Tweet

Cultural Intelligence - Or The Art Of Avoiding “FARTFULLNESS”

Guest post by: Ben Nash

Article Overview: We all know that intelligence is a good thing; however, it seems that new “flavors” of intelligence pop-up with annoying regularity. A few years ago it was emotional intelligence – this was cited as a “must have” for successful organizational players. Then we had social intelligence as the key skill. Now cultural intelligence is the hot topic!

Cultural Intelligence - Or The Art Of Avoiding “FARTFULLNESS”

We all know that intelligence is a good thing; however, it seems that new “flavors” of intelligence pop-up with annoying regularity. A few years ago it was emotional intelligence – this was cited as a “must have” for successful organizational players. Then we had social intelligence as the key skill. Now cultural intelligence is the hot topic! Cultural intelligence, it is claimed, will help you manage effectively cross-cultural differences. It will lower the cultural barriers caused by “us” and “them” thinking and allow you to predict what “they” are thinking about and how they will react to your behavior patterns. This is pretty useful when dealing with people from diverse cultural background overseas or even within the USA.

When you consider the hot water that organizations get themselves into due to lack of cultural intelligence then it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Here are a few examples:

• The Swedish furniture giant IKEA somehow agreed upon the name “FARTFULL” for one of its new desks. Enough said!
• There are several examples of companies getting tangled up with bad translations of products due to the word “mist”. We had “Irish Mist” (an alcoholic drink), “Mist Stick” (a curling iron from Clairol) and “Silver Mist” (Rolls Royce car) – all these products were a disaster in Germany as “mist” in German means manure. Fancy a glass of Irish Manure?
• In the late 1970s, Wang, the computer company could not understand why its British branches were refusing to use its latest motto “Wang Cares”. Of course, to British ears this sounds too close to ” Wankers”(a British term for masturbation) which would not really give a very positive image to any company
• In 2002, Umbro, the UK sports manufacturer had to withdraw its new sneakers called the Zyklon. The firm received complaints from many organizations and individuals as it was the name of the gas used by the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps.
• Honda introduced their new car “Fitta” into Nordic countries in 2001. If they had taken the time to undertake some cross cultural marketing research they may have discovered that “Fitta” was an old word used in vulgar language to refer to a woman’s genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. In the end they renamed it “Honda Jazz”.
• A nice cross cultural example of the fact that all pictures or symbols are not interpreted the same across the world: staff at the African port of Stevadores saw the “internationally recognized” symbol for “fragile” (i.e. broken wine glass) and presumed it was a box of broken glass. Rather than waste space they threw all the boxes into the sea!

Given these examples of cultural ignorance, maybe developing cross-cultural intelligence is a pretty smart thing to do after all

Related Articles
  Betterment is a way to lead…
  Avoiding Emotional Overreaction at Work
  Behavioural Intelligence – Attack Defend Behaviour in Negotiating
  Culture Change Begins with Desired Results
  General Intelligence Is Not Enough
  What is Your Intelligent Self-interest
  Hiring and Promoting Emotional Intelligence
  Financial Intelligence
  How Corporate Culture Drives Engagement and Accountability
  Western Arrogance and the Multinational Organizations
  Leading companies “mining” workforce for emotional intelligence
  When to Change Your Corporate Culture
  The Missing Link in Employee Assessments
  Emotions Drive Behavior Emotional Intelligence Training
  The Buzz About Emotional Intelligence
  Shame Leadership - Communicating Across Cultural Boundaries
  How Business intelligence tools can Strengthen your Competitive Advantage
  Tribe, Nation, Business Unit – Are we not are all the same?
  How Does Working With Emotional Intelligence Help Us In Daily Life?
  SME's - the future is bright

Article Tags: cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, human resources blogs, human resources management, organizational development, social intelligence



