Erin Meyer

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monister Mouse. Hello. Hello.

Hello. I loved this episode. Yeah, it was really, really fun because we talk about all these different cultural differences in conducting business around the globe. Yeah.

And it's really fun to learn the little idiosyncratic characteristics of all of us. Yeah. Erin Meyer is an author and a professor at NCED Business School based in Paris, and she has a fascinating book called The Culture Map that we are going to talk about in depth. She also has a great book called No Rules Rules.

So, please enjoy Miss Erin Meyer. He's an archer expert. He's an archer expert. He's an archer expert.

Hello. Well, hello. You're in gay Paris right now? I am.

I live here. Yeah, 20 years. What part of that? What do you call those?

They're called arrondissements, but I actually do not live right in Paris. I live in a suburb. I live in a western suburb called Neu. Neu Ser Seine.

Oh, I'm on the Seine. There's the Seine. What are the Parisian suburbs like? I've only been to Paris proper.

Oh, well, this one that I'm in now is on the metro line of Paris. It's just like right there. It's just greener than being right in the city, right? It's just like there's like parks and trees.

Do you still have that small neighborhood you feel that even Paris has as opposed to American suburbs that are strip malls? Yeah, we don't have suburbs like that. We do have suburbs that used to be villages, right? And now they're suburbs.

But this suburb is just like, I mean, if you're interested, we are. Historically, the air blows from the west to the east in Paris. Oh, wow. And because of the sewage, you're going to leave west because if you go east, it smells bad.

Preferably downriver or downwind. Yeah, that's... Exactly. So everywhere, like starting the 16th, which is the most western suburb, and then I'm just west of the western suburb, those are all the desirable places to live.

Wow, congrats. Thank you. Is Versailles like northwest Paris? No, west-west.

West-west. That makes sense. Very good air. That's why the royalty are there.

I will say, though, that the people that live probably on the far east banks, their immune system is probably much stronger. Yeah, I imagine. Can I tell Erin why I'm excited? Oh, yeah.

Because my friend Callie works at Netflix, and she is the one that introduced me to your work, and she just said, oh, everyone at Netflix is reading this book, and it's really good, and you kind of have to read it to work there. I mean, not like officially, but sort of. And I thought, oh, if that's happening in the work culture of Netflix, it's probably important to circulate to our audience. Well, thank you, Callie.

Why don't you be fascinated with the Netflix corporate culture? So do you know I just have a new book out with Reed Hastings about their corporate culture, right? And that's not what we're talking about today. I know we're talking about culture.

My friend's talking about all of it. No, we're going to talk about everything under the sun today. I like to talk, no problem, and I'm thankful to Callie. I'm curious how, growing up in Minnesota, you get such a wanderlust or a desire to immerse yourself in other cultures.

Like, what's the road that leads up to you being interested in this stuff? So I was born and raised in Minnesota, in a very monocultural place. As an adult, I started moving to other countries. So first, I was in the Peace Corps as a young woman in Botswana, and it was during that process that I became really interested in studying national cultures.

I saw how my students were motivated in such different ways than children were in the U.S. And when I came back from that, I had two things I wanted to do. I wanted to teach. I wanted to continue to teach, and I wanted to study cultural differences.

So then I ended up being a professor at a business school, studying and writing about cultural differences. Okay, so for me personally, I'll tell you, so I majored in anthropology for a very specific reason, which is I, too, was from a pretty monolithic type, white, lower middle class, kind of huge Northern Kentucky diasporate, very unified kind of culture, way of doing things, what was right and wrong. And I felt stifled by that. I was always interested in challenging that.

And I just kept thinking, I'm inheriting all these things, and I don't know that I agree with tons of them. So I think that's why I ended up doing anthrax. I was like, oh, look at the myriad of ways humans have lived on planet Earth. There's no way you could say one was better or worse or superior or inferior.

And I guess I was drawn to that because I felt maybe confined by where I grew up. In Minnesota, I would imagine maybe that is similar. It's more that I became very interested in understanding how the psychology of the group that you are raised in then impacts the way that you give feedback or the way that you build trust or the way that you make decisions. And what fascinated me as I started to study cultural differences in the work environment was that I saw that actually there was so much confusion because in one country, they learn how to feedback one way, and another country, they learn in another way.

So now you have a boss from one country who's managing someone from another country, and the message is totally get missed, right? Yeah. That became my goal was to develop a framework, which I have this culture map framework, which helps people to decode how cultural differences are impacting their effectiveness. Okay, so just right out of the gates, I'll say that this is now in 2021, a harder conversation than it would have been for us to have, I'd say in 2000.

I think there's for such good reason, an apprehension about summarizing a culture or a group of people or for lack of a better word, stereotyping. And so a lot of Monica nice fights is I'll say like, well, most blank do blank. And she, of course, has a different perspective, I think because we're from a different generation. And I'm always frustrated going like, sure, yes, the exception exists.

But I'm talking about in general, I think because it's been so militarized or so weaponized, that type of thinking, that it has prevented us from being able to do some of the productive side of that kind of generalization. And I just wonder how you navigate this topic in a world where you're not allowed to say most people do anything. Yeah, but in some ways, I've actually seen the opposite, which is I think there's greater awareness of at least subcultures than there used to be. So there used to be this kind of idea, oh, well, like we may look different, but we're all the same.

And now there's more of an awareness of, oh, well, look, I was raised in this kind of background. And because I was raised in this kind of background, I have a different value system or different beliefs. And it would be helpful to me if you would try to understand those value systems and beliefs so that we could collaborate more effectively. So I would say that if something that I do makes people uncomfortable, it's that I look at a very macro scale at the world, right?

So I look at, you know, the differences between conducting business in France and Germany and Japan and Brazil and the U.S. And of course, now, you know, Americans are saying a lot, OK, we can't just love this all together. But they also are saying, we're also saying in the U.S., wait, please understand that I am culturally different than you are. The way I define culture is a culture as a personality of a group.

So we can look at generational cultures, how different generations have different personalities. We can look at gender cultures, how different genders have different personalities. I look at national cultures and I do it on macro level, but my framework can be applied also to micro environments. Well, and that's kind of what I was going to say is like, as much as you can have an idealistic view of the world, if you are actually practicing business within that world and you have an actual measurable metric, you are forced to get realistic about that.

