Cultural Resolution

Surrounded by bilingual and multilingual people as I am on my Intercultural Communication course, I feel quite inadequate with my single language.  For me, it’s not about the arrogance of believing that English is the international language and that I don’t need to learn another.  It’s that I have no talent for languages.  I’ve tried, taken countless hours of classes in German, French and Spanish, listened to audio tapes, used interactive computer learning modules, all to no avail.  I still don’t even have much better than tourist-level proficiency in any language.  I consider it one of my greatest weaknesses, and it’s a source of shame for me.  Still, I haven’t let that stop me from exploring the world, learning about other cultures and developing close personal relationships with people around the globe.

Since beginning my studies, I’ve been confronted several times, in lectures, books and journal articles, with the opinion that you can’t truly understand a culture without learning the language.  I’m not sure I buy it.  Admittedly I haven’t delved deeper to see if anyone has backed up the opinion with proof, and maybe my own lack of language skills makes me biased, but I’m sceptical.  For one thing, I’ve known many many people who are fluent in a second language, and yet remain completely monocultural, keeping their minds closed, holding onto their cultural biases.  Their knowledge of the language doesn’t seem to have increased their cultural understanding at all.  They seem, instead, to simply be translating, substituting words but not ways of thinking.

However, I do agree with Wierzbicka that delving into key words in a language can provide cultural insights. In fact, just learning a bit about the Japanese word “enryo” provided insights for me that I’ve already been able to put to use in my ongoing work with a Japanese client.  It’s not being able to speak the words that are important, so much as it’s understanding what is behind the words.

So here’s my own theory: You can learn about and understand a culture without becoming fluent in the language, but not without developing insights into the emotions and beliefs that are central to it. Studying key words is one way to gain insights, but I suspect there are insights to be gained by examining other clues, including cultural icons, foods, customs and other behaviour. 

But I still wish I could speak additional languages. And I’ll keep taking classes and buying the latest language CD sets.  In fact, just last week I spent a day at The Language Show, and took my first lesson in Japanese.  I think optimism must be an American cultural trait.  

When I wrote my last post and hinted about Part 2, I was in the midst of discussions with potential partners for plans to launch a new global consultancy.  My enthusiasm was high and we were moving quickly, caught up in the euphoria of the big idea.  It felt really right, at least at first.  Right enough that I explained away the first couple of red flags that popped up.  I told myself it was just my tendency to avoid commitment (hey, I was over 40 before I got married, and I’ve even avoided mobile phone contracts most of my life).  But a partnership is a big commitment, not something to be rushed into. So I started paying more attention to the red flags and trusting my own feelings, and in the end, pulled out. Disappointing on some levels, but definitely the right thing to do.

In the meantime, going through that process helped to clarify my thinking about what I really want to do.  Now two weeks in to my PhD programme, I have a better idea of my workload so I can make realistic decisions about how much I want to take on. And immersing myself in the intercultural communication topic has confirmed for me that I want to focus my work more exclusively in that field.

So I’m launching a new consulting business aimed at helping companies overcome cultural barriers and succeed in global markets.  My plan is to assemble a virtual team of communication experts around the world that will collaborate to provide a full range of services, customized to meet the needs of the client company.  So obviously, I’ll be looking to my IABC network to find potential associates.  If you’re interested, give me a shout.

And stay tuned for the official launch, as well as a new name and focus for this blog, in the next week or so.

I can’t believe that I haven’t updated my blog in three whole months.  But as my last post warned, I took the summer off to focus on the quest for my next big challenge.

The process included research, reflection, brainstorming, endless flip charts stuck up on the wall, and countless discussions with friends, family and mentors.  It was messy, and at times uncomfortable.  I’ve never taken that long to decide anything.  By nature, I’m a quick decision-maker, comfortable with risk and prone to leaps of faith.  But I don’t like not having a clear direction, feeling like I’m drifting from possibility to possibility.  When I still hadn’t reached any firm conclusions in late August, I felt an almost overwhelming urge to choose something, anything, and just get on with it.  But none of the possibilities that had emerged felt like it — my next big thing.

