#105 [EN] Fons Trompenaars - Reconciling cultural differences (between countries and within organisations)

Data: Thu, 05 Aug 2021 06:30:00 +0000  ·  Duração: 01:31:33

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José Maria Pimentel 00:00:00.28This episode features Fons Trompanars and discusses cultural differences both between countries and within organizations and how to reconcile them. 00:00:10.04Our conversation starts right after the following short introduction in Portuguese. 00:00:20.02Olá, o meu nome é José Maria Pimentel e este é o 45 Graus. 00:00:24.08Desta vez trago um convidado estrangeiro ao podcast, algo que já não fazia há algum tempo. 00:00:27.60É ele Fons Trompanars. 00:00:27.60É holandês, é autor e consultor na área da gestão das organizações e da comunicação intercultural. 00:00:35.36Fons Trompanars é sobretudo conhecido pela autoria de um dos modelos de diferenças entre culturas nacionais mais conhecidos, que ele popularizou no livro Riding the Waves of Culture, publicado em 1993 e que entretanto se tornou um clássico. 00:00:48.54O modelo de Trompanars, juntamente com o Dofsted, que já falei várias vezes no podcast, é ainda uma das referências quando se trata de comparar culturas entre diferentes países. 00:00:57.38Recomendo vivamente que leia o livro dele e o Dofsted, já agora. 00:01:01.00Nenhum dos dois modelos é perfeito, até porque implica sempre fazer generalizações sobre culturas de países, cada um deles com, na maior parte dos casos, milhões de pessoas que têm crenças e valores muito diferentes. 00:01:12.20Mas a verdade é que qualquer um de nós sabe, por experiência, que existem padrões nas culturas dos diferentes países. 00:01:17.78E ler livros como o de Trompanars ou Dofsted muda a maneira como entendemos as interações que temos com pessoas de outras culturas e já agora muda também a maneira como olhamos para a nossa própria cultura. 00:01:27.82Como digo a certo ponto durante a nossa conversa, embora isto de analisar as diferenças culturais entre países possa parecer menos sério do que, por exemplo, ponderar investimentos em ferrovia ou calcular minuciosamente a melhor maneira de controlar a inflação, a verdade é que as diferenças culturais entre países não só são altamente persistentes ao longo do tempo, como influenciam de forma muito profunda uma série de áreas, desde logo a própria economia. 00:01:51.30Por exemplo, não é por acaso que a Alemanha é tão competitiva, tradicionalmente, no setor automóvel. 00:01:57.28Ou que as culturas asiáticas, inicialmente o Japão e agora a China, se dão tão bem na área da eletrónica. 00:02:03.14Ou, da mesma forma, também não é por acaso que os Estados Unidos têm sido de forma tão persistente, desde pelo menos o século XIX, o local de onde vem a maioria das grandes inovações que têm feito avançar o mundo. 00:02:14.16Comecei a nossa conversa fazendo ao convidado a pergunta mais básica de todas. 00:02:18.60O que é exatamente a cultura, neste sentido? 00:02:21.30Para explicar o que é a cultura, o convidado recorre a uma metáfora interessante. 00:02:25.26Ele descreve a cultura de cada país como uma cebola, com várias camadas. 00:02:28.90E a camada mais profunda da cebola é aquilo a que ele chama basic assumptions. 00:02:33.28Ou seja, no fundo são as crenças e os valores que cada cultura toma como uma espécie de verdades absolutas e que nem sequer passa pela cabeça da maior parte das pessoas desse país que isso possa ser de outra maneira. 00:02:43.86O que acontece na prática é que só reparamos que existe uma maneira diferente de olhar para aquele assunto quando somos confrontados com essa visão diferente ao contactar com pessoas de outras culturas. 00:02:52.66Uma dessas basic assumptions muito profundas é visível numa das sete dimensões culturais do modelo de Trompernards e que o autor distingue como, de um lado, uma visão universalista e, do outro lado, uma visão particularista. 00:03:04.86Em termos simples, as culturas mais universalistas tendem a entender que existem regras e que são regras universais e que se devem aplicar em todos os casos. 00:03:12.86Enquanto culturas mais particularistas, como é o caso dos países latinos, como Portugal, mas também dos países asiáticos, tendem a privilegiar decisões caso a caso e, sobretudo, tendem a ter em conta, com muito peso, as relações que existem entre as pessoas. 00:03:25.30O convidado dá um exemplo de um dilema que eu acho que, aliás, já falei no podcast em episódios anteriores e que ele depois explica em mais detalhe, mas é basicamente um acidente de carro que acontece com um amigo nosso ao volante e trata-se de decidir se nós, uma vez levados a tribunal, vamos mentir para proteger o nosso amigo ou vamos dizer a verdade porque a verdade é que ele ia em excesso de velocidade e atropelou alguém, o que é, no fundo, o dilema que está aqui em causa. 00:03:45.32Para culturas universalistas, como, por exemplo, os Estados Unidos, o Reino Unido, os países germânicos ou os países nórdicos, é evidente que a regra é que ele, indo em excesso de velocidade, tem culpa e, portanto, nós devemos denunciar o nosso amigo. 00:03:57.84Para países mais particularistas, como é o resto do caso de Portugal, essa é uma decisão muito mais difícil porque nós tendemos a entender que temos um dever de lealdade em relação àqueles que nos são próximos. 00:04:08.80O modelo de Trump-Nars tem, ao todo, sete dimensões, cinco das quais dizem respeito à maneira como cada cultura entende as relações entre as pessoas. 00:04:16.42Uma delas é esta que acabo de explicar, entre universalismo e particularismo. 00:04:19.96Outra é entre individualismo e coletivismo. 00:04:19.96Esta não carece de explicação. 00:04:24.54Depois existe outra, também muito interessante, que é entre culturas específicas e culturas difusas. 00:04:30.28E aqui, basicamente, culturas difusas, como é também o caso da cultura portuguesa e das culturas latinas, tendem a entender que a nossa vida profissional, o trabalho e o resto da nossa vida estão interligados. 00:04:40.84Portanto, nós somos a mesma pessoa. 00:04:42.26E se nos damos mal com um colega no trabalho, damos-nos mal em toda a nossa vida. 00:04:46.64E, de outra forma, também é isto que explica, por exemplo, porque é que em países como Portugal existe aquela tendência, que eu acho que a maioria de nós nos parece cada vez mais anacrónica, de estender as qualificações das pessoas para lá do terreno de tratamento profissional. 00:04:58.24E, portanto, alguém que fosse, antigamente, até que tivesse simplesmente uma licenciatura, era tratado por doutor, quer no seu trabalho, quer no talho, por exemplo, ou se fosse à mercearia. 00:05:06.86As outras duas dimensões relativas às interações entre as pessoas são neutro versus emocional, ou seja, culturas que são mais ou menos expressivas em relação às suas emoções. 00:05:18.46Esta é uma que discutimos também durante a conversa. 00:05:20.58E, finalmente, se o nosso estatuto depende daquilo que nós fazemos, do nosso sucesso profissional, se nós quisermos, ou daquilo que nós somos, que pode ser o nosso extrato social, o nosso sexo, ou até a nossa idade. 00:05:31.58Nós podemos achar que esta última visão está um pouco em desuso, mas a verdade é que continua a haver um contraste grande em relação à maneira como, eu diria, a maioria das culturas europeias, não só do Sul, mas quase de toda a Europa, tendem a ver a experiência profissional de alguém como algo que, mais ou menos, automaticamente lhe dá um certo valor, enquanto nos Estados Unidos não é incomum nós vermos em cargos muito elevados pessoas de 20 e poucos anos, ou 30 e poucos anos, o que seria e é bastante raro na Europa. 00:05:58.00As outras duas dimensões que faltam têm a ver com a relação com a natureza, se há culturas que acham que podem controlar a natureza ou não. 00:06:05.76Esta não é especialmente relevante. 00:06:07.36E a outra, essa sim, muito interessante, tem a ver com a maneira como cada cultura olha para o tempo. 00:06:11.98E aí há uma decisão interessante, que eu acho que é especialmente interessante para nós portugueses, porque ajuda, de certa forma, a explicar a questão do desenrascanso, a questão da capacidade que têm os portugueses para improvisar, e que é algo que é mais ou menos reconhecido internacionalmente. 00:06:25.48Neste caso, o Trump-Anars distingue culturas que entendem que o planeamento e a ordem são muito importantes, e portanto as coisas devem ocorrer de uma forma sequencial e pontual, para culturas que têm, digamos, uma relação mais flexível com o tempo. 00:06:38.50Uma experiência engraçada, que revela que esta segunda maneira não é necessariamente pior, é a experiência de ir a um café. 00:06:43.90Por exemplo, eu acho, não sei se partilham desta visão, que ir a um café com muita gente no país do centro da Europa é uma experiência às vezes estranha, porque a obsessão com a ordem faz com que as coisas às vezes não decorram com a flexibilidade necessária e que permitem países como Portugal às vezes servir de maneira muito mais rápida muita gente, porque justamente existe uma certa flexibilidade da gestão do tempo e da gestão da ordem dos pedidos, que faz com que não seja necessário gerir uma pessoa de cada vez, mas seja possível gerir vários pedidos ao mesmo tempo. 00:07:10.56Aliás, o Trump-Anars dá um exemplo muito parecido com este, sobre o talho, sobre uma ida ao talho, a Itália, precisamente a propósito destas duas dimensões. 00:07:17.64Ao longo do resto da conversa, discutimos a maior detalhe algumas destas dimensões. 00:07:22.04Falámos também sobre como é possível reconciliar os dilemas que surgem quando diferentes culturas entram em conflito. 00:07:29.06E isto acontece muitas vezes e de maneira mais relevante, ou seja, com um impacto económico marcado dentro de empresas que têm atividade multinacional. 00:07:36.78Aliás, o convidado, ao longo da carreira dele, tem adaptado sobretudo este estudo em aconselhar empresas que atuam em vários países, aconselhando-as sobre a melhor forma para gerir as diferenças das culturas dos vários países em que operam e, como ele diz, reconciliar os dilemas que são impostos por estas diferenças culturais. 00:07:54.14Como se adivinha, as organizações com maior sucesso são precisamente aquelas que melhor conseguem reconciliar estes dilemas. 00:08:00.28E pronto, deixo-vos com Fons Trompanars. 00:08:02.64Como vão ver, foi uma conversa muito interessante e, ao mesmo tempo, muito animada, porque ele tem um excelente sentido de humor. 00:08:07.84Espero que gostem. 00:08:11.50Fons, welcome to the podcast. 00:08:13.28Thanks for accepting the invitation.