You have to say, OK, when you go to Japan now, and you even give this as an example, which is like, it's too broad to just say, oh, they do it this way. And the French are subtle in the way they talk. And that's too broad. But also, it'd be very naive to not know what tools are required to achieve a goal somewhere.

Yeah. And I'll just give you a very personal example. So you learned already that I was raised in Minnesota. I've lived in France for the last 20 years.

My husband is French. My children have told me that they are French. I've learned that from them. How French have been?

But I mean, the way we give feedback is very different in the U.S. versus France, the way we are trained. And of course, there's a range in every culture about what's appropriate. But the range of what's appropriate in the U.S.

is very different than the range in France. In the U.S., we are trained to get a lot of very strong positive feedback. And we preach things like, you know, catch people doing things right and three positives with every negative. And this is not the case in France.

So in France, positive feedback is given a lot more implicitly between the lines and negative feedback more strongly or bluntly. So I'm working with this French woman a while ago. Although she has a new American boss, her boss is telling her that her performance is not acceptable. But he starts by doing that by telling her what he appreciates about her work, right?

Yeah. How confusing for her. She thinks, well, that's the best performance review I've ever received, right? And by the time he gets to the real message, she isn't even listening anymore.

She's celebrating. And then afterwards, he thinks, well, she didn't follow my instructions. And she thinks later on when she doesn't get a raise, she thinks, well, he's a hypocrite because he told me my work was great. And then he didn't reward me with a salary.

So these things happen to us all the time when we're working internationally. And often we don't even recognize that it's cultural. We just think, you know, this person was inappropriate. I was robbed.

Man, there's so many great examples to outline how this can work in so many ways. I assume you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Tipping Point, with the Korean airline chapter. And they talk about the different fear, basically fear of authority, which they give these different countries ratings and how the pilots, how much that impacts how a pilot and a co-pilot operate in the cockpit. And that's a total cultural difference, right?

It is a cultural difference. But I also loved your wording. You said fear of authority. And I would not, I mean, they wouldn't say, oh, gosh, in Korea, we are afraid of authority.

What they would say is that we respect the person in charge, right? So what that looks at, what we call power distance in academia, but it's my leading scale on my culture map framework. So we look at egalitarian versus hierarchical cultures. And it looks specifically at how much respect do I show to the person in charge or how much do I defer to authority, right?

And of course, this is something that we learn as children, right? We learn it in our schools. Am I encouraged to call my teacher by her first name and I'm encouraged to debate with her openly? Or am I encouraged to call my teacher by an honorific title and to show a lot of respect to that person in charge?

You know, there are a lot of benefits to cultures where we have this kind of strong respect of authority. I mean, like we have a campus in Singapore, very high power distance culture. And I can tell you, you know, it can be super efficient to work in a power distance culture because, you know, I was actually working with this guy from the Netherlands a while ago. The Netherlands is a super egalitarian culture, way more egalitarian than the U.S., right?

They think we are like Koreans. This Dutch guy, he was saying, oh, you know, I just love working here because when I'm leading a team in the Netherlands, you know, every time I try to get people moving in the same direction, they're contradicting me or challenging me and taking my ideas off in other directions. Here, you know, if I have an idea and I want to get people started, I just outline it and they just move in one, like, streamlined direction. So I do think that, of course, there are disadvantages to both systems.

And that Korean airline is clearly an example of the disadvantage of a high power distance culture. Yeah, Israel is like the highest on the... Okay, so Israel is the most direct culture when it comes to getting negative feedback in the world. And they are the most confrontational culture in the world.

They love a good debate. But they are actually, surprisingly, perhaps, they are the fifth most egalitarian country in the world and more egalitarian than the U.S. is. Wow.

Very interesting pattern, right? What that means is that, and I guess if you were working for an Israeli boss, you may experience him as being very hierarchical because the way he gave you such direct feedback, you would think, oh, he's a dictator. But what you wouldn't recognize is that it's very appropriate for you to give your boss feedback in exactly the same way, right? You know, I relate to this approach.

To that Israel approach? Yeah, I think I'm, like, very direct and probably too much sometimes. And, you know, I also think I'm egalitarian. Yeah.

I also want everyone to give me shit back, and then I want us to fucking bat it around a bit, and then, you know, everyone will get to say, but let's get at it. Let's go right at it. Well, so this is the beauty of my culture mapping system. You can go to my website where I have my culture mapping tools, and you can take your personal profile.

You respond to 24 questions, and then you find out where you fall on the scale, and then you can compare that to the various countries. We have 62 countries, and then you'll find out if you're living in the right country or not. I want to do a few more tasty, fun differences. I thought of a couple personal experiences I had.

My wife and I shot a movie in Italy, and it was the most bizarre experience relative to how it is shooting a movie in the United States. So in the United States, the AD or assistant director is, under the director, is the dictator, right? So it tells every department when they got to show up, when they can leave, blah, blah, blah. Well, we started shooting in Italy, and we'd be outdoors, nighttime shoot, this beautiful square that we only have for five hours.

We'd rehearse, and all of a sudden we'd go, the AD would go like, okay, let's light this thing up. And then over the walkie-talkie, you'd hear, oh, electric wrapped themselves. The electric department, which is in charge of lighting, when they decided they were done working, they just split. And sometimes the transportation department, they'd start at an hour.

They wanted to start not at the fighting pickup, so you'd be waiting for your pickup for like an hour. It was so, I found it charming. I think it was really frustrating to the AD, but I just was shocked that different departments just wrapped themselves, and they felt like they were done. Yeah, so this is my eighth culture dimension on my framework.

It's what I call the scheduling scale. It's what I call the first-degree cultural dimension, which means it's one of the dimensions you feel first, right? I mean, some of the other ones, you might live in another country for a couple of years before you start recognizing, but this one, yeah, you might just be on vacation, right? And that looks at structured time versus flexible time cultures.

And of course, the U.S. is a rather structured time culture, but let me give you an example back to get you thinking about this. So as you'd learned, I live in France. I was working a while ago with a team that was made up of half French and half Americans.