Then BAM! Everthing started falling into place, and within two weeks, it all came together.  Not one, but two very big things, each perfectly meshing with the other. Both incredibly challenging and exciting.

I can only talk about one of them now, because the other isn’t quite ready for public launch, so here’s the Part 1 announcement:

As of next week, I’ll be a doctoral student at Birkbeck College, University of London, working towards a PhD in Intercultural Communication. This topic has become a passion for me over the past few years, and was further inflamed by my experiences serving as 2008-09 Chair of IABC.  Throughout my whole process, it was clear that my next big thing would have to entail a focus on expanding my cross-cultural knowledge and experience. I looked at a number of universities in the UK and abroad, and Birkbeck seems like the perfect fit.  With only a BA in Mass Communication, I was initially looking at MA programmes.  But based on my 20+ years of experience, they waived the MA requirement and accepted me into their “new route” PhD programme.  So I’m prepared to feel like I’m in over my head at first, but I’m hoping I’ll catch on fast.  Hey, I said I needed a challenge, didn’t I?

Stay tuned for Part 2 sometime in the next few weeks. It’s big.

Today (well, by now it’s yesterday, but I’m still awake) at the 2009 IABC Annual General Meeting, I gave my final speech as 2008-09 Chair of IABC.  It’s been an amazing year, a great World Conference, and an emotional day.  Here is the script from my remarks, which I intentionally tried to keep light to avoid crying (which almost worked):

I really believe that everything you encounter in life, every person you meet, every experience or challenge, is given to you by the universe as an opportunity – that you either have something to learn or something to teach, or both.

So as my year as chair of IABC draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the lessons.  I’m going to steal from our 2009 IABC EXCEL Award winner’s Top 10 List idea, and share my top 10 lessons from the past year.

10.   Authentic communication is the new requirement, a paradigm shift has already happened, and most companies and communicators haven’t made the shift.  I learned this from my participation in social media, and it’s why I’ve become passionate about pulling other communicators along with me on my journey.  You can’t understand this from the outside, and you can’t afford to wait until your company is ready, and then hire in the expertise.  I’m really proud of how IABC has moved into a leadership role in this area, and how our use of social media is enhancing and expanding the wonderful sense of community that has always been a part of IABC.

9.  Double-check when you’re tweeting a direct message that includes your mobile phone number – especially if you’ve got 20,000 followers.

8.  If your brand tag line is BE HEARD, you have to learn to listen, and to be willing to hear things you don’t like. 

7.  That said, there is a difference between BEING HEARD and BEING OBEYED.

6.  Look very closely at any travel itinerary put together by Adrian Cropley – He forgets to schedule time for sleep.

5.  Todd Hattori is a tough act to follow – especially from a fashion sense.  Seriously, though, Todd has been a wonderful mentor and partner, and he’s been a dedicated leader, serving on the international executive board for the many years.  Please join me in thanking him for all he has given to IABC.

4.  Asia Pacific is REALLY big. Every place you need to go is a very long flight away from everyplace else there.

3.  Texas is also really big, and it is not a good idea to schedule 3 events in 3 different chapters in one day – and even worse idea to make me drive there (wrong side of the road, plus I’m a bad driver to begin with).

2.  It is way more fun to stay with IABC members than in hotels.  I’ve gotten to know Wilma Mathews’ cat Shadow, I’ve made cookies with Alice Brink, I’ve had a girlie slumber party with the Queensland chapter’s board after we spent a day developing their chapter’s first strategic plan. 

1.  IABC is about the people.  It’s our members that make this association what it is.   So thank you all for what you do for IABC, and for the opportunity to learn from you over the past year.

Ever had what you think is a brilliant idea for something new, then found out someone else had the same idea?  Maybe it’s a psychic connection, or just a coincidence, or maybe it’s a sign that it really is a brilliant idea.

Anyway, Suzanne Deatherage, an IABC member at Texas A&M University, and I recently discovered we’d both had the same idea.  We’d never met before, but within a couple minutes of meeting, we were excitedly discussing our shared vision for something that we think could be an amazing IABC member benefit, capitalizing on our organization’s global network.  Best of all, it’s something we think could be completely member-driven, doesn’t require a lot of work or budget.

