Archive for January, 2009

Indian workers in the rising generation are talented, well educated and eager to prove themselves. They are also numerous. About 1.15 billion people live in India, and the median age is less than 25. That’s a young talent pool that can’t be ignored. Samarth Sangal, a 2008 Thunderbird graduate, represents this generation well. Samarth has worked in software development and helped manage a family business in New Dehli. He shares insights on managing the younger generation in the video above, which is a clip from Thunderbird’s online certificate program, “Doing Business in India.”

By Karen S. Walch, Thunderbird Professor

Today’s inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of the United States is a good example of how globalization transforms a local or regional phenomenon into a global one. Newspapers from around the world are covering this singular event (view headlines from dozens of global publications). Several Thunderbird students were in Washington to see the inauguration firsthand, including Darien Carroll, who wrote a story about the experience. She also provided the photos included here. We would like to hear from you, as well. Leave a reply below letting us know where in the world you were on Jan. 20, 2009. Share your stories here at the World Café about your geographic location and who you were working with or enjoying the day or evening with. If you have any photos, please send them to us at karen.walch@thunderbird.edu.
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By Karen S. Walch, Thunderbird Professor

As a Thunderbird professor, I have observed an increasing curiosity about how to negotiate in the world’s fastest-growing economies – China, India, Russia, Brazil and Mexico. There is currently a rise in demand for a meaningful understanding of the cultures, regions and politics that shape these markets.

In the context of these emerging markets, a particular quality of negotiation competency is required for the development and management of successful business partnerships, alliances, joint ventures and virtual teams. Talented negotiators are in high demand with their competitive advantage of strategic insight and cultural understanding about regional politics, geography and economics.
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Sometimes “urgent” means immediately. Other times the word means maybe tomorrow. That’s one lesson that 2003 Thunderbird graduate Johann Joh shares with global managers when he teaches workshops on cross-cultural communication. Joh, who currently is applying for doctoral programs in the United States, worked previously as a global talent manager for LG Electronics in Seoul, South Korea, and for British American Tobacco Korea.
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By Karen S. Walch, Thunderbird Professor

Capturing all the dimensions of a negotiation situation can be quite overwhelming. Effective Quantum Negotiators must practice their planning as well as their cross-cultural behaviors. They must practice to plan and plan to practice! The Cultural Orientations Indicator (COI) is a practical assessment tool we use at Thunderbird to enhance the planning and behavioral skills of global negotiators. This tool provides a practical roadmap of cultural components that impact global communication and negotiation practices.
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By Karen S. Walch, Thunderbird Professor

Working professionals from all over the world share their adventures in cross-cultural negotiations with us. Here are five tips we have picked up from our network of practitioners at the Garvin Center for Cultures and Languages of International Management:

1. Adapt your negotiation style to fit your counterpart’s cultural preferences.

“U.S. negotiators sometimes tend to delight in their bluntness – which doesn’t work well with the British,” says British management consultant Tim Wilson. “By contrast, U.S. negotiators may consider the indirect communication in some cultures difficult to follow and even deceptive.” Consult the Cultural Navigator for tips on cultural preferences.
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Andreas Sigl grew up in a small town in western Germany and dreamed of becoming a landscape architect. Those plans changed abruptly 20 years ago after a trip to Japan that Sigl took through an exchange program. “Once you’ve tasted the world beyond your home, it’s difficult to go back,” Sigl said. “My countryside in Germany became too small, and I wanted to go out and explore.”

Sigl’s explorations led him to Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz., and then to a career filled with cross-cultural negotiations. Today he is head of marketing communications for Infiniti Europe, where he is helping the Japanese automaker launch its brand in the world’s toughest performance car market.
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Long before Steve Klemme was a J.P. Morgan executive in Switzerland, he was a homeless hitchhiker in Africa. He slept outdoors and traveled with little more than a passport and the knapsack on his back. At one point in 1978, he took a dugout canoe down the Niger River into Nigeria, where he hitchhiked to Lagos and tried to get a job on a cargo ship. That was his plan to earn passage to the United States. “I didn’t have enough money to get out of Africa,” he said.
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By  Karen Walch

A luxury of holiday time for me is to read. I just read, among other great books, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which outlines the conditions that exist for successful achievement in any field of interest from sports, business, software development, the arts, etc. His thesis asserts that success comes as the result of many forces; however, the most critical factor in the success equation is the result of “10,000 hours” of practice.

Although this may not come as a surprise to any of us, this thesis clarifies a hypothesis of my own that satisfaction and success in multicultural negotiations require at least “10,000 hours” of practice!

As a student of the negotiation discipline for more than two decades, I am humbled by the breadth of practice this skill demands in the multicultural setting. In the year 2009, there are a myriad of forces that have now made it possible for us to engage in a forum with all of you about the findings Professor Leclerc and I have discovered in our cross-cultural negotiation study and observation.
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Would you like to reflect and learn more about your current negotiation practices? Do you often need to negotiate with people whose expectations, interests and cultural values are different than your own? Have you ever wondered how to increase your leverage in a complex negotiation? If any of this is true, then we would like you to join us for adventures in cross-cultural communication at the World Cafe.

This blog will feature discussions, examples and briefing about best practices in intercultural negotiation. The site will be an interactive forum to assess not only common mistakes and disappointments, but also insights and frameworks for satisfying wins and the occasionally hilarious situations of fellow negotiators.

The World Cafe will feature the color, stories, voices and faces of those who are in the “field” daily, managing intricate negotiations across the globe. We invite readers’ views, comments, ideas and examples of current negotiations in the form of interactive blogs, podcasts and interviews, along with an assessment of current research and publications about negotiation in the cultural context.

As the result of significant feedback and vibrant experiences from hundreds of global negotiators, we have developed a negotiation program that explores negotiation performance through transformation of cultural insight and behavior. We would like to share some of the ideas from our curriculum and experiential learning approach that we have developed in our consulting and classroom interaction with graduate students and corporate partners.

The quantum insight approach addresses not only how negotiators think about their strategy, but also how they feel and behave as the result of individual cultural preferences. Our publications include a white paper presented at the fall 2008 SIETAR Conference, an upcoming Quantum Negotiation guidebook and a current National Academy of Science publication on the cultural underpinnings of social neuroscience.

Negotiation analysis, goal setting, fact finding and establishment of fair standards in a cross-cultural context require the exploration of concepts developed in numerous academic fields, including cultural anthropology and communication, business, law, neuroscience and psychology. Our curriculum and publications will provide examples, systematic tools and applications synthesized from numerous areas of study.

We recognize that globalization is a process of expedited and utterly profound transformation at multiple levels of human experience. This transformation is marked by a convergence of various forces that challenge our adaptive ingenuity. Our program is best described with the quantum descriptor because, at its core, the converging forces of this transformation unleash unimagined potential. Our global world as it appears to us and as we have created it is characterized less as “flat,” but more significantly as a world of dynamic, exponential potential and challenges.

Join us at the World Cafe and share your negotiation experiences with others who want not only to survive, but to thrive and lead in our contemporary global environment.