It's about Time 

by William R. Dodson

 

28 October 2002

I love working in hot places: the pace is slower and I get to take naps. In Mexico, I got to take two hours for lunch, which seemed more natural to me than hurriedly eating a squishy tuna salad sandwich at my desk while pecking with a single finger at the computer keyboard. Of course, on that particular Mexico project, I hated how long it took for the blindingly-fast Sun Unix computer to be delivered to the client site. I think we lost about one month off the project plan we hadn’t taken into account during initial scheduling. The machine had gotten to Mexico OK; I guess folks had a lot of lunches to catch up on.

 

Time is a deceptive, slippery sort of thing that is directly linked to the degree to which an individual is able to multi-task. In general, the cultures that lay in the temperate and mind-numbingly cold zones to the north of the equator are lousy at multi-tasking. And the more Anglo-Saxon-Jute-ish the culture is, the less likely it able to juggle concerns like a circus performer keeps balls and chairs and small dogs simultaneously tumbling through the air, without dropping any of them.

 

And this, really, comes down to a culture’s experience and outlook on the phenomenon of change. Asian, Mediteranean, Latin American and African cultures see change as inevitable, as something that should and must be accommodated for all stakeholders to come out winners in a transaction. Those Anglo-Saxon-Jute-ish (forthwith ASJ’s) cultures I mentioned before not only juggle terribly, they expect everything to be fixed in place with a piece of paper and a signature. ASJ’s like the British and the Germans and the French and especially like the Americans expect time to stop; they expect entropy to end. Now every physicist knows you can’t stop entropy; that is, the universe’s inevitable movement toward disorder – chaos, even. High-energy physicists know it, chaos theorists know it, and the Mexican deliverymen responsible for our Sun Unix server know it, too. In fact, most cultures that prefer to stay in tune with nature know very well that things change.

 

Which is why I sometimes have a job as an organizational change management consultant. In America. Americans don’t know that things change: schedules change, budgets change, and most especially, people’s minds change. Even the thinking of those very executives who originally signed the mandate to make a project happen; they seem to change their minds the most – or is it, really, that they’re more backtracking as Change itself (note the capital “C”) fills in the blanks of their otherwise inadequate understanding of the conditions that prompted a new project in the first place.

 

I’d never be a successful organizational change consultant in China. First of all, my Chinese is not at a level at which I’d be able to convince Chinese people that the changes at hand were good for them. They know I was lying. Second, and most important, they talk amongst themselves way too much for a change management consultant to be able to convince otherwise in time for management to perform its magic trick on the organization.

 

Cultures with a multi-faceted view of time support societies in which the people communicate with one another constantly, about everything, as though everything were equally important. These information rich environments know change is inevitable because that’s what they talk about all the time: things changing – their relationship with their spouse, their daughter’s fiancée, the latest episode of a favorite TV opera, the boss’es affair with the secretary, the silly consultant trying to get them to change.

 

ASJ cultures on the other hand spend a lot of their time trying to stop time from flowing, morphing, evolving life, us, business and human relationships. The “good life” that ASJ cultures are living, though, are influencing other cultures to get things done within the agreed upon schedule, to take fewer naps and to eat shorter lunches. It also means fewer people engaging one another in an effort to ride the waves of change and to take the time to benefit each other, instead of out-compete one’s fellow man (or woman) more efficiently. Life – and business – should be so simple. Now where did I put that Corona beer?

 

William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Advisors, L.L.C., an international markets research consultancy that helps businesses develop and place successful products and people in foreign markets. He is a contributing editor of the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal of Business Management, and writes the weekly column “The Cultured Business”, found at www.silkrc.com He can be reached at sradvisors@gmail.com or +1 (847)722-7817.