Our  idea (which is not fully developed, and could use lots of input) is to foster an exchange program that would give IABC members the opportunity to gain experience in different countries, industries or markets.  Something like a foreign exchange student or internship, but perhaps more along the lines of peer-to-peer job shadowing.

For me, the idea was born out of my own experiences staying as a guest in the homes of IABC members when I’ve visited chapters in the past year, because I find that the experience is always much richer that way than staying in hotels.  And everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve wished I could stay a bit longer, really get to know the market and the people, learn more about the cultural differences, maybe even learn the language.  In fact, the other influencer on my thinking about this was Julie Freeman‘s experience last summer participating in a Spanish immersion program that involved living with a local family in Guatemala.  What if, I thought, IABC members could do something like that, where members around the world opened their homes to fellow members.  Could there be potential benefit on both sides?  Could it be a professional development opportunity?  Could a company benefit by having a senior-level “intern” who comes in and works on a project or provides free consulting in exchange for the experience and a place to stay?  Could a communication professional who is between jobs use this kind of experience to expand their skills, gain knowledge of another industry or develop their resume?

Suzanne actually had the opportunity to participate in a formal program offered by CNN a few years ago, so she brings lots of great ideas from a different perspective, and she’s researched and found other organizations that have done similar things.

We’re thinking that a good next step would be to start an eXchange site and get more ideas and feedback, possibly attract a few folks willing to participate in some pilot exchanges, and go from there.  While Suzanne is getting that site set up, I’ll start the ball rolling by asking for comments here, and see if there are others who would like to help shape and drive the idea forward.

Let us know what you think.

UPDATE:  Suzanne has launched an eXchange site to continue this discussion and develop the idea further.  Anyone interested in working on it, please go to http://proexchange.x.iabc.com/.

With just under six weeks to go until the IABC World Conference kicks off in San Francisco, some people may still be trying to convince their bosses to find the budget, or looking at their own bank balance to see if they can swing it.  As someone who hasn’t missed a conference in many years, and paid for most of them out of my own pocket, I know that I’ve always gotten enough value to more than pay for the cost of attending. So I thought I’d share some of the ways you can make the conference pay for itself:

1.  Get material for a year’s worth of in-house professional development sessions for your whole team.  Go through the conference program in advance and select sessions that meet your department’s training needs.  Attend the sessions, take copious notes, download the slides, and then share what you’ve learned with members of your team in a series of free in-house sessions.

2.  Gain knowledge you’d otherwise have to pay a consultant for.   A day or two of consulting time would more than cover your conference costs.  So what expertise does your company need that you could gain by attending?  Never written a crisis communication plan? There are at least a half-dozen sessions that would help you build that expertise. Need to develop a social media strategy for your organization, and know how to sell it to your executive team? You could walk away from this conference with not only the knowledge, but also personal contacts with top experts.

3.  Research best practices.  With 1500 communicators from all over the world attending, you have some of the best minds in our industry, representing many of the top companies.  With a notepad or tape recorder and a list of questions, you could easily conduct research to find out how others have solved problems you’re facing.  In fact, why not offer to do this for another department and get them to help fund your trip from their research budget? Wouldn’t your HR directer like to know how Sony, IBM and Cisco improve productivity via internal communication programs?

4.   Expand your global network & knowledge.  Is your company trying to do business in China and encountering barriers? Looking for market intelligence in India? Or finding its internal culture isn’t consistent outside its home country?  You can learn from experts in cross-cultural communication, and meet professionals leading communication for top companies around the globe.  As anyone doing business across borders knows, in most parts of the world, it takes personal relationships to create business opportunities.

5.  Find a new job.  If you’re between positions at the moment, this might be the best investment you could ever make in yourself.  Not only because of the incredible networking opportunity, but also because you’ll come away energized and full of confidence, something that job-hunting tends to beat out of you.  Forget sitting at home sending out hundreds of resumes or answering classified ads, the best jobs are usually found through networking.  And I know for a fact that there are always a few headhunters in attendance (smart people, since they know that IABC conferences attract top talent).  Here’s a personal offer of support:  if you’re job hunting and attending this year’s conference, let me know in advance and I’ll help with introductions.

