More Time
In the Shade
Many cultures are
a combination of varying context and sense-of-time traits. Australia is
low context but polychronic. France has a Germanic monochronic, low-context
culture in Alsace and to a much lesser extent in the north, but otherwise
a strong Latin, polychronic, high-context culture. With this richness
goes unpredictability. I call the French quarkochronics because, like
quarks (subatomic particles that split at lightning speeds), you can't
pin them down. There is no way to tell if French people will be on time,
like monochronics, or late (although they generally won't show up more
than 45 minutes after the appointed time).
For the polychronics, life is to be taken as is--if possible, enjoyed--and,
above all, spent with other people. The Italians explain it with a story:
An Italian fisherman is lying with his wife and some friends on the beach
in the shade of his overturned boat. An Englishman sees him and says,
"You shouldn't be lying in the shade, you should be catching more fish."
The Italian asks why.
"If you worked hard and caught lots of fish, you could have a string of
boats, hire lots of others to fish for you, and get very rich."
"And what would I do then?" asks the fisherman.
"Well, you could lie in the shade on a beach."
The fisherman laughs. "Which is just what I'm doing--without all the fuss."
However, while southern Europeans and other high-context, polychronic
cultures still treasure their time in the shade, the increased pace and
stress of a computerized world is beginning to impact them.
In Spain, stores in Catalonia now rarely follow the traditional summer
schedule of 8 A.M. to 3 P.M. Fewer and fewer companies close at lunch
for two hours, and siestas are disappearing.
Italy, including Milan, the commercial capital of the country, is still
very undercomputerized, but the pace of life is faster and the vacations
shorter. "When I'm driving in the Milan rush hour," says Bruno Ronchetti,
director of Accenture's technology competency group for Italy and Greece,
"I see all the other drivers talking on their phones as they attack traffic,
and I realize the stress level is much higher than it used to be."
Nevertheless, that type of "noisy" stress is still acceptable to Italians.
In the southern-European countries, where clans and relationships are
paramount, mobile phones put people in closer touch with one another,
which goes along cultural norms. But Internet surfing and computer games
are considered isolation activities. Those solitary, silent pursuits appeal
to monochronic cultures much more than to their polychronic, high-context
counterparts.
Task-driven electronic activity has speeded up most noticeably in France,
of all the European polychronic countries. On trains and airplanes, Frenchmen
are working on their laptops. Businesses and government activities have
Web sites and e-mail addresses. Two-hour lunches are out, except with
valuable clients. Sandwiches have been known to appear on office desks.
The traditional five-week vacation is staggered throughout the year; now
just two or three weeks are taken in August. A totally new concept of
mixing business and private life has emerged--office work is carried along
to the vacation spot.
Philippe Berend, a financial consultant and former chair of Interspiro,
which makes respiratory equipment, finds that the newly aggressive business
mores have changed Paris, and French life, dramatically.
"I've seen a huge cultural adjustment of my large French industrial clients
to the American style of deadlines, transparency, and budgets," says David
Freedman, an American attorney with Baker and McKenzie, an eminent international
law firm in Paris. "All the multinational companies have done what they
needed to do to compete in the globalized market. For the PMEs (small-
and medium-sized companies) it is also changing, but at a slower pace
because they're family-owned or family-dominated."
Again, it's the culture, according to Morocco-born Professor Hamid Bouchikhi
of ESSEC, the French business school.
"There are two kinds of transactions," he says. "One is context-free,
when all the information you need is verbal--the price. The French are
very good at this, as fast as the Americans or the English. And then there
is context-contingent information. For the French, this takes time.
"For the Americans, time is money. In France, time is power, trust, confidence,
and decision," Bouchikhi notes.
Power, because the boss in France makes the decision, although employees
are often consulted and asked for input. The boss also has to consider
the unions and the comité d'entreprise (the workers' union inside the
company). Time is trust, because French managers don't monitor their employees'
progress on a project as closely as do American executives; in fact, projections
and update meetings are almost nonexistent. The French upper level of
management just has to trust the people with whom it does business.
"Relationships are like a pipe," Bouchikhi says. "When the pipe is built,
you can put anything you like in it, and the pipe is more important than
what you put through it. In France, once you have built that pipe--and
this takes time--it is easy to deal with that same person in anything."
Time yields confidence. The French like to exhaust a topic, go all around
an issue. "And time is decision," adds Bouchikhi. "Let the time pass.
Don't make the decision too fast. Il faut donner du temps au temps
['You have to give time to time']." Bouchikhi could have been talking
about Italy. Decision time is perhaps shorter in France, but building
the "pipeline" for relationships is the same.
Adapted from an article originally published in the New England Financial
Journal. Illustration copyright © Brian Ajhar.
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