Dan Erwin

What An International Experience Can Do for You

Few work experiences offer more immediate, personal insight than an overseas internship or international job. Furthermore, recent research reveals that differing cultural experiences are crucial for growing up. To be more intelligent and attuned to the way the world works, you have to have seen some of it.

The neuroscience reveals that living and working in two and especially three or more cultures can increase your fluid intelligence. Working in a culture lets you know what tourists cannot know. If you have only lived in one foreign country, you’ll be inclined to split the world in two ways of being and forever seesaw between them. Living in a third brings home the idea that there are many ways to diverge. Global capitalism has reduced cultural contrasts, but it certainly hasn’t erased them. To watch a German waiting for a McDonald’s on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and an American in the same line is to see all the differences. How the German orders, how the American stands, how they count their change and leave with their friends is to see how much culture remains, even when it might seem lost.

The neuroscience of international experience
Striking neuroscience findings explain the growth in intelligence, detailed by Susan Neiman. Competence is a particular ability to recognize the similarities between seemingly new problems and previously solved problems. This, in turn, implies that competent person has at his or her disposal a vast collection of mental representations, each capturing the essence of a wide range of specific situations and of the most effective actions associated with these situations. The research suggests that we acquire, as we age, an increasing number of cognitive templates, so that ‘... a growing number of future cognitive challenges is increasingly likely to be readily covered by a pre-existing template, or will require only a slight modification of a previously formed mental template.’ Most of the processes are located in the brain’s left hemisphere—as is shown when damage through trauma or dementia disrupts patients’ ability to recognize familiar people or things.

When compared to other mental abilities, pattern recognition has the highest correlation with general intelligence. Since the brain is wired to recognize patterns, everyone has the potential to be pattern smart, but, in different ways. The work by Nobel laureate, Herb Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem solving. Of course, problem solving is one of the key business success factors.

My background in intercultural communication reveals that even experiences in different American cities can make it possible to see different cultures, though not as effectively as international experience. How the Northern European lines up for their turn for the Minneapolis corporate elevator and how the ethnic American chaotically charges the corporate elevator in New York or Detroit can be very enlightening for almost paradigmatically different cultures even in the States. Just that experience is indicative of managerial process distinctions among the cultures for the culturally aware and astute person. Decision-making for me was profoundly different between just two American college towns—Boulder (CO) and Flagstaff (AZ).

Ideally, you should live in a place that is not primarily your mother tongue. Every language conveys presumptions that are concealed until you can compare it with another one.

However, and this is very important, the more you understand your own culture, the more an immersion in another culture can provide you with divergent perspectives and behaviors. And also, how immersion in other cultures enables you to understand your own culture far better.

Once a month, for more than a year, my first international job meant a quick flight from Minneapolis to Sao Paulo to work with the senior manager at 3M’s main Brazil plant. Although my senior client was an Italian-American New Yorker, my first experience in the cross-cultural, organizational politics of Brazil was never-to-be forgotten. Having grown up in the Eastern and Southern European diversity of Detroit in the 1940s and ‘50s, we made certain our three daughters got out of early 1980s Minnesota homogeneity and took to the East Coast, culturally diverse Chicago and also Europe for their college experience. My youngest completed a school year in Austria and then worked in Greece for nearly a year after graduating. They, too, found those experiences to be of great, pragmatic benefit.

Phyllis Korkki (NYT) recommends overseas internships for those able to able to float the airfare and expenses, in spite of fact that they are often “all work and no pay.” She emphasizes the importance of finding host companies that will provide a great deal of value to the student. Students can gain the opportunity to improve language skills and what may be more important, understanding a different culture. Her caution makes a lot of sense: “People have internships on the brain,” but it’s important to choose the right time and place for them.

How to Succeed in People Prediction

Understanding what's actually being said--a study in subtexts and mind reading: THE BIG KEY TO CAREER SUCCESS.

