Activities

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Imagine you are the communications manager for Mercedes-Benz and you're getting this cool job. You can actually start introducing your brand in China. Now you know that luxury products from the West do very well in the whole of Asia, so you know you're going to be a success. But China's a bit of a weird place for you. It's different than what you're used to. So they pronounce "Benz" differently, and whenever you actually demonstrate what your cars are all about, they look at you weird. But hey, you don't understand the culture, so you really don't know what's going on. It will be okay.

And then after a while, you find out that the pronunciation of "Benz" is actually completely wrong. So the Chinese, the way they say B is wrong. They say—and I apologize to the Chinese amongst you because I don't speak Chinese, but I was helped with this—what they say is "bensi" which is actually "rush to the death." So you have a car in which you can rush to the death. Now you don't want to pay a lot of money for that, do you?

So you don't find that out as a foreigner, and when you do, at least it can be easily corrected. At least that is not too hard to do. But of course, it's already cost you millions of dollars because you need to change pronunciation in every ad campaign and everything differently. So it is easy to change. It is called—the translation is now, or the pronunciation now is "benchi," which is called "dashing speed." So that's much better for your car.

Now, Gerber, a brand of baby milk, actually didn't get the skyrocketing success they were waiting for in South America, and they didn't understand. And they started asking why, and then it turned out that parents didn't want to buy the baby milk for their children because "Gerber" in Spanish means "to vomit." This—it sounds so, so easy to not do, but it's actually hard to miss if you don't speak the language and you don't really get involved. And these are costly but small mistakes, and they're just the tip of the iceberg. There are many layers of cross-cultural problems and many layers of cross-cultural communication mistakes.

Now let's talk about feet. We are happy with feet, right? We are relaxed about feet. Feet can't really offend us, not here. But they can offend us—or they can offend people in Asia and in Arab cultures. Their feet are considered very unclean, and when they're unclean, that means that you can't show them. So if you show the soles of feet to Asians or to Arabs, they are very offended. You should actually not show them at all, not covered, not bare.

So my client, a financial service provider in Amsterdam, asked me to look into his cross-cultural communication that he was doing for his markets in Asia and in the Middle East. So he had a service. He said, "If you use this service, then you don't have to worry about—everything is okay." Now his enthusiastic web designer looked for a picture for the front page that would be actually very close to that feeling. So in all his happiness and enthusiasm, he showed me this.

So this is exactly what you shouldn't do. This is exactly what is the most offending thing that you can do in Asia and in Arab countries. Now, when I told the web designer, he had processed this through his own set of values. When I told him, he actually still wasn't impressed, and he thought, "Yeah, you know, people can actually be difficult about everything," and, "Well, you know, leave it there." And I said, "Well, there's no point to actually even start selling your product if this is what you put on your homepage."

So people filter this through their own ideas. People get confused also about what perceptions are in different areas of the world. Generally, we offend without knowing it. We make each other sometimes angry without knowing it between cultures. We don't want to offend. We don't want to make people angry, but we misinterpret. And once we do that, we actually start retracting, getting annoyed, getting into our own normal way of behaving, and we cannot communicate at all anymore.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if we would understand each other's perceptions, if we would understand what somebody else sees when they look at us, what somebody else feels when they look at us? When we do the simplest things, somebody else might be offended, and we don't know. Wouldn't it be great if we would know that? Because if we would know that, we would actually be able to connect to each other and not feel offended or feel disrespected or even fear each other.

Now, what is culture actually? Culture is actually a perception, the collective perceptions that people have with each other. It's like glue. It's like DNA within a group of people. So culture is determined by circumstances. Often it's determined by geography and history.

Now, if you have hot climates, people live outside. They live outdoors. So they trade in the streets. They work with each other in the streets. They meet, and they also spend their money outside of the house. When you have a cold climate, people stay inside, say in Scandinavian countries. It's cold and dark outside, so people stay inside, inside of their houses, inside of their rooms, and that's where they spent their money on also. It's not a coincidence that IKEA actually started in Scandinavia.

