency wasn’t always stable and governments could change regulations on a whim, we learned to value flexibility over linear planning. But Europeans and Americans are more rigid. They expect us to work by carefully closing one box before opening the next. Like your idea that only one person in the queue should be treated at a time, with no interruptions.

  I was learning that flexible-time cultures, like India, tend to emphasize leaving many boxes open and working on all of them simultaneously. One thing at a time? That may be common sense in Stockholm, but not in Indore.

  A MEETING IS LIKE WAITING IN A LINE

  The differences between lines in Sweden and lines in India reflect broader differences between linear-time cultures and flexible-time cultures.

  Consider, for example, a simple business meeting. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, or Germany, you’re likely to find that all parties attending the meeting share the assumption that a meeting should look like a line. Accordingly, an agenda is set out ahead of time explaining, in the form of a list, exactly what time the meeting will start and what subjects will be discussed in what order. Sometimes an actual number of minutes are allotted to each topic so that the meeting can end at a preset time.

  If an attendee should try to “hijack” the meeting by bringing up some topic not found on the agenda, one linear-time participant is likely to interrupt, saying, “This is not on the agenda, so let’s take this offline and discuss it at a break,” or “Let’s park this until another time,” or “Can we put this on the agenda for next week?” or perhaps an exasperated “People! A little discipline, please!”

  What’s more, in a linear-time culture, people in a meeting are supposed to behave as if in a Swedish line. You should not be talking to your neighbor at the same time someone else is talking. You should not be taking cell phone calls on the sidelines. The group will take scheduled “bio breaks,” so please don’t leave and re-enter the room. For those on linear time, any behavior that distracts from the predefined task at hand is just plain rude.

  But a meeting in a flexible-time culture like those found in South America, parts of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East is more like an evergreen tree. An agenda with a meeting start time and a topic will probably be circulated before the meeting. This will serve as the trunk of the tree. But there’s no expectation that the meeting will progress in a linear manner. What seemed like a priority last week when the agenda was crafted is not necessarily the priority right now—so discussion may branch off in a new direction. Other branches may sprout as some members have urgent phone calls that take them in and out of the meeting. Or subgroups may form within the room to discuss timely subjects linked in some way to the main meeting trunk.

  In flexible-time cultures, it seems clear that the most productive meetings grow in unpredictable ways, and the effective manager is flexible and professional enough to capitalize on priorities and changing needs as they arise. Interruptions, agenda changes, and frequent shifts in direction are seen as natural and necessary.

  WAITING FOR A SIGN FROM THE MOON: THE STYLE-SWITCHING APPROACH TO SCHEDULING CHALLENGES

  As you might expect, the scheduling dimension also impacts the way we plan our time and how fixed or flexible those plans are felt to be.

  When Dr. Ahmed Acidah, an articulate and experienced human resources executive from a Nigerian bank, applied to attend our one-week Global Virtual Teams program at INSEAD, I hesitated. Normally participants attending this program have teams dispersed across many countries. But Acidah had just two nationalities on his team—Nigerian and German. However, we did accept Acidah into the program, and it turned out he had enough experience with cross-cultural misunderstandings between these two nationalities to fill a year’s worth of discussion.

  During the program, Acidah explained one of the challenges he faced:

  The Germans plan everything not just weeks, but months in advance. Last week, three months before a conference I will attend in Germany, I received an e-mail asking me to choose, from three options, what I want to have for dinner at the conference opener on April 6. Now let me ask you, how can I be expected to know today, a day in January, what I am going to want to eat on April 6? But this is no joke. If you don’t check the box, schedule your meal choice, and return it by the stated date, so
meone will start hunting you by e-mail.