And I asked the Americans, you know, how's it going working on this French team? And they responded a little bit like you just did about Italy, right? They said, oh, well, you know, they're chaotic, they're last minute, they're always changing things in the middle of a meeting, very challenging. A little bit later, a group from India joined the same team, and I asked the Indians, how's it going on this team?

And they said, well, Erin, you know what it's like to work with French people, right? They're very rigid. They're very inadaptable. They're so focused on the punctuality and the structure of things that they're not able to be flexible as things change around them, right?

This is what I call cultural relativity, and what we can see on the scheduling scale is that, of course, France falls between the U.S. and India, which then leads to these opposite perceptions. And interestingly, the Germans describe the Americans the same way as the Americans describe the French, right? Yeah.

Great. I'm glad you brought them up, because it was another one I put on my list of things that I wanted to talk about, because I am so fascinated with German culture. In so many ways, just first and foremost, that you go there, you walk into a building that's 300 years old, and it is cleaner than the house that we just got done building. You know, the cleanliness, the scheduling, the untimeness, talk about like a Swiss watch culture.

And my wife, again, similar, she was doing press in Hamburg. We were in Hamburg for about a week and a half, and I was really loving it. I was like, my God, this place works. And then if they say that bus is coming at 1307, it's fucking there at 1307.

So I'm like enamored with it, enamored with it. And then later, we go to Paris as our next stop. And I'm like, well, this place is a mess. But my soul's on fire here.

Like, I see this weird yin and yang to the whole thing. It's like so much structure, and you lose a little bit of zest for life. And I'm just fascinated by it. So can you just tell us a little bit about Germany?

That's what the scheduling scale is. I mean, Italians, when they work in the U.S., they say, oh my gosh, there's no soul here. Everything is focused on the clock. So they take that as they don't know how to prioritize.

They're so focused on the schedule that they don't know how to prioritize what's important at every moment. We in Italy, we understand priorities. And we're flexible. And those Americans are totally lacking flexibility.

Yeah. And the same way you may feel going from Germany to France. But I do want to point out, because again, I think that what you're talking about are some of the cultural differences that people are often aware of. And those ones are interesting.

But because we're aware of them, they're not like that serious, right? Yeah. But if we look at Germany, I mean, here's something that you might not be aware of that most German-American collaborations aren't, which is that although Germans are more hierarchical than Americans are, and Americans know that, the Germans complain that Americans are so much more hierarchical than they are. And that's because Germans are more hierarchical, meaning that they're more focused on using titles and focused on the structure in the organization.