I could go on, but the truth is, for me it’s usually one small thing –one kernel of an idea sparked by surrounding myself with so many great minds — that ends up making me leave the conference sure that it’s more than paid for itself.   That’s why I’ve always found a way to get there, whether it meant sharing a room with three other people (actually, that year was really fun), or scrimping on something else for the next six months.  There aren’t that many things in my life that have consistently returned so much value for money, but I wouldn’t miss an IABC conference.

It’s not a new story for communication budgets to be among the first cut in tough financial times. But this time, it’s personal.

In mandating staff cuts, the government of New Zealand has specifically targeted communication and PR roles as expendable, viewing them as “spin doctors” (see more in this New Zealand Herald article). 

Yesterday, on behalf of IABC, I wrote a letter protesting the action to New Zealand State Services Minister Tony Ryall.  Alone, it probably won’t get his attention, but if we can harness the power of our 16,000 members and other communication professionals around the world, we might just make a difference — not only for our New Zealand colleagues, but for our profession worldwide. 

Join me in advocating for the communication profession. Let’s employ all the tools in our collective communication arsenal.  Let’s take this opportunity to educate the world about the critical role communication plays in organizational success.  Send a letter, blog about it, tweet, send a press release, conduct a poll, discuss it on a podcast. Let your voice be heard.

The job you save (and the organization you save) could be your own.

I’ve talked about what a great tool TweetDeck is in my previous posts about Twitter (Twitter Tips for Newbies, Twitter Stage Two, and Advanced Twitter).  Clearly, I’m a big fan. So when I met TweetDeck founder and developer Iain Dodsworth at the London Social Media Cafe (also known as Tuttle) in early January, I felt a bit like a groupie meeting my favourite rock star.

I caught up with Iain again yesterday at Tuttle, and he gave me a quick overview of some of the new TweetDeck features I’d missed in the latest update. So I thought it might be helpful to share them here, in case anyone else missed them too.

First, for anyone who is on Twitter but not yet using TweetDeck, stop reading right now and download it.  If all you know of Twitter is the Twitter.com interface, you’re depriving yourself and stunting your own Twitter development.  TweetDeck transforms the Twitter experience from a series of unrelated tweets to real conversations.  It makes everything easier and more intuitive, adds additional features, and makes it possible to manage larger following/follower numbers without being overwhelmed.  Okay, enough evangelizing, I’ll move on to the newest cool features. I’m just going to highlight the ones I find especially useful to me, but you can get a complete overview (including a how-to video) on the TweetDeck blog  (you can also find the video here).

New “Other Actions”

Most of the new features are accessed via a new icon for Other Actions, which can be found in the spot previously used by the Favourites icon. Hover your cursor over the photo/avatar box on any tweet, and it’s the icon in the lower right corner. Click the icon and a box appears with a list of functions you can do right there.

• Follow/Unfollow -  Previously, you had to click on the ID and open the Profile in order to follow or unfollow. You still can, but this is handier.
• Email Tweet – This is really useful if you want to share a tweet with someone not on Twitter. By clicking here, an email window opens with the tweet in the message, so all you have to do is address it and send.  So if you were monitoring for tweets that mentioned your company, and came across a customer complaint, you could easily email the message to the person who can address the problem.
• Translate – This opens up a whole new world of Twitter for me.  Since I have contacts worldwide, I follow a number of people who tweet primarily in languages other than English. So even if they use English when they send a message to me, I’ve been missing out on everything else they tweet. Sometimes there have even been tweets which referenced or retweeted me, that I couldn’t read, other than my own name.  Now, all I have to do is click Translate, and it automatically determines which language to translate from and translates it to my designated language.  Like any computer translation, it’s not always grammatically perfect, but the translations are good enough to get the message across.  I’ve only begun to experiment with this, but I love it already.  You can also translate your outgoing tweets into another language (see below).
• Add to Group – Perhaps the most useful for me, since I waited far too late to start utilizing TweetDeck’s Group function.  The Group capability is the best way to manage large Follow numbers. I’ve got a group I call “Top Tweeps” that includes a handful of people who I want to catch every tweet.  I’m also starting one for fellow IABC members.  Anyway, now it’s very simple to add people to groups directly from any tweet.
• Search – This feature is the answer to the question I frequently hear from Twitter newbies about how to see conversations.  Say you read an intriguing tweet that is clearly part of a bigger conversation. By clicking on this Search button, TweetDeck opens a Search column on this person’s name, which means you see both their tweets and all the tweets sent to them.  Now you can see the whole conversation. It’s a quick and easy way to get to know more about someone, and to find other interesting people to follow.  It would also be useful in situations where more than one person in a company might provide back-up for an official Twitter account, to keep a search column open on that ID all the time.