  Acidah’s Nigerian staff was in a full-fledged revolt against this approach. The Germans, their calendars filled with meetings scheduled months earlier, wanted to get the team meetings for the next six months on the calendar now; that way they felt assured the meetings would take place and projects would move forward as expected. The Nigerians were caught between not wanting to create a fuss over a mere calendar invitation, and knowing from experience that trouble would ensue if they committed now and were unable to follow through later. Acidah continued:

  What these Germans do not understand is that things are always changing in Nigeria. I can’t possibly schedule a meeting three months from today because it is impossible to know what will have changed. I am from the Muslim part of Nigeria, and where I live you don’t even know when the holiday is going to start until the Supreme Leader looks at the moon and says that the holiday starts now. If I don’t know which days will be a holiday, how can I possibly know at which moment two months and seven days from now I will be available to talk on the phone?

  My German colleagues don’t get it. They want me to tell them weeks in advance if I will be available on Tuesday, June 24—and if I am not available when that day rolls around, they take offense.

  This small example illustrates the difficulties of developing realistic schedules when working internationally. One culture tells time by when the cows come home. Another schedules meetings based on the Supreme Leader’s moon analysis. A speaker from Minnesota stops speaking the moment the zero card pops up, leaving her Brazilian host baffled about her refusal to satisfy an audience hungry for additional insights.

  A first strategy for dealing effectively with the Scheduling scale is to increase your own ability to work in different ways. Style switching is an essential skill for today’s global manager.

  Mario Mota, a Brazilian from Rio de Janeiro working for the World Bank, tells how he learned to switch styles in regard to a simple but vexing scheduling problem:

  As a child, I learned from my mother that when invited to dinner, it is inappropriate to arrive at the time the host has asked you to come. Doing so will ultimately end with the hosts running frantically around the house to put things in order and will cause unnecessary stress for everyone. The best time to arrive is fifteen minutes after the stated time—or later—so the hosts will be ready and relaxed, and everyone will enjoy the evening.

  I will never forget the first time, as a young manager, I was invited to my American boss’s house for dinner. My boss and his wife invited me as well as the four other members of my team for 6:00 p.m. and I carefully arrived at 6:35. “What happened?” the worried hosts asked as they opened the door. “Did you get lost? Or stuck in traffic?” Everyone was waiting for me and the table was already set. What a humiliation!

  Fortunately, the Scheduling scale is one of the easier scales to adapt to. It only took one awkward dinner for Mota to learn the proper time to arrive when invited to dinner in an American household. The next time, he recalls, “I arrived five minutes before the stated start time, parked my car around the corner and watched the clock carefully. At 5.59 p.m., I left the car and at six o’clock I rang the doorbell. My hosts were expecting me.”

  Sometimes style switching is this easy: Learn what works best in that culture and do things the way they do them. However, understanding the cultural nuances and gauging them precisely can sometimes be challenging. Mota offers another story:

  Although I worked hard during my career on becoming more culturally agile, I have learned that, if you try adapting your style, three times out of five you will miss the mark on the first try.

  I was running a meeting in Germany a few weeks ago. I know the Germans are even more focused on punctuality than the Americans, but I didn’t really know how punctual that meant. My presentation was supposed to end at 2:00 p.m. I was watching the clock carefully. And at 2:02 I was ready to wrap up, when one of the German participants asked a question that required a detailed answer. And I said something very un-Brazilian. I said, “This is a very interesting question, but I’m afraid time is up.” I found out later from the organizers that the Germans were put off by my rigid approach. They felt I was inflexible.

  My Brazilian way would have been to answer the question in front of everyone, stretching the meeting longer. Since I knew that my natural strategy wasn’t the best one for this context, I defaulted to something that came off as abrupt and unprofessional.

  Later, I gave it some thought, and I realized all the simple and obvious ways I could have better handled the situation. I could have done like the Americans do and asked to take the question “offline,” meaning we will end the official part of the meeting now and discuss the question one-on-one afterward. Or I could have said I’d be happy to answer the question for anyone who wanted to stay longer.

  Style switching sounds very simple, but it takes a lot of trial and error to understand the subtleties and to get them right. You have to try, miss the mark, try again, and gradually find you are becoming more and more competent.

