A wave of inexpensive 4K camera and displays is about to pour into collaboration spaces. The price will be a higher demand for cultural competency. Wondering what that 4k content will be? It is the range of non-verbal communication like eye movement and expressions unique to every society. Now that you can see these hidden messages, you are be expected to decipher their meaning, and quickly, so that your company can stay competitive by leveraging a global workforce.
“Human, rather than technological constraints do the most to hold back both corporate and societal gains from globalization. The barriers are, to a great extent, inside ourselves rather than only out there in the world”
— Ghemawat, 2013, p.35
Contest cultures tend to focus on defining expected results and letting the project team establish the process and fill in the details. The problem with decisions based on targets is that it favors heuristics, and rule-of-thumb behavior can lead to false-positives. For example, once reaching the determined quota the process typically stops. In contrast, most High Power Distance cultures prefer establishing a clear sequence, and Well-Oiled Machines (even though low power) also value systematic approaches. These cultures are more likely to question how much time is worth the effort in the initiative and apply sophisticated algorithms to maximize efficiencies. Instead of stopping when a target number is reached it may be more advantageous to plan the timing.
Abstract
A multi-national company is a melting pot of cultural values. All managers, not just CFOs, need to appreciate the influence local culture has on shaping global business processes and corporate culture.
As an engineer of room and open-space collaboration systems, I look for ways to improve the design and deployment of technology to enhance innovation and productivity. The influence of regional cultures on product adoption is particularly interesting, since our deployment strategies are typically global. While cultural sensitivity is a timely topic, there is still little research on how to capitalize on regional values when implementing collaborative technology. The reality is that cultural norms are always in transition and huddle spaces are a relatively new phenomenon.
How global companies continue to change and innovate is dependent on several cultural dynamics. This article focuses on the influence of culture on change management. Gaining culture competency is the first step to successfully installing collaboration spaces on a global scale.
Akesagawa saw metaphors of Thomasson’s maintained uselessness reflected in urban settings in Tokyo, such as old train crossing gate motors that have no arms, alongside new gates, and both are dutifully maintained; stairway railing without steps, or concrete steps carefully attended but going nowhere (Roman, 2014). Akesegowas’ 1985 book Hyperart: Thomasson generated significant social media actively, and the term Thomasson entered popular culture.
Give credit to Arrive (arrivesys.com) for coming up with the term “edgeless media” as it will soon become common vernacular to describe achieving end-to-end collaborative product portfolios. In the very near future, all elements of video and graphics sharing infrastructure, including endpoints, cameras, displays and content management systems will achieve a level of practical interoperability, delivered by service providers as turn-key solutions. The challenge is that the while the products that go into edgeless solutions are inexpensive, traditional support models do not scale well against the low cost of entry. Successful implementation of an edgeless experience requires closing the fissures in the enterprise help desk, previous designs that maximize efficiency are counterproductive for supporting unified collaboration technologies.
Let us discuss the unrelenting demand to be productive and competitive and the value of building technology habitats that foster innovation and collaboration. Back in 2006, Brafmin and Beckstrom identified the need for organizations to behave more like a starfish than spiders as means of adapting to change in the environment. Fast forward to today and threat of cyber-attack reinforces the importance of transferring knowledge and solving problems creatively. Global leaders now manage hundreds of starfish teams, all moving rapidly along on the periphery of the organization’s ecosystem, given decision-making autonomy, sidestepping each other and corporate bureaucracy. Starfish communities require interconnecting geographically dispersed teams through a porous “society” of desktop collaboration and team touchdown stations.