But they are also more consensual. So they believe in making decisions in a slower way over time and getting a lot more people. involved in the decisions so in the u.s where we have a system that is both rather egalitarian we like to use first names right away we don't like to have to ask the boss to meet with the boss's boss but we also want a strong decision maker we want someone to say at the end of the meeting okay we made a decision and then we're all going to follow along and often the germans say oh those americans they act like they're so egalitarian but then when the bosses go right they just click their heels and go right at the same time that the americans are complaining those germans are so slow to make a decision is anything ever going to happen around here here's another anecdotal experience i have that speaks to that which is i worked for general motors for years we would have these international car shows where the german division of general motors would come to the states opal and the way they treated their technicians versus the way we treated our technicians so the engineers would go stay at the very nice hotel in the town and then the technicians the guys doing the actual mechanical labor they would be at a lower rung hotel but the germans their technicians stayed at the nice hotel with them they ate at the same table with them and there wasn't that kind of status hierarchical thing and you could see it i loved it it's so interesting right because they at least when they're speaking german they almost always call each other by their last names right so that kind of formality gives you the impression that they're really top down in their management style but they're actually you see this total dichotomy at least when it comes to decision making so that's what i try to do right to get people to like move beyond the stereotype to understand these more complex issues that are often impacting us without us being aware of it and i imagine you approach it like an anthropologist i would guess where you're not there to say oh the french people are right or the americans are wrong it's more about understanding this is how they are and now how do we cohesively coexist oh i never have a right and wrong and there's no point there's always benefits to each side and i mean the goal is to build empathy and to help people develop strategies one of my favorite examples my book the culture map came out in 2014 and i remember when i finished writing it i felt really proud of myself like i thought i'd accomplish something and soon after i had you know the lesson that you never know everything so i took this trip to japan and while i was in tokyo i gave a 20 minute presentation to a group of 30 japanese and at the end of the presentation i asked if there were any questions and no one raised their hand so i went to sit down my japanese colleague who was traveling with me from in sead the business school i teach at he said to me erin i think there were some questions can i try so he stood up and he said to the group you know professor meyer has just spoken with you do you have any questions no one raised their hand but this time he stopped and he silently observed the group for several long seconds right and then he stopped and he gestured to this gentleman who was sitting there from my perspective motionless and he said oh yes do you have a question and this guy asked this fascinating question he did it three more times so afterwards i said to him how did you know that those people had questions he said well it had to do with how bright their eyes were oh my god you're not new wellness culture why you can't see anything oh yeah i thought that is very challenging for me coming from minnesota like i do yeah but then he clarified he said you know erin in japan we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the west so when you ask the group if there are any questions most people are not looking right at you they're looking somewhere else but i noticed when you asked if there were questions there were a couple of people in the room who were looking right at you and their eyes were right which signifies they would like to have you call on them if you would like to wow so the next day i gave another presentation again i asked if there were any questions and again no one raised their hand so this time i thought okay erin you gotta try right so i did what he suggested what he'd done what i seen him do and i stopped and i silently observed the group and as i looked around the room i saw immediately that he was right okay most people were not looking right at me that was obvious now that i thought about it but as i looked around i saw that there was one woman in the room who was looking right at me and when i looked at her she held my gaze oh wow now were her eyes bright i don't know but i wanted to try so i made a little bit of a little bit of a gesture to her and she nodded her head and i said do you have a question and she said thank you and she asked this fascinating question and i want to tell you i mean it was such a critical and unsettling learning experience for me because at nsiad where i teach i have these incredibly multicultural classrooms every day and i just written a book on cultural differences and when i came back to my school i started seeing all of these bright eyes in my classes that i had just been entirely missing and not just from the japanese and i have to tell you that's impacted how i facilitate my classes every day so these are the really important cultural differences that we don't even know what's happening but they're totally impacting our effectiveness so those are the ones i really try to focus on the tough stuff but we have something else going on is that i think quite challenging for american organizations working with other countries which is that we are one of the only countries in the world where we have a participation grade in our classes and you know i don't know what you think but i do believe that in the u.s and there's a tendency that that participation grade is more focused on that you contributed than that what you said was actually like a super high quality oh this is the beginning of the dunning-kruger effect which is like we're training people to have an opinion whether they have one or not exactly like we're gonna reward you for saying anything we don't give a shit if it's good or bad that's right so of course what happens then is that in meetings around the world americans tend to talk a lot more than other cultures do and you know you were mentioning your friend at netflix right who brought up my culture map book and i can tell you i mean that's a big thing at netflix is that often the american bosses are saying to their brazilian singaporean japanese employees you know if you want to get promoted if you want to be noticed then you have to start contributing in meetings you know whatever you say it doesn't matter just speak up speak up and that's a very strange message i mean even to people in europe like the idea that i should talk even if i don't have anything specific to say and i would say it's incentivizing charisma more than results like to me if you want to get ahead in this company do something productive and profound but what we're really saying is you got to be charismatic and it means of course that if you are leading a multicultural team meeting don't assume that because people don't talk they don't have anything to say stay tuned for more if you dare often what happens is that americans are jumping in so quickly trying to make the contribution to have their voice heard i mean let me give you an example here i'll give you a question to this but i'll give you a french person mocking americans this is from my class the other day she said oh here's the americans in meetings oh i just want to reiterate what stephanie said and i just want to say i really think that that was interesting stephanie pointed out i agree with you stephanie yes she said that french woman is like i don't understand why did she say that oh my god yeah what a waste of time but we learned that in school right we learned that we need to speak up even if it's just to kind of like reiterate a point or make our voice heard let me just say if you are leading a multicultural team please call on the non-americans frequently because just because they don't speak doesn't mean they don't have anything to say often they haven't found a moment to speak well you know what i immediately think of when you give that example is are we the worst in the world as far as reply all on emails because i also find anytime you've got like 12 people on email everyone's got to say yeah i totally agree it's like just unless you disagree just leave it no but well yes i agree with you i agree with you on that because emails suck but there is an element if you're on like a team email for work that if you don't reply on you don't say yeah i agree your boss will think you didn't read it or you're not as in tune as the other people on the team like part of it is just showing like i'm paying attention and i'm involved which is also from the top down though because if you have the person who's sending along email is going to get promoted you have to do that what are your thoughts on that well i will tell you that no the u.s is not the culture where they use reply all the most oh okay let's go to sweden oh yeah i was gonna move there until now oh no i love the swedish culture but it's the second most consensual culture in the world after japan japan is the first most consensual culture and what that means is that a lot of people are involved in the decision making process and the boss is not the decision maker right the boss is the facilitator of the decision i used to work for a danish company and i remember oh so i switched from sweden to denmark same thing sweden is more consensual than denmark but same same dynamic i used to work for a danish company i remember that my boss this danish guy he told me oh you know please no we're really egalitarian in denmark and we're really consensual and i thought that sounded great and i thought i definitely want to work for a company like that and then it started for example he was getting ready for a team meeting there were maybe 10 of us on the team and he said well send out an email like what do you think the team meeting should be about and one person responded well i think it should be about this reply all right i think it should be about this and someone else i think it should be about this and you know from my american perspective you know as we were saying earlier americans like fast decisions so i was just like could someone just please make a decision so we can move on well i would have emailed we could have had a meeting by now but we didn't because no one will decide and then after about oh i guess everybody had responded but me right all of the other nine people so then he emailed me because i seemed uncooperative right and he was like hi erin we haven't heard from you you know what's your perspective oh my god but i realized you know in that environment decisions are made more slowly but by the time the decision is made there is deep commitment from everybody and all of the details have been worked out right so i just had to participate and you know in the end everything worked out fine as long as i was adaptable you know these systems work very well in their own cultures right i mean sweden people are super consensual decisions take a while everyone's bought and it works on the contrary in india the boss makes the decision for everybody everyone's happy to follow the decision it works the problem is when you have a team where you're made up of half indians and half swedish people and they don't realize there's a difference in the way the decisions are made so they both try to follow their own format and that ends up with a lot of inefficiency right that's the worst thing we can do so we resist the urge because there would be metrics right to figure out what country is most productive or what country has the longest window of bringing an idea into production there would be ways to measure the efficiency of these different