So the Dutch have actually also adjusted to their natural surroundings. We are a small country by the sea with a lot of neighbors, and these neighbors actually spoke other languages. So we learned many languages, and we're very known for this. People are very amazed that we speak so many languages, and that's because we wanted to trade. We had to protect ourselves against the water, so doing this, we actually learned how to protect land, to reclaim land, and now we are the best water managers in the world because of the challenges we've had. We've created some real business all over the world.

Have any of you ever looked outside of the window when you land at Schiphol Airport? Every single centimeter of our country is organized. And I have been with foreigners next to me in a plane, and they were just looking outside and going, "What? It's so organized!" We had to. That's how we survived. So this is what has become part of who we are.

Perceptions are actually something we are not aware of till we meet other people, till we meet other people that are different. It's like looking through yellow glasses all of your life. You don't know that you're looking through yellow glasses because there's nothing else. That's all you see. But actually, if everybody around you also has yellow glasses, that will be the end of it. The moment you meet somebody with pink glasses that look at the world in a different way, then it gets complicated because you don't know they're wearing pink glasses. They don't know that you're wearing yellow glasses. So actually, it's sometimes very hard to communicate unless you start understanding you have actually met somebody with other glasses. And this is how we start understanding other cultures: by meeting them, by starting to understand how they think.

When I went abroad, that was when I understood what it was to be a Dutch person. I didn't know how we thought. It was just normal. I never thought about it. But the moment I went outside of my country, I understood who we were, who we collectively are, and also what we—what others think about us and what others feel about us. I started understanding that. Wouldn't it be great if we could look through each other's glasses and see how somebody else sees the world and see how somebody else sees possibilities and success where we don't?

If you look at different perceptions, this is one that actually causes a lot of emotions. Here in Europe, we cannot not react to this picture. This is so intense for us because of our history. But I've seen a boy with this kind of shirts many times in Asia and in India. In India, this is the symbol of fertility. There's nothing wrong. Nobody understands in India that we think about Second World War when we see this.

When we are old in Europe or in the Netherlands or in the West, we lose youth. In the East and in Africa, we actually gain wisdom. There's a difference in perception.

Like the Dutch have actually been excelling in water management, there is a way of every culture to excel, and we have to find out what other cultures have become good in because of what they have gone through in their existence, what they've had to battle. So if you look at Asian and African nations, you will see that they have learned a lot of sustainability because of what happened in their lives, because of what happened in their existence. They had to face daily challenges that we didn't have to face or don't have to face anymore. So they have actually created creative muscles, and they actually know how to solve things that we don't know anymore.

If you look at Africa, people in Africa—most people in Africa—the first phone they ever used was the handphone. They never had the system of landlines. And we are all happy with our smartphones, right? But let's be honest, guys: they run out of power continuously. You have to update them continuously, and you have to buy a new one every two years. So are they so great?

The Africans have actually created a banking system with a simple telephone. They've actually created a lot of potential just by this small device. It's sustainable, it's practical. They use it as a radio. They use it as a flashlight, and they actually do it in a far smarter way than we do.

I am an adviser voluntarily to My Shining Star Foundation in Malaysia, and in this role, I actually work as the only Caucasian with Asians. I see that my team is flexible. I see that they are innovative, and they actually asked me to structure the organization. But they are doing all the fantastic work, and they solve all the problems in the end with the means they have, with the network they have. I am very inspired by the way they want to grow professionally and personally and spiritually, and I really learned from it as a Dutch person with a good education to understand how to solve problems in a different way.

So what I would like to say to end with is we actually are a fantastic group of amazing people. We all have different talents. We all have different gifts. We need to respect each other. We need to find out what each other's gifts are, and we need to start working and evolving together. It will take a bit of energy from all sides, but there is so much to gain. There is so much to work with, and we can grow and develop and find solutions we could never have found in one culture between cultures. So let's grow, let's evolve, let's be bright together.

[Music] [Applause]