Fons Trompenaars 00:08:15.16Very welcome, and thank you for inviting me.
José Maria Pimentel 00:08:17.66Let's start by defining culture. 00:08:18.94You use an interesting metaphor, if we can call it, that is actually a way of organizing what we're talking about when we say culture. 00:08:25.58You mentioned that it comes in layers, right? 00:08:27.76What do you mean by that?
Fons Trompenaars 00:08:28.82Yeah, and that's why we use the metaphor of the onion. 00:08:32.24It's very much inspired by the work of Ed Schein, who I really appreciate in this field from MIT. 00:08:38.98And it is a three-layered model because culture comes to you at the outside. 00:08:44.86It's the way people dress. 00:08:46.24It's the language they speak. 00:08:47.90It's the way they organize a meeting. 00:08:50.26It's the observable, or what Ed Schein calls the explicit side of culture. 00:08:55.80But it hides a deeper layer, and that is the layer of norms and values. 00:08:59.94And norms are shared orientations of what people define as what they should do. 00:09:04.42And values are shared orientations of what people think they want to do, they desire to do. 00:09:10.28So if you wear a tie, it could be because you have to, but you hate ties. 00:09:15.38It could be because you love ties, and you don't have to, and you still wear them. 00:09:20.22And Ed Schein says something interesting. 00:09:22.32When the value becomes a norm, in other words, when people start liking what they should do, it slips out of consciousness. 00:09:31.16And there we go to the core of what I call the onion, and that is our basic assumption. 00:09:36.78So a value that has become a norm slips out of consciousness. 00:09:40.70I love that word, and becomes a basic assumption. 00:09:44.90And a basic assumption is close to a belief. 00:09:47.04You don't even know you have it, but you find it out in culture shock, because it's the world taken for granted. 00:09:54.06It's the water for the fish. 00:09:55.72The fish understands water only when it's out of the water, because it's always in the water. 00:10:01.12So three layers of the onion, explicit culture on the outside, norms and values in the inside, and what we call basic assumptions in the very core. 00:10:10.26And that's why I use the onion, because if you unpeel the onion, it makes you cry.
José Maria Pimentel 00:10:17.90And that's exactly what happens when those basic assumptions come in tension with the basic assumptions of different cultures.
Fons Trompenaars 00:10:24.58For sure, because people don't know what they're defending. 00:10:27.96It's a bit like oxygen. 00:10:29.60Oxygen is a value. 00:10:31.20It has become a norm by breathing. 00:10:33.58And you don't talk about, you know, lack of oxygen. 00:10:37.24You just breathe. 00:10:38.32And if you're healthy, there's nothing. 00:10:40.24But if you come into a room where there is no oxygen, which is known as culture shock, you realize how important oxygen is. 00:10:46.90And that is something that is the main core of our work, is to help people to know in what areas they are.
José Maria Pimentel 00:10:53.86And you use an interesting analogy, which at least in my personal experience resonates a lot, which is the way to find out these implicit assumptions. 00:11:00.78It's when people get annoyed by the question you ask. 00:11:03.60Yeah. 00:11:03.90That's when it fits a basic assumption.
Fons Trompenaars 00:11:05.86Exactly. 00:11:06.52And it's the work of Cunningwood. 00:11:08.76Yeah. 00:11:08.96Let me show that I read some books in an essay on metaphysics. 00:11:16.00It was a doctor asked by the patient, what do I have, doctor? 00:11:20.02He says, you have pneumonia. 00:11:21.78Oh, doctor, what is the cause of pneumonia? 00:11:24.62Oh, it could be bacterial or a virus. 00:11:26.92Oh, doctor, what is a virus? 00:11:29.92What is causing a virus? 00:11:31.96Oh, he said, and he goes on and the whole chain of causality goes up. 00:11:36.94And then the patient says, doctor, you say that any symptom has a cause. 00:11:42.66How do you know? 00:11:43.76And then the doctor gets ticklish, irritated. 00:11:46.54Why? 00:11:47.20You hit him on a basic assumption. 00:11:49.82If you ask questions, and that's, you know, very often the five why questions. 00:11:55.24If you are in culture, ask why, why, why, till they get irritated and you know, you hit them on a basic assumption.
José Maria Pimentel 00:12:02.32Kids, kids are quite good on hitting basic assumptions. 00:12:04.20Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:12:05.04They are. 00:12:05.72They are. 00:12:06.28They are. 00:12:07.24Because they are by definition open and written, right?
Fons Trompenaars 00:12:11.04Very, very much so. 00:12:12.42Very much so.
José Maria Pimentel 00:12:13.50But anyway, so I love your work. 00:12:15.36And one of the reasons I'm interested in this area of cultural differences is that in my opinion is the most persistent of differences between countries or even between organizations or within organizations. 00:12:27.68I mean, your book was written in 1997?
Fons Trompenaars 00:12:30.661993 was the very first edition. 00:12:33.46Okay. 00:12:33.58And then it was taken over by another publisher. 00:12:36.42It's interesting because it's based on my dissertation, which was in 83. 00:12:41.32And to be honest, when I was doing my PhD, people, and this was sophisticated, it was at Wharton, people said, what? 00:12:48.98Culture? 00:12:49.62And we were just getting used to business schools.
José Maria Pimentel 00:12:53.02Don't you have anything more serious to do?
Fons Trompenaars 00:12:55.10Exactly. 00:12:55.54The one best way of organizing, coming from MBA studies. 00:13:00.04Anyway, so it was really early,
José Maria Pimentel 00:13:03.06early work. 00:13:04.10It's fun because unlike other things which you can quantify, this is very, very persistent. 00:13:09.14I mean, if one was to read your, even your original edition of 1992, 1993, 99% of what's there is still up to date.
Fons Trompenaars 00:13:17.52Yeah, it doesn't change that quickly. 00:13:19.92It's more in the applications, in the digitalization, but the basic model and also, and we'll talk about that I'm sure very soon, the whole issue of dilemma reconciliation is, yeah, beyond Hegel. 00:13:38.04It goes on forever because it's perhaps the essential nature of human beings and, you know, applications, it's interesting, you were talking about national differences, corporate differences, within corporate differences. 00:13:50.18it can apply to many layers like the layer of gender, you know, male and female culture. 00:13:57.88It could be applied to discipline. 00:13:59.92It could be applied to hierarchical level. 00:14:03.04It's so multi-applicable.
José Maria Pimentel 00:14:04.96To families, to departments within organizations, anything.
