How to understand any country (culturally & strategically) – over a weekend

To say that we are living in a globalized world has become cliché. However, especially after COVID, there is an acute “felt experience” of globalization among the people of the world. A virus that started in one corner of the world, engulfed the whole of it. Inflation, disruption of jobs, trade, and life was felt across the world. Following this was a period of fiscal deficits, and a parallel, if not coordinated effort to “rebuild”.

However, this is not the first time such a thing has happened. The Wallstreet meltdown of 2008, the world wars, and now the Russia Ukraine War – directly or indirectly effects everyone – whether they drive to office, buy groceries, or manage a kitchen.

People, especially professionals, and more specifically white collar professionals increasingly operate in internationalized environments. They need to understand businesses, policies, cultures, and preferences of different countries and regions on a much more frequent basis than anytime before.

I personally get many consulting assignments from businesses, investors, and political risk companies to help them understand culture, important stakeholders, their positions, and policies in different countries. Initially, and naturally, this was focused on India. But now the assignments have included providing insights on the European Union, USA, Canada, Brazil, Japan, France, and Germany.

I find these assignments to be extremely stimulating. There are at least three reasons why I find myself so engrossed in such assignments:

1.      I am a student of history: this was my undergrad major and really the subject that I really love. History is homebase for me, and even now, almost on a daily basis I spend an hour or two reading histories of various countries. It is an irrational pull and an intellectual voyage for me.

2.      My early childhood experiences were shaped by my family’s export business. My family exported glass handicrafts all over the world and my father was the first person to start export of glass handicrafts from Firozabad – a small town in Uttar Pradesh, India. This led me to meet people from all over the world from a very young age and learn about their business practices, culture, economy, personalities, and eccentricities.

3.      My work has taken me to collaborate with policymakers, academicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and businesses from all over the world. Right from being part of conferences such as the World Economic Forum, to hosting Parliamentary delegations from the European Free Trade Association and parliamentarians from various countries in India, and having taught (and studied) at universities in the US, India, and guest lectured in person or remotely in the UK and Ukraine, I have cultivated a keen understanding of how different cultures work and built relations with some amazing people across the world. My education at Cornell has certainly been a cornerstone of that and since then, hosting multinational conferences and collaborative projects has sort of been “my thing”.

It can take a while to understand a culture whether you are interested in business, investments, job opportunities, academic opportunities, or are simply curious. The laws, business practices, and terms of friendships and relations, are quite culturally rooted in each country.

One way to navigate it is through understanding specific laws, regulations, and what you see in the media – a fact based approach. This is very important but hardly insightful. You can learn little about the functioning of a household by barely looking at its address. Similarly, you can barely learn a language by studying its grammatical rules.

Knowing facts or looking merely at what the media presents to us does not give insights into the undercurrents of a particular culture. Simply studying laws/regulations or looking at the media may give you information on what the laws and politics is currently, but it will hardly teach you, for example, how laws and regulations are likely to shape, who will wield political power and what policies will they pursue. You simply can't have navigating or predictive capacity without immersing yourself in a culture.

The question is, when there are too many cultures to immerse oneself in, what do you do? This has been my quest. Indeed, there are many levels of analysis here. First is the historical one – the way I do it is that I would pick up a historical primer and learn about a culture’s overall historical development (at least from the medieval times until now) – it does not even have to include reading tomes of books – wiki surfing (done strategically) and documentaries can give you that. Once you have that broad historical map, it is time to identify the relationship between key events, key ideas, and key people. This is a tricky business.

Typically, what works is the following:

1. Having people in your network with whom you can talk on an equal level, and informally from the country of interest and doing “culture exchange conversations” – essentially boasting, criticizing, and sharing the habits and tendencies of each other’s countries. This can be done online or in person. There is a way to structure this.
2. Cultivating relations with eminent persons from that country, There are ways to do it depending on the field that you are in. This is a whole art and science in itself.
3. Writing a role-play report – essentially taking the perspective of one stakeholder in that country and analyzing how that stakeholder would look at a whole plethora of issues – from gender, and family, to subsidies and international relations. This may sound superfluous but is actually very important. Just knowing about the values of a nation theoretically – for example, “The Scandinavians are egalitarian” will not cut it. You need to know the nuances – for example, under certain conditions, German professors and CEOs are a lot more hierarchical than let’s say their American counterparts but in other situations, US can have an unsaid hierarchy of relations and Germany could prove to be more egalitarian and easy going.
4. Learning about a select few tendencies from specific resources: books, documentaries, short stories, historical records.

Obviously, this all takes time. However, I have started to curate resources and a method to do it much more quickly. First, I could do it in a week. Now, when needed, I can pull it off over a weekend – at least the fundamentals. You need to know the right things to look for.

I am planning to develop this into a 2-day course with resources, strategies, exercises, and networks to develop cross-cultural strategic skills – not just the woolly cultural immersion stuff that tells you a lot, and is super interesting, but you can't do anything with it. But something that tells you about how to navigate a culture, get things done, understand the go and no-go areas, and have some predictive power. Send me your thoughts and maybe we should do this!