World Café

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.

Klemme was 23 at the time and had no formal training in cross-cultural negotiations. But he had good instincts.

“I like the adventure,” he said Dec. 10 in an interview at the J.P. Morgan offices in Geneva. “I like the adrenaline rush of meeting somebody new or being in a new situation.”

When Klemme failed to find work in Nigeria, he hitchhiked to Senegal and tried again. Eventually, he found a job on a cargo ship and worked his way home.

The traveler enrolled at Thunderbird School of Global Management a few years later and took a course in cross-cultural communication during his first semester. “I still use many of the tactics and strategies taught in that class,” he said.

Except now, instead of negotiating for passage on a cargo ship to the United States, Klemme negotiates banking matters with some of the wealthiest individuals in the Middle East. As managing director of J.P. Morgan’s private banking operations in the region, he must know his clients well.

He visits their homes, meets their families and even writes letters of reference for their children when they apply to college. “Some of my best friends are my clients,” Klemme said.

Klemme’s first job after graduating from Thunderbird in 1985 was a private banking position with CitiGroup in New York. He had been hired to manage certain European accounts, but he learned on his first day at CitiGroup that his assignment had been changed to small and medium-sized private banking accounts in the Middle East.

“I took over 1,200 accounts on the first day,” Klemme said. “And I had no assistants.”

Since then he has spent more than 20 years as a private banker in the Middle East. During that time he has learned many lessons about effective cross-cultural negotiations in the region.

Be prepared

“The most important thing is to prepare, prepare and then prepare some more,” he said. “It’s important to do a lot of contingency planning and think, ‘What if something doesn’t go right.’ What if somebody new comes into the meeting that you didn’t expect.”

Klemme says he picked up the philosophy from Boy Scouts of America, which uses the motto “Be prepared.” He says joined the Scouting program as a boy and earned the highest rank, Eagle Scout.

Klemme prepares for cross-cultural negotiations by reading before each meeting. He says he reads about the culture, history and current events in the region, and he reads about the individuals he plans to meet.

“It’s very important when you start a negotiation to find some way to connect with that individual on a personal level,” he said. “Maybe they were educated in the U.S., or maybe they have a common interest with you.”

Finding common ground

Klemme said another key to success is finding common ground. He said this has never been a problem in the Middle East because the culture is similar to the one he experienced while growing up in a small town in Iowa.

“There are many similarities between Iowa and the Middle East,” Klemme said. “In both places, your life revolves around family and religion.”

Klemme said another thing that makes conversation easy in the Middle East is that many in the region have an affinity for U.S. pop culture. He said this is especially true in Saudi Arabia, where people watch television shows such as “Desperate Housewives” and follow American sports.

“People in the Middle East also love to talk about American politics,” Klemme said. “The No. 1 most popular topic is American politics.”

Overcoming language barriers

One challenge that Klemme faces in the Middle East is a language barrier. He said he has never been gifted at learning foreign languages, and his knowledge of Arabic remains minimal.

But this has never stopped Klemme from developing close, personal relationships with his clients.

“One of my largest clients doesn’t speak a word of English, and I don’t speak enough Arabic,” he said. “So we always deal through a translator.”

Klemme said this client watches his body language and pays attention to his tone of voice and other nonverbal messages.

“We greet each other very warmly,” Klemme said. “And we have a very strong friendship even though we don’t speak the same language.”

Posted: 01|6|09 at 4:17 pm.
Filed under: Cross-cultural profiles.
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