Fons Trompenaars 00:14:08.84Completely. 00:14:09.24And the fun thing is that the challenge internationally, but also within companies, between disciplines, are the biggest challenge of an organization. 00:14:19.82You know, when you get monodiscipline, you get a tunnel vision and you will die if there is a virus that you can't deal with. 00:14:27.96While most innovations are out of the clash between disciplines, and you see the Pfizer virus now in Corona times, is based on very interesting combinations of biotechnology. 00:14:43.62It's a new way of approaching with RNA technology, which is a clash of disciplines, which is amazing.
José Maria Pimentel 00:14:50.96I'm a firm believer in that. 00:14:52.28I mean, it's one of the reasons I've started this podcast by talking with people from completely different fields is that you can find interceptions, you can find connections between completely different areas that you hadn't thought of before. 00:15:03.24Yeah.
Fons Trompenaars 00:15:03.72And if we take it to the international scale, I believe that Europe is a great experiment, but we should focus more on what we share than only emphasize the differences. 00:15:14.14and there is much more we share than people know because of basic assumptions. 00:15:19.88The basic assumptions of Europe are not known. 00:15:22.24So when we wrote the Constitution of Europe, we had as many chapters in the Constitution as nationalities. 00:15:29.30Well, if you ask an American or a Chinese, tell me more about Europe, they will say too much vacation, quality of life, perhaps Christianity in the larger way. 00:15:41.70Oh yeah, never thought about that or not even knowing it that we have a ridiculous amount of vacation.
José Maria Pimentel 00:15:50.22You notice that when you travel basically when you go to the US then you understand, okay, there's an European way of being that I hadn't noticed
Fons Trompenaars 00:15:56.46that similarities before. 00:15:58.30And if you are in New York and you meet a Spanish guy or a Portuguese guy or a Swedish guy or girl, you say, oh, it feels like at home.
José Maria Pimentel 00:16:08.66Yeah, suddenly you're country mates, right? 00:16:10.88Yes, interesting. 00:16:13.46Speaking of national cultures, your thesis, which makes sense to me, is that different cultures arose in response to different challenges. 00:16:21.74So there are different adaptations to different challenges that were faced in different parts of the world and that makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of things. 00:16:28.50But I'm curious about and we can maybe zoom in on some of the seven cultural dimensions you identify. 00:16:35.30Let's start by random ones. 00:16:36.38Let's start on emotional expressiveness, which is whether a culture encourages people to express their emotions in public like we see, I don't know, Italians are probably the case in point for this or whether it promotes some discretion on which the Japanese or the Finnish would be the case that comes to mind. 00:16:54.36I mean, in this case, I'm curious because although it makes sense what you say that cultures arise as an adaptation, what can lead different cultures to be differently emotionally expressive?
Fons Trompenaars 00:17:04.08That's a very interesting one. 00:17:06.62By the way, it's interesting that a southern European person like yourself raises the issue of what we call neutral versus affective as a dimension because I did a lot of work with Charles Hamden Turner. 00:17:20.66Charles says, in fact, I think there are six dimensions. 00:17:24.56There's neutral versus affective, but he's British. 00:17:27.66Oh, really? 00:17:28.06It's probably
José Maria Pimentel 00:17:32.68the most elusive one in terms of causality. 00:17:35.90That's why I asked him. 00:17:36.64Yeah, interesting.
Fons Trompenaars 00:17:37.60It's a tricky question, I know. 00:17:39.34Yeah, no, but it's also a difficult one. 00:17:41.84Let me start with a basic principle that indeed it's nature, our natural environment that very often is the root cause of cultural differences because when we started to develop our cultures, it started with a fight against nature. 00:17:57.46there's a wonderful book by Moscovici called In other words, culture as the fight against nature. 00:18:06.80So if we take the oxygen example, a baby, if it doesn't cry, the doctor might make it cry because it needs to be challenged by the lack of oxygen out of the womb of the woman. 00:18:19.06And then when it works, the value of oxygen becomes a norm and you forget about it. 00:18:25.52But it's the fight against nature. 00:18:26.96So let me give you some examples and then I'll come to emotions. 00:18:31.16What we have found is that the Swedish and the Finns have the longest time perspective. 00:18:37.62And I said, how come? 00:18:39.32And then I realized that the Swedes and the Finns for a long, long hundreds of years were making money out of wood. 00:18:48.20so they cut the wood and the paper industry comes from Finland and Sweden. 00:18:53.66But they know it takes 35 years before the tree is back in the same shape. 00:18:58.18While if you are in a banana country, you pluck a banana, you eat the banana, you know it's back in three months' time. 00:19:05.82So you plan in Greece in much shorter periods than in Sweden.
José Maria Pimentel 00:19:10.50I remember seeing a similar explanation for why the Chinese or Asian cultures in general have a longer term perspective because they have historically a rice-based system. 00:19:21.26and cultivating rice is much or was much more challenging than cultivating wheat because you have to plan for the whole year and you have like two cultures per year. 00:19:30.70You can seethe twice per year. 00:19:32.62So you have to plan much more into the future.
Fons Trompenaars 00:19:34.86Exactly. 00:19:35.62And it also shows why the Chinese are collectivistic because you cannot grow rice alone. 00:19:43.18Yes, that's a very good point. 00:19:44.00It also shows why the Dutch love consensus. 00:19:47.46Consensus that we want to jointly agree before we decide and that is because we had to fight water and if you fight water you need consensus. 00:19:57.12You cannot fight water alone and that is interesting. 00:19:59.98Now, in fact, I could reverse the question what do you think will make people more emotional in terms of the fight with nature than people who are much more restrained in their emotions and in fact that has indeed to do with our time perspective. 00:20:17.74When you're passionate you don't plan. 00:20:20.26you just burst it out while if you are again Finland, Sweden, the Nordics everything is planned. 00:20:28.42Why? 00:20:28.86Because our summer is in a weekend and in the summer we have to plan for the rest of the year. 00:20:35.86So piano, piano let's not make this too much emotional let's restrain our affection. 00:20:45.30By the way there's a wonderful book I do as if I read a lot I don't read a lot I did read a lot but sometimes these more philosophical discussions remind me of a book and this book is about civilization Elias is his the author name and he says that the process of civilization is based on the control of affection so he links and he starts the book in the middle ages where people farted and you know this is a podcast so I'll make the noise get it out yeah and you know you pee under the table and that's why you throw your pee on the back side and all that stuff and he said the process of civilization is to restrain your emotion so we can go for good heart attacks now I'm saying that because that might be an explanation of emotions I don't know if I would like to link it purely to civilization like civilized people don't fart at the table fair enough fair enough they fart but you only smell it you don't hear it yeah it's a polite way that's really civilized I think it would put down southern Europe civilization because I think part of that civilization is the passion of people is the emotional expression I'm not saying that in the Nordics they are not having emotions they do but they don't express them that openly I also noticed in both Portugal and Spain that people are much less loud also in Argentina than in Italy for example in Italy everything is theater well if you go to Spain or Portugal there's much more control of that loudness also in Argentina there are even expressions in Argentina that but that might also and I'm trying to extend the discussion on your question because of the regimes that have been there that you were not allowed to speak loudly while in America you know even if you have nothing to say you shout
José Maria Pimentel 00:23:00.40that's right it's funny you say that because in Portugal everyone thinks the Spaniards speak very loud but I think that's the case everywhere so you always think that the people next door speak very loud while most likely you are speaking as loud as them yes
Fons Trompenaars 00:23:16.94again it's all relative it's all relative you're biased towards yourself
José Maria Pimentel 00:23:22.14but going back to the emotional thing I think that explanation it's partially true so if we could go back in time there's certainly a line towards more restraint and that has good and bad things but clearly that's not the whole thing because you can see differences even in the Nordic countries you can see differences between the Finns and the Swedish for instance the Finns are much more quiet and arguably you can argue that there's a comeback of emotion nowadays if you look at the US for instance I would argue that you see a lot of emotionality or how do you call it affection affection
Fons Trompenaars 00:23:55.64versus neutrality it's the Talcott Parsons expression for that cultural dimension
José Maria Pimentel 00:24:02.00so I think that's in the US I'd argue that's coming back so that's clearly other causes for it
Fons Trompenaars 00:24:08.32oh yeah for sure and if you take America and now we're coming into the field of combining dimension so one dimension is affective versus neutrality which is about expressing emotions the other one is specific and diffuse which is my favorite dimension you know specificity means you're focused cut the crap you're analytic while if you diffuse you involve the whole system it's well done it is it is holistic now if you look at the combination of emotions of Americans compared to emotions of a Spaniard or a Portuguese the emotions in America are specific they can be emotional about a specific area so for example if you are American and I negotiate with you and we get angry then after the business we have a beer together and we talk about our favorite baseball club because we're American you separate the emotions business is business and now while in most Latin cultures you get the beer in your face you know it is a diffuse now if you combine specific with emotions we call it enjoyment if you combine diffuse with emotions it's called love or the negative sides it is hate by the way the other ones if you're neutral and specific it's called approval and if you are neutral and diffuse it's called esteem so that latter one is Asia versus the Nordics which are more specific but it's interesting also to emphasize the importance of combining values because our culture doesn't come in my seven dimensions they come in the complete structure amongst them and one stimulates the other