cultural approaches but do we resist that or do we acknowledge it i think different cultures are best at different things so like even that decision-making method like both the japanese and the germans are rather consensual the japanese vary and the germans rather consensual in their decisions which means they take longer to make the decisions but then when the decisions are made they are fixed they are not changed frequently in comparison in the u.s we tend to make decisions very quickly but then we change them frequently right isn't that the truth yeah um so what happens of course just if it's not obvious if you have an american japanese collaboration is that the japanese are really frustrated because the americans said we had a decision and then they're changing their direction the next day and the americans are very frustrated the japanese are so slow to make the decision but which is better okay it depends on what you're trying to accomplish what are both the germans and japanese really good at cars right and if you are going for a perfect product and you want to make sure that you fought through every little possible risk and it's the you know whatever the fastest car on earth then that method of slow consensual decision making can work great but if you are um in let's say the high tech industry and you need to make sure that your product gets out there quickly then that fast and flexible is much more important so i think that's true with all of the different cultural scales that we look at there's a reason that those cultures have those ways of operating but some of them are better for some things and some for others i just have this deep curiosity about the russian culture let's introduce the culture map and that there's eight scales maybe we could talk about russia as an example of these eight scales we can let's do it okay so tell us the eight scales okay i'm going to go through them quickly and some of them really do need explanation okay so the first one is what i call the communicating scale it looks at how much we pass messages between the lines versus how much we spell everything out and recap in writing so a great example of that is that okay the u.s is the most let's use the term explicit the most explicit culture in the world on the framework it's called low context the most explicit culture in the world and that comes because we are a culture originally of immigrants we don't have you know thousands of years of shared history and knowledge we came from different countries we learned that messages couldn't easily be passed between the lines yeah confusion was probably really common right so we were always simplified things to the lowest common denominator and then repeating them and putting them in writing um japan okay we've been speaking about japan japan is the highest context of the most implicit culture in the world there's an expression in japanese which is kuki yomenai they started to ky it means someone who is unable to read the air oh wow i guess that makes sense with the eyes yeah sure i mean i was clearly kuki yomenai yeah situation france is also i mean a much more implicit culture than the u.s is so much more high context passing messages between the lines and there's an expression in french which is a sous-entendu and a sous-entendu it means i'm under the herd so it means don't listen to what you heard right listen to the message that i passed under what you heard there's another word in french which is to say something at the deuxième degree which literally means to say something at the second degree so in french the first degree that means take what i said literally but then if i say something at the second degree it means don't listen to what i said listen to what i meant right or even don't listen to what i meant listen to what i really meant so for example the french writer la fontaine he wrote at the second degree so you could read his writing at the first degree at the literal level and you would see oh this is a child story with a moral but you could think about the context within which the story was written and you would see oh actually this is a commentary about how louis xiv misused his money yeah so there's what i meant what i really meant and i assume that you are sophisticated enough to pick up my real message what we see in business is that like in france if you are good at passing messages between the lines and reading the air you're likely to get promoted in comparison to the u.s whereas if you are good at simplifying things a lot and putting them really clearly in writing you are likely to get promoted yes so then the second dimension looks at how we get negative feedback in different parts of the world whether we get feedback more directly or more indirectly whether we say it like it is or whether we wrap positives around negatives like we do in the u.s or whether we really soften the message so for example like in thailand we might give negative feedback by saying the good and leaving out the bad right so that would be i'll give you an example i was giving a presentation in thailand and the coordinator asked me to send her two photos and a video so that she could promote the conference and i did and then i called her to see if she had what she needed and she said the photos were excellent thank you you read the air so then i said oh would you like me to send you more video options and she said oh yes thank you if you have them that would be wonderful right so you see that she said the good and left out the bad and then only because i was familiar with the technique did i then pick up the ball and ask her for what she needed now if i hadn't been aware of that technique of course i would have gotten off of the phone and she would have thought oh it's too bad she doesn't have any other video options yeah okay so those are more indirect cultures the u.s is on the middle of that scale of the direct to indirect negative feedback scale where we tend to be quite explicit but as i said we wrap positive feedback around negative feedback and then we have cultures like germany or even more so the netherlands or even more so russia or even more so israel where we tend to just say it like it is and you know i'll give you a funny example that i have for my students if for anyone who's worked with dutch people you know their culture is very let's say honest uh so they just say it like it is i had these dutch guys that were in my class a while ago and we were doing this kind of like group sharing session where we were in groups of about seven and everyone kind of gave their scenario at work and then they got help from the group and i remember one of the guys this guy vim this um this dutch guy he talked about all of these problems he was having working with british people and then this other dutch guy in the group peter he says in front of the group right he said vim you know this has happened because you're a poor communicator and you have uh and you have difficulty relating to people um what was interesting was that i saw them i saw his face turning red so i thought okay this is not a good situation yeah and i also saw the other people at the table they were looking at their feet right like i mean they were all from other countries they're all staring at their feet like okay this is not gone well so that evening i went to the dinner and i thought i'm gonna have to clean up that thing that happened with those dutch guys yeah but i went into the restaurant and these two dutch guys the same guys right they're having a beer together they're having a great time so i came up to them i was like oh i'm surprised to see you together and i remember him right the guy turned red he looked at me totally surprised and he said oh well maybe i looked uncomfortable when pete gave me that feedback but i so much appreciate that he would be willing to tell me that about myself i mean that that is clearly a gift and it makes me feel much more close to him now that he's giving me that feedback i thought wow that culture is really different than my own that reminds me so much of being on your rail trip when i was 19 and there were three dutch gals in our about our age my girlfriend's age and one of them had been on a foreign exchange student in georgia and i said oh how did you like it she goes oh my god i hated it down there everyone hello how are you doing good to see you she's like i couldn't stand all the fake talk like this flowery baloney you know acting like you're familiar with somebody she just saw it as so disingenuous and i was like oh wow yeah we kind of find that charming oh that was a dutch person talking about yes yeah right so i actually i have a fruit model to explain this so you actually you asked about russia so maybe i can go there now so we have what we call a coconut versus peach cultures so a coconut culture like the netherlands but even more so russia so coconut cultures are cultures where we don't smile a lot at strangers we don't ask personal questions of people that we don't know we don't talk about our families of people we're not close to right so like the outside of a coconut we're hard on the outside right but then as we develop a relationship as we get to know one another we become more and more friendly and warm and open we talk more about our families we ask more about the other family and we start smiling a lot the us is uh peach culture and of course if we want to talk about regional differences as you know the southern us versus boston yeah yeah that's right so i mean two examples of peach cultures are the us and brazil so in these cultures we smile a lot of strangers we ask people personal questions that we just bumped into in the grocery store we talk about our children with people that we don't even know but like a peach right if you think about a peach is like soft on the outside but then the pit is on the inside yeah and we do protect ourselves of course in the peach culture it's not that we make our hearts available to everybody so then we get to a part of the hard pit where we protect ourselves and we really have to get to know each other well right before we go like inside the pit oh my god yeah can i add to that i think what we really do is the immediate familiarity is the story it's the bullshit story that is the lubricant of the social interaction so it's like i have a version of my kids they'll tell you at the grocery store oh she's so bright this one rides a motorcycle and then i'll tell monica these little bitches they are so fucking entitled you know if i really trust her i'll let her know how my kids really are so i think like yeah that's right that's right you don't tell people about the grocery store huh yeah it's almost like there's this illusion of openness yeah but it's really the story we're telling the world that's right that's right and that's how we behave to strangers so what happens then i mean uh so okay russia typical coconut culture like we don't smile at strangers we keep strangers at a distance this russian guy igor tells me about his first time taking an airplane to the u.s and during this uh seven hour flight he's sitting next to this american and the american of course tells him all about himself he tells him about his job interview the next day he shows him pictures of his family and igor thinks wow you know i'm connecting with this guy in a way i have never connected with anybody so so quickly he thinks how could a deep friendship arrive you know in this in the short space of time so he does something really unusual for him or in russian culture he starts talking about his children and his family and sharing about his life and then the airplane lands and of course igor writes down his telephone number because he's going to call the guy the next day to find out how his job interview ran and you know the american he stands up and he says it was a pleasure to meet you have a great trip oh what igor feels he feels tricked yeah betrayed yeah he was tricked into thinking that this guy wanted to be his friend yeah and then the guy turns which is why i'm sorry to announce that so frequently in european cultures americans are seen as being superficial and hypocritical because we offer