Welcome back from Summer break. As of today we return to weekly posts and hope you had a great summer.
My travels to more than 40 countries and my contacts with people from even more nations have afforded me some unique opportunities to see cultural differences at work. “Excerpts from the Diary of a Global Traveler” is a remembrance of some of my most memorable and personally instructive experiences. These excerpts will now be a recurring feature of this blog. I hope you find these true stories interesting and useful to you.
Background to the diary: In this series of posts I will share firsthand experiences as well as other highly instructive techniques I have learned during my journeys to more than 40 countries in 40 years. My base of operations at the beginning of that period was the US where I was responsible for all the international meetings and training programs of the worldwide Rotary organization. From 1979 to 1987 I managed a team that had the responsibility for putting on the annual Rotary World Congress. This event brought well over 20,000 people from more than 100 nations together for five days each year to discuss ways to improve our planet as well as our individual communities. The World Congress was held in a different country each year which adds considerably to the challenge of planning logistics, arranging housing, food service and a program which serves to be both entertaining and inspiring.
Here is the first piece pulled from my diary.
It is 2 AM and I am sitting in the huge exhibition center of a large South American city. In seven hours a crowd, which over the course of the day will swell to 20,000, will be lining up at our registration desks to receive their credentials and pre-purchased tickets for the 1981 Rotary World Congress. The only problem is that all those custom-made badges and tickets in individualized packets are inexplicably being held ransom by a senior customs officer who feels that his government paycheck is insufficient and that we should contribute something to help grease the skids and get our materials released. All this is being conveyed through subordinate go-betweens using innuendo to explain how this unfortunate situation can be resolved.
It was now or never. All I had to do to get our materials was send a representative to the customs official with an envelope stuffed with cash. This was strictly against my employer’s ethics policy as well as my own. But the pressure was mounting, and the question was “who would blink first.”
Once the material would arrive, we still would have to sort and place everything at the correct registration desks according to alphabetical order. My final gambit was to let it be known that without these materials the opening ceremony could not be held as scheduled, which would certainly displease the country’s dictator president who was scheduled to participate in the opening ceremonies.
Finally, we were informed that our materials had been released and we could come to pick them up. By the time the boxes finally arrived it was 3 AM and I had the unpleasant task of waking many staff members to come as soon as possible and set up the long overdue materials. After all, the show must go on.
It’s not the first problem I had getting this particular event launched in this country. They also impounded my computer for a week when I arrived. Additionally, a local potential supplier had tried unsuccessfully to blackmail a member of my staff into awarding a lucrative contract to that vendor.
The opening ceremony each year is a moving presentation of the flags of every country where a Rotary club operates. But days before the ceremony, the protocol officers of the host nation said we could not present the flag of Taiwan in the presence of the country’s President (our honorary guest at the opening ceremonies) since our host nation did not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. That year we had to break with tradition and did not present any flags to the great disappointment of every delegate.
These are just a few examples of cultural differences regarding bribery and gifts. May I give an expensive gift to my customer or receive one from my supplier? Absolutely no in some cultures and absolutely yes in others. But what happens when a “no” culture meets a “yes” culture?
Take-aways: Things which are be illegal in one country or a violation of your company’s policy may be normal practice in another country. Know the rules of the game when you enter a different culture but remember that you will have to reconcile them with what is acceptable back home. You may be thousands of kilometers away, but you are never “off the grid”.
Herb