José Maria Pimentel 00:26:12.36you make a point of stating that every culture has its strength and every dimension has its strengths and weaknesses which makes sense I would argue that I mean one of the people who sees the diffuseness of Latin cultures as somewhat of a weakness for modern society I'd like to see what you think of this because it's bad in business and even bad in democracies to the extent that it makes criticism personal as you were stating so if when you criticize someone his or her character is on the table so you're not just criticizing him or her because he did a bad deal or because he has a wrong opinion about the subject his self esteem is hit by that comment and this makes it very hard to both decide within organizations and have a productive discussion in the public space in the
Fons Trompenaars 00:27:02.04democratic society I could argue the opposite as well and I'm trying to make a point any value disconnected from its opposite leads to a pathology in other words we need to enrich our cultures by their opposite if you only have passion without any rationality you're a neurotic if you are neutral without any passion you're a robot and in our work we are trying to show that any value taken to an extreme because it's disconnected from its opposite leads to a pathology and we see that in capitalism and we have seen it in communism where certain values like individual gain at the cost of society doesn't work so I could do the counter argument by saying yeah but the end of civilization if we all become robots without any passion and we don't take anything personal anymore right so and we call them in other words there's every value has
José Maria Pimentel 00:28:07.50an embedded trade-off
Fons Trompenaars 00:28:08.76yes however it should not become a compromise it should be an enrichment process of values integrating on a higher level
José Maria Pimentel 00:28:19.54okay I'm glad you raised that because that's one of the ideas I loved in your book about rejecting compromise I say this because compromise seems like a good solution many times but on the other hand we all know I mean I know this even with my spouse that I know that compromise is not always the best solution if we want to go out to have a meal and she wants to go to Chinese and I want to go to an Italian the compromise of going to an Israeli restaurant is probably not the best solution because both of us will not like it not because we don't like Israel but because it's not the type of food we want to go to so the compromise is not the good solution what you propose is trying to reconcile the two values in this case try to reconcile what's driving us to one of us want to go to a Chinese and the other one wanting to go to an Italian restaurant but in essence what is different between this reconciliation and the right
Fons Trompenaars 00:29:17.02now physically we picture a dilemma on a dual axis so you have an x and y axis and then you have a grid of 10 by 10 so you draw 10 horizontal lines and 10 vertical lines and compromise is 5-5 it's in the middle of the grid so which means you lose half of x for the sake of winning half of y in other words compromise is a win lose situation it's 50-50 reconciliation is going to 10-10 is at least developed fully x and at least developed fully y but it could even go to 2020 to 30-30 because it's evolving to higher level and that is win-win now let's take your example of food I think fusion food is the combination of west and east which gives it an extra taste it's almost that the eastern flavors are even better because it's combined with the west and that the western taste whatever that is is better because of the eastern influence and if it's a compromise you say yeah you just put some spaghetti with some Chinese sauce it is that beautiful combination which rises up to a better solution
José Maria Pimentel 00:30:47.64that analogy makes complete sense to me yeah let's go back to the I'm sorry I was a bit disorganized in this conversation let's go back to the dimensions and then I want to return to this dilemma reconciliation which has a lot to say about it but for the sake of our listeners let's organize things so you've mentioned time so our culture relates to time whether it has a more short-term or long-term perspective we have mentioned already how expressive emotionally one is and how diffused versus specific the culture is what are we missing
Fons Trompenaars 00:31:20.78we in fact have organized our seven dimensions around three major areas the first area is the area of human relations relationship between human beings the second area is time and the final area is the area of the wonderful world of the relationship with the environment with nature do we control nature or is nature controlling us in the five areas of human relationships we find are you more rule driven or are you more driven by exceptions and we call that universalism versus particularism then we have what is your relationship as a human being with the group individual group oriented individualism collectivism if you like we have the emotions which we judge upon is our relationship focused analytic on a piece of your personality or is it involving your full personality and that specific and diffused and finally what gives you status is it based on what you do or who you are and that is called achievement versus description and then we have time short term long term and we have the relationship with nature do we control nature or is nature controlling us that's the basic model
José Maria Pimentel 00:32:38.48we mentioned two of them already individualistic versus collectivist everybody is more or less acquainted with that one that's more intuitive the universal versus particularist one is quite fascinating one to me you know you use an example in the book a dilemma which I had met already secondhand I didn't know it was from your book which is the car crash example maybe I can ask you to explain it better than me yeah
Fons Trompenaars 00:33:06.92you're riding in a car driven by a close friend of yours your friend is speeding going 50 kilometers an hour where you're allowed to go 30 and he hits the pedestrian you come to court and the lawyer of your friend says don't worry you're the only witness two questions what is the right of your friend to expect you that you help him by lying and the second question is would you lie yes or no now that challenges people's sense of are you rather universalistic a good friend would not expect me to lie and I will not lie because the rule is more important than our friendship in a particularistic culture it is yeah but my friend is unique and I will not always lie but for this friend I will and that's why it's called particularism there are exceptional cases where I divert from the rule now it's interesting because if I ask this to people all people say oh wow is this an easy one or not and I've not met anybody in any culture who said this is an easy situation and I ask why not oh it's a dilemma so many organizations that internationalize understand this difference that there are cultures where there are rules and they go for relationships and the exceptional friendship and that's how business is done differently through a contract or through people you know and you don't need lawyers because you know them but what do you do if you internationalize and there is this enormous urge to be the same everywhere we call that globalization and so I have a question to ask because a lot of organizations have introduced shared values and as you know the most popular value is integrity and I very often cynically say it's because nobody has it and then that's why you need to put it on the wall very often I see by the way a lot of values on the wall where I know the company doesn't have it that's why it's on the wall but anyway integrity is very popular perhaps for that reason and I was with a big international firm in America and there were 60 people 40 nationalities and I asked them the question suppose one of your values is integrity how does integrity help you to give the correct answer to the car accident and obviously there was an American standing up John I remember his name he said Mr. 00:35:41.32Trompadas I followed you so far but now I lost you how can integrity be different than you not lying and your friend not asking you to lie there was a Korean who stood up and said John I disagree how can you have integrity if you don't help your friend and that was an interesting moment because I said oh so there are different interpretations of what is integrity and every participant understood both now that's interesting so let me then say suppose you're having and that's the question you're having a multicultural team and more and more we are working with multicultural teams your value is integrity what would you do in the car accident now you know what Americans would say you know what Koreans would say Swedish Portuguese Nigerian all in one team what would you do and the only answer I got was a group of Japanese who said Mr. 00:36:42.76Trump and us your option assumes that there is a link between choosing between a friend and the truth with integrity no what we would do in Japan is we would test the strength of our friendship by asking our friend to tell the truth in court so we can talk to the judge to lower the sentence for his courage wow and and and and what happens here instead of choosing between a friend and the truth you connect the friend to the truth and that really supports the ultimate meaning of integrity namely creating wholeness through the integration of opposites that is integrity now dilemma reconciliation in other words bringing together opposite values is leading to integrity and this is just one example that's the type of work we do when people are saying oh they are French and they are Portuguese and they are German and they are merging what to do what I see in my field is that a lot of cross cultural specialists explain the difference and then walk out of the room and say good luck say come on that's where the problem starts and so that is in one dimension the rule versus the exception what we call universalism and particularism how to combine them on a higher level and an example out of business is do you want to globalize to go for the universal truth or do you want to localize and obviously what you need is to develop a trans cultural organization where it's based on four characteristics one you have shared values but they are like yin and yang and that is interesting yin and yang values I'll come back to that in a second so instead of saying we go for collaboration you say no we work together in order to give individuals more freedom home or we use the individual freedom for our teams to work better together that is yin and yang values rather than we go for collaboration so characteristic is it's a polycentric type of organization in other words it doesn't have a big center that dictates the universal truth from Chicago or New York very often it's American by the way no you have centers of excellence in other words you distribute the power of people who have something to say and you avoid the big universal type of stuff thirdly it is an organization where there is a keen interest to learn locally take the best practices local best practices and globalize them and then finally it's based on a leadership model called servant leadership in other words it's a leader that connects opposites like the meta dilemma serving and leading inviting you to reconcile the individual and the team and what have you and that is what we call the trans national organization