friendship and then we don't follow through we're so embarrassed yeah yeah yeah the guy the american on the plane should have been like oh i couldn't grab your number because i'm gonna go get someone else's approval in five minutes yeah also if you're igor it could be like i was tricked and then also i opened up i told my whole thing and he was like that's a pass for this friendship right but then on the other hand i mean how does the american feel not maybe not in this situation but the guy who's going to russia to do business or even coming to france i mean also in france we're so much more coconut even in the u.s what do you say about french people they're arrogant right why are they arrogant well they don't smile at me on the street i ask them a question they act like they don't care i ask them about their children they walk away from me right um so we feel i mean we feel that they're hostile that they're unfriendly that they're unwelcoming and these are just i mean once we're aware of the differences we can just start laughing about it and try to be more adaptable not take it personally right yeah oh wow i keep getting so embarrassed about americans i know god makes me want to fly i wish i could take a russian airline everywhere i went that's great i love it okay how about leading yes the leading scale um so the leading scale we talked a little bit about already it's about egalitarian versus hierarchical cultures it looks at how much we defer to the person in charge and i'll just give you a fun example so on that scale the american culture is rather egalitarian but not as egalitarian for example scandinavia or the netherlands and on the other side of the scale we have latin cultures and then even further for example usually asian cultures right or african cultures so i was working with heineken a while ago so a dutch company and in the netherlands you really learn that you know the secretary can easily email the ceo and give her opinion about something people are very comfortable working across levels and when i was working with heineken after they purchased this big this big operation in monterey mexico and in mexico i mean they tend to defer more to authority more than the u.s and certainly more than the netherlands and i had this mexican guy i was working with he said to me oh my gosh managing dutch people is absolutely incredible because i come to these meetings and i want to like roll out my strategy and they're challenging me they're contradicting me they're taking my ideas off in other directions sometimes i just want to get down on my knees and plead with them please don't forget that i'm the boss so i think that's a really important dimension because it shows that in today's global world it's no longer enough to be able to manage the dutch way or mexican way or american way or chinese way but we really have to start being flexible enough to adapt our leadership style to the countries that we're working with in order to get the results that we need and is there a trend if you charted the long arc of all this do you find that through globalization this is getting more homogenized like are the differences diminishing we do see changing but i don't generally see cultures coming together so for example on that scale of egalitarian versus hierarchical or how much we defer to authority every country in the world is generationally becoming more egalitarian so in every country whether you are from china from spain or from the u.s we defer to authority less than our parents did and our children defer to authority less than we did oh i like that trend and that's happened i believe because of the internet yeah if you think about it just i mean a couple of decades ago like when i was a child several decades ago when i was a child and certainly when you know my parents were children it really was the older person who had the information if you needed information you had to go to someone who had the experience or who had the knowledge from being on earth yeah that's an amazing point yeah yeah but today our children can just jump on the internet you know like we don't trust the doctor anymore because we looked up on the internet something that's different than what the doctor told us so therefore we defer to the doctor less than we used to yeah when our kids say to their teachers no no uh you know miss johnson it's not true i looked it up on the internet yeah i always think about how frustrating it must be to be a doctor these days i mean it would be maddening like oh you're 12 minute search you think trump's my 12 years of education on this that's right so that we see around the world in every country i don't see that the countries are kind of coming together in a meeting spot i just see that the whole world is shifting to be more and more egalitarian with the difference between the countries still there but a clear movement then on the direct and indirect negative feedback scale i don't see a consistent movement you know in the u.s i believe that millennials of course are less direct with negative feedback and expect more positive wrapping than their parents did oh yeah but that's very different than in china or india where the younger generations tend to be much more direct with negative feedback and then we have countries like the netherlands or denmark where i haven't seen much movement generationally so we are shifting but we're not becoming one culture and then deciding then is another one back to our task right so uh yes deciding we already talked about earlier so that looks at the difference between consensual decision making and top-down decision making we make decisions quickly and we change them frequently that's top down or consensual we make decisions slowly over a long period of time as a group and then the decision is fixed after we've made it and then trusting sounds like the fruit metaphor it's not thank you for bringing that up yeah um yeah so that's actually the trusting scale i actually think is the most important of all of the scales although it's the most simple so it looks at how we come to trust a business partner for example or a colleague in different parts of the world so if you think about it there's two kinds of trust so there's cognitive trust that's trust from your brain that's like i see you're on time you do good work you're reliable i trust you and then we have what we call effective trust that's like trust from your heart that's like i feel this emotional bond with you or i feel i feel a personal connection i feel like i've seen who you are beyond or below your professional persona and because i've seen who you are inside i trust you now if i ask you why you trust your mother it doesn't matter where you come from you'll talk to me about effective trust but if i ask you why you trust a business partner we'll see a lot more difference from one culture to another countries like the u.s where we tend to use cognitive trust for work and effective trust for home and in fact in the u.s i mean we've been taught right i'm changing a little bit we've been taught that it's not safe or smart to get too close to people that we work with right so if we're gonna negotiate a deal or we're gonna manage a team we don't want to like open up too much because then it compromises our objectability right but then in every emerging market country in the world from brazil to indonesia to nigeria to china and there's much more of a cognitive and effective trust being all woven together in the workplace okay so what happens then what happens is that the american team is bidding for business in china they take the airplane to shanghai they rehearse their presentation they get every word just perfect they have the best presentation possible they come in they give that great presentation and then they come home and then they don't get the work and then they think it's an issue of price right later that the work went to a group in malaysia and then they think it was a price issue but what actually happened is if the malaysians the malaysian group spent a good deal of time outside of work getting to know their chinese counterparts having meals together maybe drinking together i'm sharing and opening up so now they have that trust between them and now that makes it much easier for the chinese to feel like well we'll work with them even if they're more expensive because we know we can trust them wow yeah so that's a very important dimension because if we're aware of it we can i think easily adapt our style to build the trust that we need and if we're not aware of it we might end up accidentally even losing the business entirely yeah so high schmooze factor i'm gonna euphemize that as stay tuned for more if you dare and how about disagreeing yeah so that dimension looks at how we express disagreement in different parts of the world so we have more confrontational cultures those are cultures where we we really like a strong debate so we really like to get to come into a room together and say you know i totally disagree with you and the more we have strong open debates the more we feel that's good for the team and that's good for the business so the strong ones right are israel as we talked about earlier france so france israel the two most confrontational cultures in the world um but also germany they love to have a good debate in germany in more factual way but a good debate then on the other side of the scale we feel that open debate or strong disagreement is really really a way to ruin the relationship so we don't say i disagree with you in those cultures like in the uk so british people towards the avoid confrontation side of the scale and the british person instead of saying i disagree will almost always say i totally agree with everything you've said and uh-huh well we're like taught that in therapy to do that yeah like i hear you i see you yeah that's right that whole act of listening thing right yeah so maybe i'll give you a personal example okay so france is the second most confrontational culture in the world after israel the u.s falls to the middle of this scale okay so when i moved to france i told you already my husband is french uh we went to this party this dinner party with a group of his french friends and things started out fine partway through the meal the group got into what i thought was a big fight so the hostess this woman named helen she started talking about this gulf tournament that happens in their village and whether it should continue or not so she said i'm against it and then she said all of the reasons that she was against it and then her best friend danielle said and then you say that because you're selfish oh and then everybody at the table started taking a side some people were for it and some people were against it and they're waving their arms and their voices are raising and you know in my culture remember i'm from minnesota but in the u.s in general if this happened at the dinner table with guests over you know i would have thought this was a very bad sign i would have expected someone to stand up walk out of the room slam the door and never come back so i was wishing i was anywhere but there and someone looked at me and said well erin what do you think and i was like absolutely no opinion but it's all of course i mean the interesting part was about 10 minutes later the topic changed there were no hard feelings at the table and then danielle went into the other room arms around each other best friends as always and when i got into the car with my husband that evening my french husband i said oh what a horrible evening and i remember he looked at me he was like what are you talking about we had a really fun time tonight yeah and so have you grown towards that so now when you're in that same situation for 20 years can you get to the place where you enjoy it personally or you still what i can tell you is that i have a different reaction to this in business versus in my whole life so in business i mean as a professional yes let's say i have totally adapted what that means is in my classrooms, when my French participants raise their hands and say, no, I totally disagree with what you just said. And then they explain why they disagree.

