Book review
The Business Chameleon: The Art of Achieving Success in Business Abroad
By Ron Roet and Diana Beaver
Published by Management Books 2000 Ltd, 2003,
ISBN 1-85252-429-4
216 Pages. £14.99
This is a new book about how to do business in different cultures. It is written by two acquaintances, Ron (Dutch) and Diana (English) who have both lived abroad and who suggest some tools and theories you can use to make inter-cultural relations work for you in business. Having lived in a few different cultures myself (The Netherlands, Belgium, USA, UK and Nepal) I only found things that I agreed with – this is an easy, interesting read and it gives lots of examples and exercises you can try yourself to make yourself more culturally aware.
The book is very business focused and reminds us that business is about people and more importantly about the relationships between people. If we can think about the paradigm that another culture lives by and then try to build a hybrid between our culture and theirs, we are a step closer on the way to a good relationship.
The very first suggestion is to be insatiably curious: "Open all your senses and notice what you notice." There are several useful tools and exercises in the first chapters to help you to shift your views of others and why they do the things they do. Because, in effect, we are each different, with different maps of the world (none of which map the territory), so even people from the same culture sometimes don't get it right and make wrong assumptions about each other. One tool is Gregory Bateson's logical levels of thinking (page 29) which helps you to look at things from another person's perspective.
The main theory in the book, developed by Ron, is called the Cultural Auras Theory or CAT. I like the theory – it is simple and makes good sense. It puts a structure on how people from different cultures create a relationship. The only problem I have with the book is the use of the word 'Aura'. I can just see what some of the engineers I work with would make of that (but perhaps I am making an incorrect assumption here); I think it sounds too New Age and 'touchy-feely' for them.
There are four auras: The Formal Business aura, the Friendly Business aura, the Friendly Personal aura and the Inner Core. Different cultures do business in different auras AND it takes different amounts of time to move from one aura to the next dependent on the culture you belong to. It is a useful model to work to and there are plenty of examples of what each looks like and how one might move from Formal to Personal in different cultures.
There are some generalisations about different cultures and how they like to work (with the caveat that one must always be observant – what works with most people in a culture may not work with your business partner). The most useful chapter is Chapter 6, "The F*** Word". That word is fear and it is what stops us from trying new things – either new products, or behaving differently. There are some good exercises about how to deal with intimidating people and how to expand your own 'safe space'.
My favourite quote is from page 113 and tells the story about the Brahma Kumaris who have done a survey of values around the world. They found that no matter what race, colour, creed or sex we are, we share the same top nine values: peace, respect, love, responsibility, happiness, tolerance, cooperation, honesty, humility, simplicity and unity. Keep that in mind next time you are dealing with a difficult 'foreigner': his or her values are the same as yours... so what is stopping the relationship from developing? If we honour these values, we can create the relationships we need to do business.
I also really liked Chapter 9, One Man's Gift is Another Man's Poison. It talks about 'false friends'; words that we think we know what they mean in another language because we know what they mean in ours. For instance, in German 'gift' means poison. There are lots of wonderful examples including examples between American and British English. And they didn't even get around to discussing things like what the Americans think 'To table' something is (they think it means to shelve it and not discuss it) and what the British think it means (something to be discussed now).
I think what I like best is the pragmatic approach and the way the authors help you to capture your own learning as you negotiate the "minefield" of intercultural relations. It isn't really a minefield, it is supremely interesting and they show their own enthusiasm and keen interest in everything they write. Diana is an NLP specialist and she brings her knowledge of NLP to bear on how to build relationships that work between culturally different partners. Again, very pragmatic – what works? How? And how can I get it to work for me while remaining authentic to who I am? Ron, being Dutch has almost always had to work across cultures. He has a very interesting background in business and many of the examples of selling across cultures are his.
You can have some good fun reading this book; it is entertaining and interesting and there is plenty of humour to help in your learning process. There is also plenty of good learning to be had from this book – I highly recommend it if you are interested in working across cultures.