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In 2004, I went to India for the first time, to lead a software development project for an Italian company. The first, and only time, I had fourteen developers reporting to me. Everything was new, cool and shiny. It felt like the country was moving forward in the development scale right under my own eyes. New buildings and new (land) development projects were everywhere. Things were awesome!
Four months later, I grew increasingly frustrated. Not many things were cool and shiny, nothing was awesome anymore. Every small roadblock, every tiny problem that would be a non-issue in my comfy first-world country, would take days to sort out in emerging India. Factoring these issues, things were still not progressing in as fast or as good as they would if we ran the project completely in my own country. People were fine, talented workers with a lot of energy on both sides, but we were going nowhere.
Four years later, on a different project for Dutch clients with Indonesian programmers, I realized what happened, something that would have been blindly obvious to any non-technical, experienced manager: a cultural chasm was undermining our work.
Developers are simple-minded folks. We face the universal laws of math and logic all day long. When we have people issues, it’s often because we implicitly apply the same rules to persons. We treat them as if they were logical machines, behaving consistently like if they were subject to some kind of Global Unified Theory of Mankind. It is bad enough with people who share the same culture as yourself, it’s fatal with people who came from different backgrounds — much like a developer and a sales manager: the former is from mars, the latter from venus.
What is a culture? What is it for? It makes everyday life so much simpler: it gives us a default model, a set of standard operating procedures for daily activities and interactions.
A popular definition in anthropology literature is:
Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values. (Kluckhohn, 1951)
Culture is better thought as an iceberg: there is a small, visible part and a big, hidden part.
Arts, literature, language, food, dresses, games are tangible cultural traits. In the business world, the visible part include documents, procedures, organizational structure, architecture of buildings, dress codes, appropriate communication and languages.
The hidden part — far more important, because by default we implicitly assume our own applies to everyone and grow increasingly frustrated when people do not act according to our expectactions —involves deeper meanings like the concept of time, beauty, sin, disease, the meaning of friendship, privacy, relationships between men and women, managers and employees, mankind and nature, the role of people in society, even acceptable approaches to problem-solving, motivations, preferences and values.