If that happened in the US, I would think, oh, this person is not happy with this class. Yes. Or it has no respect for me. Right.

I would think, right, that they felt that I wasn't credible or something like that. But I know when a French person does that, that is of the utmost positive side. That means this person is totally engaged and they would like to now have a debate with the class about this fascinating topic. So I no longer have an emotional reaction to that.

But I am afraid to tell you that my husband says that luckily I eventually get over things or I would not speak to any of his cousins anymore. Right. Different dinners of this type of thing has happened yet. Well, Monica and I have had this problem in real life, which is my family will argue and scream at each other at the dinner table.

And it's totally fine. And I'm now realizing, you know, the patriarch of my family was was 100 percent French and a very French guy. And maybe that's where that all comes from. Like just the.

Yeah. I mean, I feel that I also grew up in a similar environment because of the Indian background, but it didn't ever result. There were lingering feelings after. So it doesn't make me feel good when we enter that type of conversation.

Yeah. Yeah. And we're just gonna be upset with each other for a couple of days. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's interesting, Monica, because you might know there's this book called The Argumentative Indian, which is like written in India for Indians.

Right. My Indian students have told me about it. I actually haven't read it. My Indian students have always told me about it.

And that being said, India is rather to the avoid confrontation side of my disagreeing scale. And what I've seen is that Indians may be very, yeah, like argumentative and certainly emotionally expressive. Yes. In a family environment or when they're around people who are close to them.

But then when it comes to a work environment, especially if they're working with people from other countries, they tend to really not even say no. Right. They say yes and then pass the no between the lines by saying something like like if your boss asked you to do something, that's a very common situation. This German guy managing a group in India and he says to his Indian staff member, you know, here's what needs to happen.

Can we do this? And the Indian guy kind of, oh, it will be difficult. And he explains why it will be difficult. But then he says we will do our best.

Yeah. And the German guy thinks the Indian is going to get to work on it. And the Indian guy thinks he has clearly just explained there is no way in hell that he has any time to do that. Yeah.

Can't be done. Yeah. Well, there is a high level of respecting authority there, I feel like. Right.

So that comes into play. And that totally makes sense. I would say for my parents in the work environment is much different than, yeah, at the dinner table. That's right.

Very, very interesting. I'd like to come to one of your family dinners. It's a riot. Yeah.

Monica and her father, they should ring a bell. Well, here we go. It's also interesting because I'm American and my dad is from India, but my mom is also American, but grew up first generation. Like she moved when she was sick.

She moved to the United States when she was sick. So there is kind of a bizarre clashing of things happening as well, probably. Well, sure. And I, you know, this is what people always want to talk about after I give a presentation.

So my book and my speeches are always about business. But afterwards, people always come up to me to talk about my wife was from this culture and my mother was from that culture, because of course, this is about interpersonal relationships. And if we have multicultural families like me or I'm American, but my children born and raised in France. Right.

And it's so strange to see your children like coming from a different culture than you do. Oh, it's got to be so bizarre. Right. So this is, I mean, this is the global world that we're living in, but the more global we become, the more important it is to think about these things.

Yeah. Okay. We only have two left. We did really good.

We have scheduling. I love these. I do too. We have scheduling and persuading.

Okay. Scheduling. We already talked about. So just quickly scheduled time, right?

Versus flexible time. Yeah. Italian electricians versus the LA electricians. Okay.

We got it. Right. That dimension looks specifically at, let's say in every culture, we value structure in business and we value flexibility in business. But that specific dimension tells us how much a culture values one in comparison to the other, right?