  Complicating style switching is the fact that each culture has its own peculiarities and apparent contradictions. Cam Johnson was raised in Michigan and lived in Tokyo for two years before moving to Beijing. In Japan, he became aware of the enormous importance placed on punctuality—even when it comes to events where punctuality is ignored in the United States. Cam recalls, “I took my teenage son to an Eminem rap concert in Chiba at the Makuhari Messe. The concert was scheduled to start at 8:00 p.m. In other countries, a rap concert starts thirty, sixty, ninety minutes late. Not in Tokyo. We showed up eleven minutes late because of traffic, and my son missed eleven minutes of the show.”

  When Cam moved his family to Beijing, he initially believed that the Chinese would take a similar approach to time. Little by little, however, the differences between the Chinese and Japanese scheduling systems became clear to him:

  In Chinese culture, punctuality is a virtue, and if you arrive late for a meeting you should definitely apologize for your tardiness. But any similarity in approach to time between the Chinese and Japanese stops there. The Japanese are highly organized planners. They are definitely more organized than they are flexible. In China, everything happens immediately, without preplanning. The Chinese are the kings of flexibility. This is a culture where people don’t think about tomorrow or next week; they think about right now.

  For example, I had to call an electrician because my TV was broken. Within five minutes of my hanging up the phone, he was knocking at my door. When I had a clogged drain, I called the plumber and he showed up a few minutes later. Now I know that, when there is a problem with something, I’d better be ready for someone to come in and fix it as soon as I pick up the phone.

  Reactivity is key here, but that also means that plans that are made in advance are considered flexible. The Chinese will often pop in to see you with no appointment. This used to make me angry. I felt they didn’t respect my time. Can’t they send a simple e-mail in advance so I can be ready for them when they arrive? Do they think I don’t have anything else to do? That my time is disposable?

  But now that I’ve become a bit Chinese myself, I’ve learned I can do this, too. If I’m traveling in Guangzhou and I have thirty minutes to spare, I just make a quick call from a taxi and visit someone working in the area. I’ve come to see this system as highly flexible and efficient.

  Something similar applies to meetings. In China, if you send out an advance agenda, you’ll arrive to find out either that no one has read the agenda or that the meeting has been canceled. So now I call a day before to make sure the meeting is still on. And when we meet, I try to remain flexible and let things get covered in whatever order they may happen rather than trying to stick with a prearranged schedule.

  The most interesting thing about hearing how Johnson learned to work with the Chinese was how he came to appreciate the strengths of the Chinese approach:

  Now I look at the way
my Chinese colleagues work and I just marvel at it. They are amazing at ad hoc logistics. For example, I’ve attended dozens of workshops in China, and not one has gone according to plan. Things change the night before: speakers, topics, even venues. But it all ends up working out. Once you understand that the Chinese are extremely flexible, everything works fine if you just do the same.

  THE FRAMING STRATEGY FOR CROSS-CULTURAL LEADERS

  Style switching is a powerful approach for those who are visiting another culture—indeed, an essential one. But what if you are not the visitor? What if you are the leader in charge of a multicultural team with members who practice a variety of scheduling styles? In this situation, flexibility and open-mindedness are not enough.

  It’s nine o’clock on Monday morning, and my course is supposed to start. However, of the thirty-two Saudi Arabian managers who are visiting INSEAD and are scheduled to spend the day with me, only one is in the classroom—and since he is talking on the phone, I can’t ask him where the rest are.

  Fifteen minutes later, the group starts to trickle in, and at about 9:35 I get started. It all works fine for me. Understanding the Saudi flexible-time system, I let both my lectures and our breaks stretch a little longer, using any extra time to build relationships and get to know one another better.

  The following week, I happened to have another classroom day scheduled with a group of Saudis. This time, the program director had taken steps to adjust the students’ scheduling expectations. During the program introduction, he told them, “During our week together, we should all imagine we are in Switzerland. We will start on time, to the minute, and end on time, to the minute. And anyone who forgets this team culture and comes late to class will have to contribute five euros to the fund for our end-of-the-week champagne party!”