AUGUST 2006
Bumpy Road to Savoir Faire
Global business means more than jet lag and a dog-eared passport. It can also give new meaning to boo-boo.
Illustration by Tim Bower
by Janet Zich
As more people visit, work, and retire in countries not their own, they
find increasing opportunities to make cultural faux pas—or boo-boos, as they
say en anglaise. Differences in language top the lists of some of our
red-faced alums.
Practicing her Spanish in Cartagena, Colombia, Molly Wittenberg, MBA ’87,
asked the waiter for what she thought was a Coca-Cola. “He stammered that
they didn’t have any,” she recalls. “After dinner a man followed us out and
said that he had heard me ask the waiter for cocaine, and he could tell me
where to get some. I was mortified!” Indeed, language problems can get
downright dangerous. Three years ago Kazuo Yoshi, SEP ’93, visited Spain as
a project manager for his company. First time he took a shower he turned on
the tap that said “C”—full blast. He quickly learned “C” stands for
caliente,
which in Spanish means hot. He thought it stood for cold. Ouch!
Some of the most serious linguistic misunderstandings arise when Americans
visit the United Kingdom, a land where the natives speak a deceptively
similar tongue. After working as a consultant in London for two years, Karen
Young, MBA ’01, resigned to focus on charity work. At her final review she
was advised to be “less American.” What? Turned out she’d been ending her
voicemails, “Have a great day,” which her company interpreted as “an
insincere Americanism.” During his four years in the U.K., Whitney Baldwin,
MBA ’84, paid the price for his Yankeeisms. Every time his colleagues called
him on one, he’d put one pound in a jar on his desk. At the end of the month
he’d empty the jar, and they’d all head off to the pub. “This seemed to send
the right signal,” he writes.
Like language, food can be culturally perplexing. “I had to learn to slurp
soup in Japan in order to be polite,” writes Ed Truitt, MBA ’61, while Toru
Tanaka, MBA ’92, once found himself representing his Japanese company in
Mauritania, where his Bedouin companions expected him to eat pasta and
mutton with one hand and no utensils. “The locals would roll it up into a
ball while mine all dripped through my fingers,” Tanaka writes. “I went
hungry.” Ian Bryden, SEP ’86, went hungry too. Happily. At a dinner on the
Caspian Sea, the main course was one of the area’s famous sturgeons, fully 6
feet in length. Bryden, the guest of honor, was presented with the head. “I
poked around gingerly and then had an inspiration. I handed the beast to my
host with a flourish and my wishes for a long and happy life. Did I acquit
myself gracefully? My host seemed to think so.”
But there are occasions so awful that the only solution is to apologize and
hope for the best. Some years ago Gillis Broinowski, SEP ’80, accompanied
his boss to Tokyo, where they ordered a limousine to take the board chairman
of Nippon Steel to dinner. They didn’t know the chairman had arranged to be
picked up first. When the limo arrived with no time to spare, Broinowski and
the boss leapt into the back seat. “There is a muffled plea from somewhere
deep in the seat,” Broinowski writes, “and we realize my larger-than-life
boss is sitting on our revered guest.” The chairman “may have been small in
stature, but he was quite the reverse in every other way. He took the
incident in good spirit and the evening was capped off by formal apologies
over much sushi and sake.”
And then there’s the solution found by retired Col. Will Allanson, MBA ’64.
After years of duty in the American Embassy in Paris, Allanson settled in
the French Pyrenees, where he encountered his very first incident diplomatique majeur: His cat treed the neighbor’s prize hen. “I couldn’t
coax the stubborn bird down,” he writes, “and she froze to death in the
overnight cold. I found her in the morning, rigor mortis, at the foot of the
tree.” How to explain the fowl deed? Allanson chickened out. He let his
French wife do the talking.