Okay. Over the other. Okay. Then the last scale.

Well, that one is very difficult for me to talk about in a couple of minutes. I think it's one of the most important dimensions, but also most of the most complicated. So it looks at the difference between what I call application first versus principle first cultures. It's based on the idea of induction, which is application first versus deduction, which is principle first.

Like in a country like Italy or Spain or Brazil or France or Germany, they really learn in their school system, this system of first looking at all of the theory and the philosophy before coming to any kind of conclusion or action. Like a holistic view of the whole thing. Well, like we can't do a math problem about pi until we've proven pi. So like if you're studying math and application first culture, like the US, the US is a strong application first culture.

So that means we open up our math book to page one, chapter one, and we start by getting a sample problem. We get a clear formula and then we take the formula and we apply it to real life situations. So in the American school system, we spend a lot of time looking at real life situations, at case studies, at practical application. So we're really focused on application first.

Yeah. And we don't like to spend too much time. We learn that in school, but definitely in business. We don't like to spend too much time like talking about the theory, right?

We want to get to action. Yeah. Yeah. In comparison to especially many other Latin cultures, but like Latin American, but also Latin European cultures or countries like Germany, where we really feel we can't get to application.

So if you open up your math book, page one, chapter one, can we wrestle with the theory behind the math and the philosophy behind the math. It's only after we've kind of proven those principles that we then can come to application. So I kind of like that. Yeah.

Cause I can see the value in it, which is in a weird way. It's getting you to buy in like, okay, I think this is a noble pursuit. Now how do we do it? I see some value in that, like deciding almost that you would want to pursue this.

Why would you? Sure. And of course, so in the French schooling system, they teach introduction thesis, antithesis synthesis. So that's very deep in the French mind versus in the U.S.

where we teach get to the point and stick to the point. Yeah. So how that plays out would be that like if I am American, I'm giving a presentation in Germany. So Germany more principle first, the U.S.

more application first, then I'm going to start on my first slide by getting right to the point. Yeah. We waste 3 billion a year on rivets. This is what we waste.

And this is my recommendation for how to move forward. You try this in Germany. Wait, wait, but you know, how many people did you pull? What questions did you ask?

What methodology did you use for analyzing the data? And then the American thinks they're challenging my credibility. Yeah. Yeah.

Or they're wasting my time. Right. Oh, and also the German thinks this American woman thinks I'm stupid. That I'll just swallow anything.

She can just give me this like conclusion and I'm not even going to think about it. Oh, see, I really identify with this. I'm so annoying. I'm so disagreeable.

My wife can't stand. She's like, we got to do X, Y, and Z. I go, okay, but back up. Why are we doing X, Y, and Z?

I got to believe in this before I get involved in the planning of it. I can really relate. And then also, of course, what happens on the other side would be if you have someone from, oh, Brazil or Mexico or Italy or France or Germany who's giving a presentation in the U.S. I mean, they often spend quite a bit of time a quote from the Spanish guy last week in class.

He said, my American boss said to me last week, Javier, when you give a presentation, it is not a strip show. Do not take off one piece of clothing at a time before you eventually get to the point. Go full Monty right away. Right.

And I just thought that was a great description because in these more principal first cultures, we've really been taught, my French children have really been taught this system of how to build up till you get to the conclusion, like a strip show. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's interesting because that also ties back into like time.

Like we want to just get to the point. We want it to be done. Same within the scheduling. Like there's no time for flexibility.

We just got to like get it done in this order. So it all adds up. And I would imagine the French enjoy process more than we do. Like my big goal in life is to enjoy process, but I'm so, you know, results oriented that I often miss process, which is where your life exists.

But the French are very, very flexible. Remember that, right? So they are not, I mean, nothing like the Germans, right? So Germans that love structure and process, the French are more, have a tendency to want to, you know, think freely and have like free associations, which I think is one of the reasons that the French culture is so creative, right?

I mean, the French, like what, all this fashion and beauty. And that's because they're not like tied down with structure. They believe in this kind of a creative cultural structure, which then leads to innovation. But I do want to kind of wrap up that last dimension by saying that, you know, my goal is not just to like tell people what the difference are and say, good luck.

Because actually, I mean, I think there are a lot of strategies that you can use. Like I've learned and, you know, it's not so difficult to just when I'm giving a presentation in Germany to always start by first explaining, you know, here's the methodology. Here's the research I did before I get to the point and get practical examples in the same way that Javier can learn to have a slide at the beginning that says, these are my conclusions instead of doing the script show, right? We have to understand the difference in order to make the adjustment.

This is also fascinating. Yeah, I love it. Is it just Netflix? You wrote a book with Reed or just involving Reed Hastings?

Yeah, so Reed and I, Reed Hastings and I co-authored a book, which just came out a few months ago, which is called No Rules, Rules. I love it. No Rules, Rules. No Rules, Rules.

Yeah, yeah. No Rules, Rules. Maybe you should have put a Z at the end of the second rules. That would have made it really clear.

I've had to explain that because around the world, they haven't understood it because they think it means rules for no rules. That's what I thought when I read it. Right, and it's been translated wrong. The title has been translated wrong, but too late.

You should have called me. I never thought of the Z thing. So that book, it's a whole other story. We'll have to do that another day.

But that book is about the crazy corporate culture at Netflix and how this counterintuitive culture has led to this extreme flexibility and innovation and what other companies or entrepreneurs or team leaders who want to have more innovation and flexibility, what they can do to what she's at. But yeah, the reason that I became interested in Netflix, and this is only actually the last chapter of the book, was because they had this crazy culture that had one attribute, which was all about candor. So Reed contacted me because they were getting ready to internationalize the company. It was the end of 2015, and they were getting ready to roll out into other parts of the world.

So I started working with them as they got ready for their international expansion, and I was very concerned. I was very concerned about how this edgy, provocative culture that was working fabulously in the U.S., how that was going to play out in Japan and Singapore and Brazil. So I'll leave that to your readers. They can learn about that on their own.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The no rules rules. Well, Erin, you're so interesting, and this stuff is so, so fascinating. We thank you for joining us in the evening over there in France.

My pleasure. Nice to talk with both of you. It was a lot of fun. Take care.

Bye-bye.