Related Forum Posts
Internet Users Hbk http://www.internetscamsanonymous.com - Current site for sale of our handbook as a Clickbank product Welcome any and all feedback: Sale page Content Handbook Content Pricing Too Big Considering braking it to 2 volumes: Avoiding Scams Online and Doing Business Online and maybe ad 3rd volume related internet technology Kind of like selling preventive medicine!! Thank you in advance for your interest and comments
Re: LEADERS - Nice post, i like the Doers and the listeners comments from my handbook 8.5 HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LEADERSHIP? Planning Problem Solving Vision Innovation Leadership Emotional Intelligence Delegation Communication Self-Development Relationship Building Commercial Financial skills Personal Energy Ethics Transparency Even there I see that we are missing "PASSION"
How can small businesses protect themselves from bad custome - [quote="Donna":3ituds2n]I had to chime in on this one - I worked on that project and "reasonable" is NOT a word I would use to describe that client. She couldn't care less about anyone else and she did nothing to cooperate with the work I did at all. Once they decided not to proceed with the tour, she threatened to sue if she did not get a full and immediate refund. Avoiding a nuisance lawsuit is really not being taken advantage of. Sometimes a business person needs to have the common sense to know when and how to cut their losses and avoid additional hassle if possible. Actually, I did reuse quite a bit of the research I did and she is out of our lives forever. Donna[/quote:3ituds2n] Hi again Donna, While I think you made the right decision with respect to handling this difficult client... what's to stop future "bad" clients from doing the same to you (or other small business owners for that matter)? For instance, what if someone read this post, then asked you to promote them only to later ask full refund and threaten to sue? How can small business owners protect themselves from these kind of unpleasant situations?
Re: Search Engine Optimization - There are a great number of reasons a person can have difficulty with Google indexing there site. One of the most important aspects is doing initial keyword research properly. I'm amazed at how many times people will just pick a keyword phrase "they think makes the most sense" without doing the research to explore all of the windows of data. This does not take weeks and hours if you follow the guidelines in the book on this site I offer for free to Evan's members. It's called Wordtracker Magic 2.0 - Keyword Forensics for SEO. Once you have 4 or 5 keyword phrases with fair search volume and the right window of opportunity, you will find it extremely easy to grab top visibility even with only mild optimization. This is one of the most stress free ways to grab organic top visibility and traffic, without the stress. It's been working for me since 1997. Other easy tips. If you write sloppy copy you will will not get nearly as effective results as if you write very focused, useful and engaging content that readers will find helpful. Some people find writing harder than others. If you find it difficult personally, then chunk the process down into 2 steps. Step 1. Write the content first. There should be a beginning a middle and an end. Write your content with the knowledge of which keyword phrase you are going to target - but do not worry about optimization or where the keywords go or character counts or anything technical (in this first step.) Write something and work on it for whatever time it needs for you to feel proud of the finished work. Don't forget to include a call to action near the end. Step 2. Once the article is written and looking good, read it out loud to see how it flows. Next in the second step, just do a mild rewrite of the article for the SEO specs. One of the single most important things is not keyword density, but it's keyword proximity (meaning to use your phrase as a whole group of words together.) By writing in this 2 step method, you will with practice, find that you are writing far higher quality because so many have trouble writing and optimizing at the same time. Why is high quality important? Google uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the background. For a number of years now, Google has been able to gather the context of a message. You see it is no longer just the primary keyword phrase that is important (because it is all the entire body of supporting words other than the keyword phrase that matters including synonyms etc.) In our workshops we teach significant in-depth studies in each of these areas plus more. Remember that if you are new to SEO focus on optimizing for just 1 keyword phrase per page and it will be much easier. As to why your site may not be showing up in Google, it is difficult for me to say without seeing your site. But you might check to ensure you are using a Doctype tag at the top of the page and also the ISO character set tag must be there as they are required by Google for compliance. Google actually follows very closely to any guidelines set by the W3C org and you may want to brush up on Google Webmaster guidelines too, because things do change in there and they are a helpful resource. These are just very basic tips, but if you follow them you can grab your traffic fairly easy without all the stress. If you visit my site, I have hundreds of free tips I can send you (just a tip a day but they are short, easy to understand and free.)


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

How To Improve Your CTA (Call To Action)

Build Corporate Credit for Your Small Business

Ask All to Buy!

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.