José Maria Pimentel 00:39:54.66you know the way I look at your approach in this case to business but I think it can be applied elsewhere is that you take the perspective as I see those of challenges as looking for positive sum games instead of zero sum games or even negative sum games which is the approach sometimes some zero sum games are inevitable which values are clearly clashing there's nothing you can do about it but as you mentioned before in most values or in all values most people share both extremes or understand both extremes so they are somewhere in the spectrum and so they understand in the example of the car crash it would be pathological as you were saying if I didn't understand why rules are necessary or if I didn't understand that I have some duty towards my friends or to take it to a more extreme case towards my family that one everybody understands right especially when the
Fons Trompenaars 00:40:45.64pedestrian is your mother-in-law yeah 100 kilometers an hour anyway my point here
José Maria Pimentel 00:40:57.50is that the way you reconcile these dilemmas as I see it is looking for a positive sum game a game in which you can find benefits for both perspectives and you can apply that in business you can apply that in the economy I mean GDP has grown multiple fold in the last 200 years and that's a positive sum game in and on itself trade is a positive sum game but even politics I mean if you look at the state a democracy is basically not a compromise it's a reconciliation between a pre-modern state which was basically nonexists it's very small and a totalitarian state which is what happens if you just have a big state without democracy in order to have a functional state with the benefits it has and freedom you have to have a liberal democracy so that's a dilemma reconciliation on itself if I can spread your concept towards politics
Fons Trompenaars 00:41:51.44yeah we had a discussion on Europe in Europe we need to reconcile the differences so that diversity becomes the thing that you share and that's interesting and you get very often these funny statements when you are in reconciliation mode now there is in reconciling a big difference between either or which is polarization and it's on which dictatorship is built either or a lot of people say it should be and and it's not good enough you know let me give you an example
José Maria Pimentel 00:42:27.88and and would be the compromise in a sense
Fons Trompenaars 00:42:30.00yeah it's very often leads to a compromise at least not to an optimal situation because and and they're still separate they're both there but they're still separate the word is through through so the question in the global local dilemma which I just gave is ask local people what can you do locally to make the company more global and at headquarters in global headquarters you say what can you do globally to serve the local client better and then you have a reconciliation mindset and that is something that is a bit counterintuitive so we need to educate people to think now I think it's also cultural because in China yeah I say China but in most of Asia yin and yang as a philosophy is really educating people from the beginning hey there are two sides of it and that's why they make the westerners so nervous no I
José Maria Pimentel 00:43:32.42wanted to ask you about that actually because you recently wrote a book precisely about China yeah which is interesting because I mentioned before that if one reads your book even 20-25 years after it was written one almost loses nothing because cultural differences that are mapped there pretty much correspond to what exists nowadays but there's an interesting difference you clearly wrote your book when people were talking about Japan so you mentioned Japan a lot Japan was basically the exception in the room everybody was thinking back then how come these guys have been so successful when they have so many cultural traits that are different from what we understood until now were correlated with modernity but nowadays the challenge is not Japan which has stagnated but rather China so I guess that's why you wrote that book but I would be curious to know your view on what China shows that we didn't see before about success if you will
Fons Trompenaars 00:44:26.06no it's a very it's a very good question because the meta dilemma I think they reconcile to avoid the pathologies we now see in over-the-top capitalism like the idiots like Bezos and you know all the westerners flying to the space burning money while they better give it to Africa you know the pathologies of capitalism and the big macho game between the three richest people in the world you know from brands and you know what I mean that pathology was fighting the other pathology known as communism communism was everything was the state you know you had a small elite who got all the money and in fact the end result was a bit the same as capitalism namely a few people with a lot of money and the rest suffering the only difference was the illusion of freedom now I've been in America a but it's an illusion of freedom the American dream is an illusion it happens to so few people anyway what China has done is to combine the two systems it's it's state capitalism and I'm very hopeful perhaps not in the Chinese way but in the western way I think northern Europe including our country the Netherlands but also in Sweden and and in Norway there are ways where we say hey wow this might be the nice combination of what the state in other words hopefully like in northern Europe a democratic state putting strict boundaries within a space where you have freedom because believe me the capitalism in China cannot be nurtured so much if there wouldn't be freedom there are a lot of entrepreneurs in China but don't go out of the sandbox dictated by the Chinese party and that dilemma I call it the sandbox the parents say here are the borders of the sandbox take all the freedom but don't go out of the sandbox right now that's the meta dilemma and for the rest in the book what we show is that on every of our seven dimensions China in a way has reconciled it and by the way to support that we were a bit too late to publish it at length in the book we did mention it a little was we did a COVID-19 research first of all a research on what are the dilemmas that people feel they are having because of COVID-19 like health versus economy like individual accountability versus group solidarity compliance versus freedom all these dilemmas that we all feel every day with corona we have developed a questionnaire and we have asked 22 countries representatives about 12,000 people on how they scored on the opposites China in six of the seven dimensions scored best on one side and the other side which is the beginning of a proof of reconciliation but it's not the way we think let's give an example compliance by government rules are always respected and then you get a liquid scale China obviously scores very high there but if you then say we in China I say we were we in our country obviously not only China but take the freedom whenever we think there is one China scores very high on that as well now you could say because they had a gun at their head which would be typically a Western no the Chinese say if we now comply to the government we will diminish the illness which gives us freedom in the future they think differently and they are much less in the bipolar mode like in America for example they chose for the economy and they say shit what about health Brazil the same right and then they go to health and they say oh what about our economy it's another mindset and that's what we work out in the book Contribua para a
José Maria Pimentel 00:48:57.30continuidade e crescimento deste projeto no site 45 graus ponto parafuso ponto net barra apoiar veja os benefícios associados a cada modalidade e como pode contribuir diretamente ou através do patreon obrigado it's interesting because your approach gives or frames an idea that I had seen before which is that part of the Asian exceptionalism if you want to call it that is that Asian culture and this is obviously a big back term but let's call it that is more comfortable with ambiguity and having opposite ideas in mind what would seem as opposite ideas in
Fons Trompenaars 00:49:31.24mind yes you know I'm I'm not by the way saying everything is fine in China I mean I can point to things where I say oh my god but it's quite easy my question is what can the West learn from China and there are a lot of things we can learn rather than China oh this is the new heaven on earth are you kidding no but there are things in China where the Western societies could enrich themselves I don't mean financially but in terms of mindset and
José Maria Pimentel 00:50:02.62in this case your view is basically that they are able to strike a balance between collectivism and individualism for example and avoiding the trap of American culture in which you see and that's very visible in business and in organizations in which you see that you assess people you evaluate people by their individual contribution which is not only difficult to measure but it also can go counter the collective benefit right so it can go counter to the you frame
Fons Trompenaars 00:50:30.98it very well and I think that is at the moment the big problem is that a lot of the dimensions of our culture in especially America as an extreme we are coming a couple of years later but in America we are European
José Maria Pimentel 00:50:47.12so we are a bit less individualistic yeah yeah
Fons Trompenaars 00:50:49.90but we have seen the we have seen the movements toward it and the best manifestation of that was this interesting idea by Friedman and what have you is this shareholder value as I once wrote in an article shareholder value the value created for people who never share and and that is the idea of you know making money for one player only yeah you're
José Maria Pimentel 00:51:16.96talking about the Friedman article I think the New York Times in the 1960s yes yes everything
Fons Trompenaars 00:51:22.60about money and that if you go for the stakeholder that is the dominant stakeholder the other stakeholder and that is the shareholder then the others will profit and that was not true if you look at the distribution of wealth in America it is staggering over the last 20 years it was like a hockey stick you know it was like this and then boom it went up in other words one percent in America has more than 80 percent of the wealth a CEO's income is 140 times more than a blue collar worker now that was 30 15 years ago so it's like a hockey stick you know and I'm worried about it because that's why you get more criminality people are not accepting it look at all the boats from Africa to Europe and Europe you know it's because the boat to America is too long it's this dream that is caused by the fact that we screwed the Africans 200 years ago you know and now we are seeing the symptoms of we want it back perhaps not even in that mindset but but it's normal if the difference get too big you get this type of behavior and I can't even blame the Africans the poor you know I can blame the traffickers who make money out of it but it's awful to see but we also have to go to the fundamental issues in what is causing what and I think the stakeholder model is a model where you look that between the stakeholders there are a lot of dilemmas perhaps I can say something about that Jose and and that that is that we have some PhD students working on our now not then 43,000 dilemmas that we have captured over the years and what we found is that there are 24 typically PhD 24 families of dilemmas and then I said 24 that it's just too much and I was looking at those 24 families and I found out that most of them were dilemmas