Reference no: EM133396473

Questions: Please answer these question from Peter Alfandary's TED talk.

1. How does Peter Alfandary's TED talk relate to the material on communication across cultures?

2. Why are there miscommunications between people from different countries?

2. How do cultural dimensions relate to communication differences between countries?

Case Study: Peter Alfandary's TED talkI "sometimes describe myself as a culturally conflicted Englishman. I am first generation born in the UK. I was educated at the French Lisa in London for 13 years. I spent a lot of my childhood in Italy and 30 years as an international lawyer. I've always been fascinated by cultural differences. I think it was arriving in New York as a 21-year-old student. I got my first taste of the oxymoron I'd like to share with you today. Global village. Not global village in the way brilliantly described by Marshall McClellan when he predicted the internet in the 19 sixties. But more as a word that we use an expression we use a lot. Now, my New York experience was not momentous, but it left a huge effect on me. I spent my first day walking the streets in, or the word awesome had not yet become fashionable. And at the end of the day, I decided to take a cab to have dinner with some family friends. I knew about Caps. I 'v taken cabs in London. So I got into the cab. My very English polite may be an apologetic way. I said to the cab driver, Good afternoon. Think, ou could possibly take me to, I read him the address on the piece of paper. He looked around. His eyes had gone funny at this stage. His brain was clearly working overtime. His answer was, unforgettable. Sonny, do you want to go, but don't you want to go? What to close at this stage, I was confused because I wanted to go because I was expecting for dinner. But I thought for many days and many hours about that encounter. Rude, confused. Was it me? Was it him? And it made me realize for the first time how very different we all are and how differently we communicate. On a Do you want to go or don't you want to go was followed by many other examples during my career as a young and not so young lawyer member, as a very young lawyer negotiating with the Japanese. i came back to the office, very proud. They agreed to everything I said. And my boss looked at me and said, Peter are you sure? Oh, yes. They kept on saying yes. And he explained to me, of course, that yes, meant that they had heard you not that they agreed. Realize with my Dutch, my German, and some of my American clients, the directness doesn't necessarily mean rudeness. A bit like my cab driver in New York. And I also of course learnt that the English really do talk in a code that nobody understands. I could cite many examples if we had time. But one of them always reminds me of the Italian who when he was told by an Englishman. But the Englishman was slightly disappointed by something the Italian said. Why did even mention it? I explain that slightly disappointed in English met extremely angry and probably you will never be forgiven. I learnt about negotiations. And the fact that displays of emotion, of anger don't necessarily mean that a deal is off, even walking out of a room. I learned about time. Now, I'm one of these people who if I have a conference call at half-past eight, because I'm what's called monochronic. I will dial in at 826 just in case the password doesn't work the first time. Some cultures don't do that. Some cultures time is, should I put it a guideline? The world won't. And if the meeting starts 20 minutes late, relax what you're getting so excited about files for lunch, about lunches and negotiation so that in some cultures, a long lunch and the Middle East in France, for example, can be an integral part of a negotiation. And I always remember Frenchmen who once said that when his New York colleagues suggested that they had a working lunch with the sandwich, he actually felt physically sick. I learned about the use of silence in Finland. I'm still learning every day. You see my belief is that the idea that there's a global village is a myth. There is no single village. There are many villages on our globe. We talk about global warming, global economy, a global crisis, global communication. But Village life, village culture still rules. I don't make any value judgment when I say that. But I do believe that we have to stop believing in the quasar, mythical powers of globalization. And we have to start remembering how very, very easy it is to misunderstand each other. We live in paradoxical times. What I call the 21st century paradox has got two colours to it. First, dominance of English in certainly in the world of commerce as the Lingua Franca of the world. The second is are unrelenting and total reliance on digital communication. Both of those lead to what's called a cross-cultural dilemma. Mobility, because English is spoken so much and because it's so easy to communicate that we really to understand each other. We sit in boardrooms, Brits, Americans, Chinese Russians, French of negotiating English. But do we always understand each other? Often not. We interpret subjectively. We jump to conclusions. We look at the world through eyes and lenses that are designed to correct our vision and not the other person's. We stereotype. We also think and react very quickly. And the question we may"