Thanks to Google Analytics, I pay a lot of attention to my blog readership so I can better figure out where to focus my blogs. Back in 2014, I published a blog entitled Mind Reading 101. For years my clients have been asking about my "secrets" to mind reading and that blog revealed much of the information about that subject. Surprisingly, the readership on that blog was limited. So, I put the blog up on a commercial site that has periodically used my stuff. Wow! I got tons of readership and a lot of comments--almost all very positive. Some of it effusive and expressing much thanks for the blog. It took me awhile to figure the readership differences. Approximately 65% of my readership is below the age of 35. I'm very happy about that--that's my target audience. But the audience in the commercial blog is older and more experienced. Fifteen years of work experience--more like the commercial blog readers--results in a different set of priorities. And that, I think, is one major reason why my blog was appreciated on one site, but not on my site. People prediction is a higher priority for managers in their late thirties and forties than for the 35 and below set. 

Yet, people prediction is just as important early in one's career. It's the major key to your career future. People prediction is about how your boss, your peers and your customers respond to ideas, projects, recommendations and your work. If the response is negative, you're in trouble--no matter how good your technology. And you'd better make some personal changes. If the response is positive, you know you're on the right path. Your technology skills are just a piece of your success. It's all about quality relationships.

Here's the big idea: what people say is important, but what's beneath what they say--the close reading or subtext--are usually far more important.

So once more, here's Mind Reading 101, slightly reconfigured.

Or. . . How to succeed in the prediction game.

Some time ago, after listening to a neighbor talk about her family, I asked whether she was "rules oriented." I was certain she was, but I wanted to double-check my prediction. "Of course," she said. That's the best way to raise kids. Aren't you?" Amused by her shock at my negative answer, I was more intrigued by the fact that in spite of a number of personally-revealing conversations, she was clueless regarding my orientation.

Her lack of mind reading tools resulted in prediction failure.

As a business person, you can’t afford that kind of prediction failure. Your ability to predict others’ thinking and behavior is not only necessary for working with your boss, peers, subordinates, clients and teams, it’s also necessary for overall career success.

Mind reading tools grow out of two disciplines: the rhetorical competency of "close reading" and the communication competency of “barrier resolution.” Close reading tools are mind-reading competencies that enable you to go beyond the words and evidence that's presented. Barrier-resolution tools are competencies related to the recent stuff in the “ladder of inference.”  

Ultimately, mind reading is built on the well-accepted fact that ways of thinking tend to be systematic. People tend to hold well-connected kinds of values and convictions in their thinking...

We want our thinking to be consistent. So, for example, what we think about the environment may share some basic assumptions and values with what we think about government programs for the poor. What's especially useful about these tools is that once we identify a person's set of values or convictions we are able to predict how a person will think and behave related to other similar issues. With success, we can work better together, get more done, and build our business reputation. Obviously mind reading tools are not foolproof, but they are highly valuable in nearly all the important relationships of life: business, investing, schooling, complex decision making, even choice of friends.

So how can you up the ante on your mind-reading skills? In short, how can you become a successful "predictor" of others’ thinking and behavior?  

Let’s begin with a non-business “case.” In a hilarious interview, Jared Diamond provides some great stuff for building your mind-reading skills. Diamond is the author of some of the best popular science books. From the Sunday NYTImes magazine, here are three interview questions with his answers:

It's Even More Important Now to Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

When I first wrote this back  in 2012, it was just fairly relevant. Given the status of our culture today, this article is extremely relevant. People aren't talking to each other about their differences. They are not just marching, but sometimes they are rioting over their differences. The issues that divide are numerous: politics, science, education, religion, pandemic, etc. The list is seemingly endless. Now, more than ever, people are just ignoring those they know differ with them, and sometimes behaving like irreconcilable enemies.

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...

So why should you keep your friends close--and your enemies closer? It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to your knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct. In my first vocation, the Christian ministry, I worked diligently to stay close to parishioners who disagreed with my orientation. The consequence was that unlike many in the congregationalist polity I maintained significant support not only from those of my ideology, but also those of more rigid, fundamentalist ideologies. They could have been "enemies" and capable in our polity of creating a lot difficulties. But over an eleven year period, that never happened because I was close to those who differed--and worked to make "adjustments" without compromises.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close...