between stakeholders it's employees asking for this shareholders asking for that it is clients asking for this and let's say society asking for that a client want a mortgage and society says don't give it to them etc or it is a client wanting to have chips to eat to get fat and society say no no don't do it these are the dilemmas that an organization is dealing with and we have developed 10 golden dilemmas and what we have done in our research is to show that companies that have reconciled those dilemmas and if you have five stakeholders client society shareholder employees and managers representing the efficiency of the organization those are five stakeholders if you connect all five with each other you get 10 dilemmas we call them the 10 golden dilemmas so an example is we want to serve customer wants versus we need to respect society's laws because customer wants very often things that society says don't do it and like the mortgage etc etc on the one hand for efficiency we need to reduce cost on the other hand we want to develop our people yeah which cost money 10 golden dilemmas then we asked people in the organization how do you score on those dilemmas so on a grid 10 by 10 do you score 10 10 very unlikely then it's reconciled or 3 2 or whatever then we measured the organizational culture is it inviting we have a certain way of measuring organizational culture we define organizational culture as the end result of competing values fighting for preference and the end result of that fight is organizational culture equilibrium exactly but be careful not a compromise then we it's a dynamic equilibrium so the third measure is the competence of its leadership to reconcile dilemmas now if you add up those three measures the invitation of corporate culture to reconcile dilemmas the competence of its leaders to reconcile dilemmas and the position on the 10 golden dilemmas we can predict the value of an organization rather than going back in history because most organizations are valued of what they did in the past not what they do in the future that's why all these big books about great companies eight of the 10 are bankrupt after the second edition of the book yeah so we're hopeful we can link dilemma reconciliation to performance
José Maria Pimentel 00:56:38.06no that's a very exciting idea i would say it makes sense and it's in a sense it measures which companies are able to again create those positive sum games of out of those dilemmas exactly that they face exactly and you can definitely create them i mean when you sell something to a client to some extent you're extracting money from the client but you're also giving value and if you give more value than the money you're extracting you're creating value it's a positive sum game if on the other hand you give less value that the money you're extracting yeah yeah then you're you're you're
Fons Trompenaars 00:57:09.22you know uh it's it's very exciting this talk because of you jose and um and i mean that thank you because it it stimulates a lot of stuff in my mind which in normal interviews doesn't happen there are these uh quick money makers you know they have computers i entered one of those rooms loaded with computers to be faster than your competitor uh these flash traders they're called it's because being quicker than others you can uh buy a lot of shares and then because you buy a lot of shares the price goes up and then they sell them again when the price is up and if you're late you always lose money and if you're the first you always win money what are they contributing to society except filling their own pocket yeah nothing and uh compare them to uh now this is an extreme because obviously financial services are are necessary and there is value created there but in 80 percent no after some point right yeah it's charles handy charles handy was interviewed you know charles handy is one of those great authors in business which looks like a contradiction in terms and um he was interviewed in one of his uh let's say exit uh pension pre-pension interviews i don't by the way consider this one as as one and charles handy was asked mr handy can you explain why people in the financial service in particular bankers make so much more money than doctors and nurses and he said that's very simple bankers are paid for the lack of meaning in their work
José Maria Pimentel 00:58:59.26and i love which is very much true yeah because
Fons Trompenaars 00:59:02.72if the only goal in life is to make money it's a very poor life you know my daughter my i have three daughters my middle daughter is a nurse she makes 1600 euros a month she works her head off i mean in the evenings in the nights in the yeah and uh she comes home and once a week she eats with us and i'll tell you she never talks about the lack of money and i know she has a lack of money she always talks about the latest patient what happened to that patient and that that gives her meaning and it's all about meaning and if money becomes meaning it's a bit like uh what uh peter sanghi once said in one of those keynotes obviously you need oxygen oxygen is like money but if oxygen becomes your goal you're a lung patient and i i thought that was a deep thought um so we need stakeholder models and and by the way that's what china does much more than wall street no and it's interesting you raise that point because
José Maria Pimentel 01:00:07.82believe it or not i've thought about precisely that tension between money and fulfillment money and meaning which is something i think it's inherent to capitalism so it's part of the game or inherent to almost any economic system but it's probably more visible in capitalism but i would say it's more present nowadays in other words if you are exchanging goods or services and there are some jobs which are harder harder in the sense not of requiring a higher iq but but of requiring higher effort and unpleasant things it makes sense that fewer people would be willing to do them so it makes sense that to pay them more but nowadays we see that there are some jobs which are not only meaningful for those people that have them but also in part because they are meaningful for them they are useful for society and one of them would be nurses doctors professors teachers researchers scientists or journalists some scientists some scientists and and a lot of those jobs not all of them but some of them are very poorly paid nowadays journalist is one example of course and i think that's a problem it is and the funny thing is
Fons Trompenaars 01:01:11.36it's not worldwide journalism i don't know but i know that for example one of my daughters another daughter lives in london and she said that in certain hospitals nurses are very well paid i know in singapore they're very well paid so there is hope it's a cultural thing also yeah also everything at the end of the day is a cultural thing but sure there's also a scarcity and and you know we're having discussions now in the netherlands especially after covid that we should have much more budget for nurses because we didn't have enough of them the same thing here and and for health in general you know we applaud them because they they are doing great work and i i don't know in in portugal but we have had cases in in the netherlands where people on the ambulance you know paramedics were aggressively kicked and i said how is that possible you know i very often go to ajax our football team and there are paramedics in every corner ready to help people and i very often tell them a thumb up you know you're doing great work don't forget and they are almost shocked by the fact that i do it and i mean it how come that they earn so little money but i think partly is because they are paid by the meaning in their work and so they allow themselves not to protest too much apart from an economic problem that you cannot imagine how how many people work in those type teachers nurses doctors if you add them up it's one third of an economy and if you just raise them with 10 percent the country goes bankrupt uh but that's an economic thing but as long as they are willing to pay for the meaning in their work that's why people who are in there for money i say go into uh heroin and cocaine treatment oh no no no oh i say so there is a limit for what you do for money threshold yeah and uh and there's a limit for
José Maria Pimentel 01:03:19.14what you do for meaning by the way which is money very good point a dilemma dilemma again
Fons Trompenaars 01:03:27.32no yeah and then you get my job you're very well paid for a very meaningful job reconciliation
José Maria Pimentel 01:03:35.64which sounds great yes and it makes sense that you're able to reconcile that
Fons Trompenaars 01:03:42.36by accident
José Maria Pimentel 01:03:43.88let me play to some extent devil's advocate on on u.s culture here if we can i mean are generalizing of of course so your point is a very good one that we need to ensure stability protect the community if you will and in this case be sure that people who have value are properly paid for it there's another argument for american values for american individualism if you can well we could probably call it like that from our european perspective americans are clearly more individualistic than us and much more than than asians again we're stereotyping here but but i think it's safe to say but one could argue and i certainly agree with that to some extent that that individualism it's also what drives or what has driven american entrepreneurship and innovation i mean yeah we have to be honest if you look at europe it's not a place where innovation has come from in the last decades or is coming from nowadays and the same thing although in a different fashion could be argue for china and japan that their culture enables them to be very fast in catching up with the technology but not so much in creating new things i've seen this argument a lot and i i share it to some extent at least now my reaction would be
Fons Trompenaars 01:04:55.02first of all i have nothing against any value you know if i see values of companies and not knowing the company i you know have you give me an example of a value where you say no i don't like it that people would publish on the wall so i have nothing against individualism but my argument would be that for innovation you need more than individualism you need it and americans have it heavily and they have reconciled certain things namely they're also good in teamwork and because you cannot have pure individualism leading to innovation yes to invention but not to innovation okay and the difference is exactly that that they combine it with great teamwork now let me give you a definition of innovation innovation and a definition of entrepreneurship innovation is combining values that are not easily joined therefore scarce therefore profitable so if you look at apple what have they combined in values that makes us coin them as innovative and it's values that are not easily joined like aesthetics and everything that is functional everything that is functional at apple is made beautiful everything that is beautiful has a function and the glass plate on your iphone is beautiful because it doesn't have a frame very often you know i i can show you a television an older one which is still a flat screen but it has a frame and compared to the new ones without a frame they're ugly right um now i'm saying that the fact that it doesn't have a frame makes it also functional because you don't break your nails when you swipe it