Translate Outgoing Tweets

You can translate a tweet you have just typed into any of about 40 languages.  Just click on the icon that looks like a conversation bubble, located next to the hashtag icon at the lower right of the tweet box, then next to it click the tiny arrow, which opens up the list of languages. When you select one, it will translate your tweet.  I’ve tested it in several languages and asked native speakers to tell me if they can understand my tweet, and in every case, the answer is yes, but it’s not perfect grammatically. That’s good enough for me. I’m not even perfect in my own language.

Hashtag Helpers

Two new features make it easier to use hashtags:

• Automatic hashtag in replies – Now when you reply to a tweet that includes a hashtag, the hashtag will automatically appear in the message (you can delete it if you wish).
• Recent hashtags – If you use hashtags regularly, especially while at an event, you get tired of typing it into every tweet.  Now with a click you can open a pull-down list of recent hashtags you’ve used and insert it into your tweet.  The hashtag icon is located at the bottom right of the tweet box (next to the Shorten and Twitpic buttons). It will hold up to 10 hashtags.

Auto-complete for IDs

This feature is really useful if you want to send a direct message or @ message and can’t remember the exact ID. As soon as you type either a “d” plus a space or the @ symbol, an auto-complete box appears, and as you type, a list appears with possible IDs. This feature, by the way, was added after the others as a separate update, and wasn’t automatically pushed out, so if you want it, you’ll need to download the latest update.

There’s more, including some changes in the Settings choices, so it’s definitely worth watching the video and reading the TweetDeck blog.

My love of TweetDeck just keeps growing, and I’m not alone. According to TechCrunch, TweetDeck is the second most popular Twitter application, and it’s certainly the top Twitter desktop client.  As I’ve said before, I couldn’t do all that I do with Twitter if it weren’t for TweetDeck.  Love, love, love it.

Even as I type, one of IABC’s newest chapters is launching, both offline and online.  IABC South Island, New Zealand launches this evening with an event (attended by 50 people!).  And right now, Adrian Cropley and I are meeting with the board and helping them set up the chapter’s eXchange page, which will serve as their website.  They’re all raving about how easy it is. 

Congrats to the new chapter, and welcome to eXchange!  Next stop: Twitter.

My IABC Asia/Pacific tour is off to a great start, kicked off with a lunch meeting with IABC Hong Kong. It was an intimate group, which allowed for lots of interaction and good discussion. Our primary topic was “mapping your career path” and since participants ranged from entry level to senior, it perfectly illustrated how IABC can help communication professionals at every phase.

We ended the session with a Be Heard discussion — a chance for them to share concerns, feedback, and tell me what they want from IABC.

I asked if the global economic crisis is being felt here. A resounding yes. Worries about budget cuts, layoffs, hiring freezes, etc. But interestingly , a number of companies are putting out calming messages, letting both internal and external audiences know that they’re ok. I’d love to hear more, so anyone who is either doing this or has received this kind of message, please share.

Very special thanks to IABC Hong Kong Chapter President, Dana Peterson, Director of Sales & Marketing for International Cosmetic Suppliers Ltd, for coordinating my visit (while nursing a 2-week old stray kitten and managing a major event).