Case Study 2: Communication
When an American company opened an office in India: Business operations needed to adjust to include frequent phone-based conference calls. The American team quickly began …
Case Study: Communication Protocols
A multinational team in the United States: On this team, a Japanese engineer was getting increasingly frustrated with his American manager. He sent repeated formal …
New Year Eve (Japanese style)
New years at our house means two things: Food and Japanese TV. My wife is from Japan, so when it comes to big holidays we …
Obama Spa
These guys in Kyushu, Japan were going nuts when Barack Obama became president. They had election parties, and even invited the president to come and …
Instituitions Versus People: A Japanese Perspective
We have 3 kids who we are teaching to speak Japanese. We also have Japanese TV by satellite at home. This means that we show …
The New Guy: Adventures in Communication
The new guy arrived from Japan just a week earlier. He is the one that observed “Americans could never survive driving the roads in Japan” …
Bento: Go Forth Into The World, My Child
Bento. Traditional lunchboxes from Japan. I would go so far as to say that Bento is becoming an English word. In case you don’t know, …
Uh…The words are upside-down and sideways…
I appreciate the entheusiasm for foreign cultures, but this guy in Austin has these Kanji characters plastered upside down and sideways on his shiny truck. …
I’m On The Phone (and NO, I don’t see you.)
Working with Japanese engineers, one thing that was hard to get used to is how the phone is handled. I have noticed that for Japanese, …
Don’t Point that Thing At Me!
Sometimes body language can be a problem. It always counts, and in international teams it can sometimes fail to carry the intended result. When working …
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