José Maria Pimentel 01:06:40.86so functionality you get both a larger screen and a better functioning device exactly now formula one what is
Fons Trompenaars 01:06:48.74what is the big dilemma in formula one speed and safety every engineer in formula one says how can i use the speed to make the car more safe now the mindset of safety sweden is quite different than the mindset of speed italy but if you combine the two you're in great shape and that's called aerodynamics you use the speed of the car to give it more downforce
José Maria Pimentel 01:07:16.18now the same argument in ships in boats with with leverage right yes i'm not sure if it's if this is the word when you put some weight so that it goes down a bit and it's not it's not tumbling around yes yes yeah you're adding weight which is supposed to be bad but it's you're you're giving it stability i don't know it just occurred to me when you were saying
Fons Trompenaars 01:07:36.56yeah no it's interesting because it reminds me of of the fact that you have a where does culture come in and what i say is culture is that weight now let's build on that metaphor what we do in cultural analysis even with stereotypes but we warn people like you did to me it's a stereotype no not to you to our listeners to our listeners you know let's say myers-briggs had the most used psychological test in the world are you rather thinking or are you feeling and if you score eight or eighty on thinking you score twenty on feeling yeah and i say well what kind of bipolar nonsense is that why is my feeling done at the cost of my thinking yeah it's because the questionnaire was built like that and you have to choose between a and b right and if you have ten questions and eight are to word thinking and two to you get the score it's as simple as that but they argue yeah we know you have two hands a thinking hand and a feeling hand but you have a preference if you write it's the right hand oh now that's like culture however what distinguishes our work from many other works is yeah that's about handwriting and what is your preference you have both but what is your preference we say but let's now go into clapping and when you clap the preference of your writing hand disappears it's about coordination and what we need to teach people is more clapping than better writing right but the preference coming back to your point is the weight it's your starting point in the dilemma reconciliation process so in america individualism question would be what can you do with individual freedom that makes better teams and in japan i would reverse the question i would say what can you do with your teams that nurture
José Maria Pimentel 01:09:35.24individual freedom and that's what great parents do with their kids i think yeah that's your point about the or your comparison with mbti is is a good one because obviously there's there's a trade-off in which if you're i mean you're born with a certain preference and if you spend part of your day under a very rational mindset it makes you it makes sense that you're less comfortable with with feeling or with empathy but there's no reason that you can have it both ways that you cannot develop the like you
Fons Trompenaars 01:10:01.06like you yeah but by the way jose we developed a questionnaire that measures instead of a or b you
José Maria Pimentel 01:10:09.74you know the the myes briggs mbti is yeah i know it very well a b a b i i actually did an episode on personality psychology although it was not covering that one but the the so-called big five which is more
Fons Trompenaars 01:10:20.92accepted in the academy anyway it's all the same if it's not one it's the other if it's the other it's not the one and we have developed a b c d namely a and b old mbti and then c and d is in my words now how do you connect your thinking as a framing for your feelings and how do you use your feelings to improve the quality of your thinking you can still be in 110 or in 101 but you can also be in 1010 so i'm not ignoring that there are personalities who only think at the robots and who only feel the neurotics you remember but there are people who combine the two and i think they are better let's not say better
José Maria Pimentel 01:11:09.46people but they are better leaders i agree with your view talking about organizations you mentioned before one needs to to be able to assess performance both of the group and of the individual that's an interesting challenge because as you know better than me the business world is dominated by american and to some extent uk culture even the literature most of the anglo-saxon culture basically so we get this individual performance analysis metrics logic for european cultures and this is especially the case for more latin catholic whatever you want to call them cultures like like the portuguese this sounds strange and people from my experience even resent sometimes individual assessment in part this is because as you explain in the book part of what they've done was done as a team yeah so it's very difficult to disentangle what was done by the individual and by the team on the other hand in a company in an organization we need to be able to assess the contribution of the individual in some way even if not copy pasting from the american bible so which way do you recommend to reconcile this dilemma especially in cultures which are more collectivistic not as much as asian ones but certainly more than
Fons Trompenaars 01:12:19.62than the anglo-saxon you know perhaps or perhaps you don't but let me i worked nine years with shell the dutch oil company and we had a joint venture between the japanese and northwest europeans americans this was pretty big groups 200 each on each side and it was a joint venture and after half a year the the project leader of this joint venture the ceo if you like the manager of this joint venture came to me said font you did something on culture i have problems with the japanese he was dutch by the way you know they seem to be demotivated can you interview them and find out what is going on and cutting a long story short the japanese felt everything was focused on the individual the bonus was individuals were rank ordered in who is doing better than others and they felt it was at the cost of their community feeling of their team feeling now i'm i'm again cutting some story short we ended up by saying 50 of the variable pay will go to individuals under only one criterion who's the best team player so individuals get half of the bonus of the pot on the basis of who's the best team player now this was a research environment so it's about measurement and and you were already warning me it's very difficult to measure we'll come back to that in a second teams were giving bonuses on the basis of what they could show what they did to make an individual excel now that's what you do if you have a multicultural team where communitarian collectivist people work together with individuals and this is exactly what parents do with the reward systems of kids is based on what they do predominantly we're not ideal what they do for their brothers the sisters and the family and the family is praised in the autonomy that children have when they're 18 right i'm exaggerating for making it very clear because if you as a father or as a mother will focus on individual autonomy and your child of age 16 will say dad thanks for your help i found a room bye bye and you never see her in my case her again you say oh honey i think we overdid individual autonomy right now if your son is 42 and say dad i'm so happy at home perhaps you have overdone collectivity no it is making your children so autonomous that within their autonomy they choose to become a good family member and the reward systems are made that way and and that's a quite
José Maria Pimentel 01:15:01.54interesting example because i would argue that in some cultures you see autonomy taken to an extreme in which kids leave home and and break up almost with the family not out of resentment but out of apathy yeah and and and in other cultures such as more southern countries you see the other extreme which they don't leave home yeah even with a kick in the back yeah yeah no but jose my mother is french
Fons Trompenaars 01:15:24.98so that's where the at least from our perspective the south starts a bit right and i have lived at home till i was 22 23 because i and all my friends were out when they were 18 so i knew they were saying well what's wrong with fonts but i couldn't leave the house because i would hurt my mother so
José Maria Pimentel 01:15:48.36much yes i understand that my mother still resents that i left so early yeah yeah it's true yeah she said i left too early yeah i wasn't she wasn't finished with me yeah and it's interesting because
Fons Trompenaars 01:15:59.76my mother obviously lived her world of 25 years before when she was in paris in 25 years france has changed as well i mean but she didn't experience that so she was still with that mindset you don't leave out before you're married i have now a daughter who has three children and her friend who is the father of all three and they're not married yet so what can i say yeah i say it's corona it's corona
José Maria Pimentel 01:16:28.06but look going back to the organizational question which we'll talk about before my main doubt here the main challenge i see is with those two principles you gave which make a lot of sense how would you be able to spot the free riders so people who are not giving their fair share so which would that enable you or rather especially in asian cultures which are shame based on which people don't want to lose face that cultural aspect is so strong that you won't have free riders such as you have you would have in the west if you're not overseeing them if you're not supervising them they just stop working some of them not everyone of course because under the american the anglo-saxon system we clearly see how you do that you have a quantitative metric you didn't sell enough you didn't produce enough reports whatever yeah you're out yeah yeah that that's interesting because you know
Fons Trompenaars 01:17:14.46in japan how they do it you you get a desk closer to the window so it's much more done by shame oh really oh yeah no no in in japan the leader in the open space office and mostly open the leader is in the center and the closer you are to the window the less your hierarchical level is and if you move from the center to the outside you know it's time to take the decision to leave the company that's how
José Maria Pimentel 01:17:42.06they deal with free riders there's shame for you right so that's very clear yeah and it's very
Fons Trompenaars 01:17:47.58symbolic shame plays there it's very symbolic symbolic and also the the place at the window allows you to watch even more outside so you can find your your new job outside yeah but coming back to the dilemma listen a dilemma is only when two positives fight if it's a negative then it's interesting because if free riding although i like the word but if free riding is only negative what i would say is uh let's uh make sure that we see also the positive side in it and perhaps we can learn something from the free riders because i believe that they might find other meaning in their work and perhaps contribute to other levels of the organization than just taking profit out of it without contributing i believe that in all cultures if it's a negative versus a positive first of all it's not a dilemma and we have to take care with the free riders and namely go out or reinstall motivation by asking the question why are you free riding because i don't think the negative behavior of free riding is done with great pleasure by the free riders themselves so first of all try to give them a chance and i think that's done differently in shame versus guilt cultures but if they don't do it kick them out i mean that's also
José Maria Pimentel 01:19:15.36done in other cultures sure of course my question here or my doubt and i'm curious about your experience with these different cultures because actually i've lived in china for a year but i was studying not not working so i don't have that experience and i've never been in japan and i've always been curious about in those very collectivistic cultures or communitarian even to some extent on which the focus is on the group how can they maximize individual performance is it that the group pool is so strong that you just need culture to work its way and you don't need to be measuring all
Fons Trompenaars 01:19:45.54the time such as yeah no there is implicit there are much more in diffuse measurement systems it's called social control you know there are so many moments where the group takes care of your individual motivation and uh you're all you know looking over the shoulder i know stories of uh people staying at 10 o'clock in the evening not doing anything but the boss was still working up until 10 and uh you know
José Maria Pimentel 01:20:14.72that's called social control sure i clearly have seen that in portugal from my experience i think
Fons Trompenaars 01:20:20.12no it's not it's not a monopoly of eastern cultures it happens everywhere sure no and sometimes i call
José Maria Pimentel 01:20:27.32portugal the asians of europe because we share i'm not sure if this is obvious for most people even my country mates but i think even if nuanced i think we share there are some ways in which we are i don't know
Fons Trompenaars 01:20:39.80why but more asian than latin yeah it's it's very interesting for example what i found but that's my external not informed view i think from all latin cultures the portuguese are more neutral they won't show emotions as much as i even see a difference between spain and italy it's almost going from neutral to very affected in italy but in portugal i i see people are very restrained in
José Maria Pimentel 01:21:07.14showing their emotions exactly yeah that's true that's why i say that i see even some similarities with the fins to some extent which doesn't make any sense because and also there are moments because every
Fons Trompenaars 01:21:19.60culture needs volts to release their emotions like the fado and uh it's it's moments where you see the
José Maria Pimentel 01:21:27.42intense emotions coming out but they are sad emotions actually in the case they are they are because of the
Fons Trompenaars 01:21:33.28yeah yeah they were very i mean difficult times back then yeah yeah yeah no no interesting it's
José Maria Pimentel 01:21:41.16it's restrained much more restrained than spain and especially much more than it yeah i gave you the
Fons Trompenaars 01:21:46.22example of uh how to deal with free riders in in asia that's indeed based on shame and that's why people normally speaking are no free riders in in japan to give an extreme and if so they will put symbolically on a place where everybody knows on his way out but they will never fire you it needs to be your own decision to leave yourself out of shame yeah well in the other extreme america australia the uk you make sure that you and you know the word firing is like a cannon firing you out you know you don't decide you're just pushed out and and it means there's no shame in it which is the interesting
José Maria Pimentel 01:22:29.00part so that in the extreme case of some parts of us you've just removed the shame out of it it's just a normal thing yes everyone has been fired once in his or her life exactly you know we're talking about the portuguese culture now and i was hearing you and i was thinking that some things have changed in recent decades i would argue that for instance although we tend to be less expressive than our latin neighbors our neighbors in the south people are more expressive now than they were before if you look at father father is a great example even father itself has changed i would argue i'm not a specialist in music but it's more cheerful now than it was before although there was always a cheerful type of father but it's i would argue it's more cheerful i argue that people are more expressive if you will now that they were before which means that cultural does change uh and that leads me to a question can you change culture i mean you can certainly change it in an organization which is a more self-framed space in which you can i mean you have a limited number of people but can you in a country change culture it's interesting because if you look at eastern countries in which you have communism for several decades in a lot of aspects it seems that the regime was not was never there because culture is very similar to what was there before and people are going people just went back to the church for instance in other aspects maybe not so in other aspects maybe communism did change
Fons Trompenaars 01:23:47.68culture there i know this is a broad question no no no i'm curious to know i always like to go back to the fundaments which we discussed earlier on what is culture and culture is the way people organize themselves to overcome the problems they face you know like the dutch fight with water all the time the portuguese fight with water in another way now if i look at at fundamental changes in europe also the dutch the germans big wars are so intense that it does change a culture into something like never this again or so but people need to continuously be recognizing that if they don't do it they disappear so it it is not something you do overnight it's a continuous process and that's why if you are successful as an organization you know you know the famous story of the cooked frog if you throw a frog in hot water they jump out because too hot if you put a frog in cold water it swims and then gradually you increase the temperature they die that's the same with culture so in shell they develop scenario planning and scenario planning is if you are very successful let's now look at scenarios where you're not and then work out what you would do if one of those scenarios would get real sort of anticipate yeah and and it's almost a play do you change culture with that no you need to feel the heat you know believe me talking about shell they are having hot feet now uh you know legally they're challenged now by the dutch government or the dutch legal system that they don't apply the rules for europe of co2 reduction and they have to then you will change your mindset in the organization without any doubt because they know if they don't they die
José Maria Pimentel 01:25:42.72but that's an external event i guess in most cases you have to have an external event to change culture
Fons Trompenaars 01:25:48.60i think so and you know on the positive side internally it is the inspiring leader you know the the big contribution of ed shine in his book organizational cultures and leadership is connecting the role of a leader to drag culture out of you it's positive it's inspiring and especially in in startups and the the one or two founders with great ideas there we go and they create a culture out of the
José Maria Pimentel 01:26:16.88positive rather than the threat no and actually speaking of leaders a name comes to mind of someone was able to arguably change the culture of a country for the good which is li kuan yu so the the prime minister of singapore here we go i think it although singa certainly from an european perspective singapore has some aspects on which one has misgiving such as not being a proper democracy but it's clearly a case of success in economic terms sure but it's it's comparable to china perhaps
Fons Trompenaars 01:26:44.58singapore was the experiment of china to uh to build on it's state capitalism as well yeah and i remember
José Maria Pimentel 01:26:51.06seeing in your book i don't remember in which one but in some dimensions singapore was not where the other asian countries were no no which uh hints of a shift that had happened before yeah you know
Fons Trompenaars 01:27:03.30very much so and singapore is really the the the bridge like hong kong between east and west and you can see that you can see that flavor leads to very great results
José Maria Pimentel 01:27:13.86fons i'm mindful of your time so uh i think we should wrap this up this it's it was a great conversation but i want to i don't want to overstay or to take much of your time is there anything i didn't
Fons Trompenaars 01:27:26.50ask you wanted to say well what i i would love to say is um perhaps something on on the dilemma of analog and digital with corona we have found an enormous amount of uh digitalization becoming popular but also the limits of it and you say oh bloody hell another zoom it drives me crazy we we in our organization are trying to certify people to use our way of thinking and we have developed some e-learning if you go to www tht consulting.com you find the explanations why i'm saying it because i have found out in the corona times that if you combine face to face with digital you can get great insights into things that you can't do face to face only or can't do digitally only yes yes there's a positive game right there and the podcast is another example of that so again it's uh asking the question what can i do digitally that deepens the relationship face to face and what can i do face to face that makes people more easily and effectively use digital that combination is is so powerful and and we will go i think worldwide into that arena we we have seen it with social media one of the things i'm very curious
José Maria Pimentel 01:28:47.54looking at the future in organizations so not companies but organizations in general is what the future paradigm will be because nowadays we all we are all fed up of of working remotely those of us who have been working almost 100 remotely i mean after some time you clearly see the limitations of it even if it's sufficient you're not talking with people anymore it's less creative i mean we can argue a lot of limitations but also if we think of the past working the same time every day with the same people in my opinion is not very good for the relationship between those people because you're you're forced to be together all day which so if you can find um again a way to positive same game exactly you need to have the benefits of both i think it's great so i'm very curious to know how it will go okay fonts we end here thanks a lot for coming on the podcast este episódio foi editado por martin cunharrego visitem o site 45 graus ponto parafuso ponto net barra apoiar para ver como podem contribuir para o 45 graus através do patreon ou diretamente bem como os vários benefícios associados a cada modalidade de apoio se não puderem apoiar financeiramente podem sempre contribuir para a continuidade do 45 graus avaliando nas principais plataformas de podcasts e entre amigos e familiares o 45 graus é um projeto tornado possível pela comunidade de mecenas que o apoia e cujos nomes encontram na descrição deste episódio agradeço em particular a Tomás Fragoso Gonçalo Monteiro Nuno Costa Francisco Carmenes Gildo Mário Lourenço Carlos Seissa Cardoso José Luís Malaquias Tiago Leite Carlos Martins Corto Lemos Margarida Varela Felipe Bento Caires Miguel Marques família Galaró Nuno Iana João Ribeiro Miguel Vassalo e Bruno Heleno até ao próximo episódio 01:30:52.86E aí 01:31:22.86E aí