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.
Korkki doesn’t deal with my own reasoning for encouraging international experience for every student who can possibly dig up the change for six months or a year. Yeah, I’m well aware that parents are liable to have to continue paying the same American college or university for their kids’ international experience. But my daughter’s Columbia-Barnard expenses and tuition were far more than the total costs of a year at the University of Vienna, even including travel. If you’re a part of the class that’s willing and able to dig up the shekels for it, it’s an experience that will bring a lot of value to the younger generation whether or not they are planning for an international job.
Similar values and rewards also come from managerial tenures in international settings. Though most corporations recognize international experience as a plus, the more backward organizations may penalize the employee, in one way or another, for outside the US (OUS) experience. As a result, managers may need to weigh the career pluses and minuses at his current organization. But the experience may be richly rewarded in another organization. Whether or not the organization rewards you for your experience, the values you can receive from that experience are significant.
Much of the international learning applies directly to the US organizational experience. Cultural boundaries define us because they stabilize systems of behaviors and cognition. When a person is placed in another stable system, he or she is forced to learn behavioral and thinking ways that differ markedly from their original system. I consulted off and on for 12 years in both 3M and old Pillsbury—two profoundly different cultures. 3M, for example, is a highly concrete culture, reinforcing a large number of rules. Their rules simplify the creation and marketing of new products, the major expertise of the company. Old Pillsbury, in contrast, was visually entrepreneurial and strongly oriented to change as a high priority. Because I had lived and worked in five different cities and states, I expected the culture in Minnesota to be different. It was profoundly so, in ways natives were incapable of explaining, but far more obvious—and thus manipulable—for me. The cultural variety I brought with me, made consulting across the nation and in different firms, far more insightful. I was keyed into conceptualizing present and potential differences. And thus, able to make personal, behavioral changes, as I moved between organizational cultures. I knew, for example, how to work the differences between executive administrators and get to their bosses in New York, Minnesota, Chicago, Detroit, D.C., Los Angeles and St Louis. And, significantly, what to look for when I was ignorant of a culture like Atlanta.
People of one culture immersed in another gain a highly useful understanding of different “realities.” Our own culture teaches us what to see and what to ignore. Experience in another culture teaches us that another culture sees and ignores different things. Opportunities in Greece, for example, are closely tied to family relationships. An outsider may be shocked by the direct question of “how much do you make?” Or, “how much did that cost?” If the foreigner is reluctant to answer that question, he may be foregoing unwittingly the proffered acceptance as a friend. Effective product and process designers can use the experience of different realities to focus on design questions from many different angles, often providing significant innovations to their American company.
Adjusting to different beliefs about the workplace. International experience can make it far more possible for a person to adjust and manage today’s endless reorganizations and restructuring. The classic intercultural experience deals with many of the various workplace questions today’s organizations are focusing upon. How much planning should precede action? How are incentives, rewards and control best managed? How much conformity and initiative are expected? What does an effective work setting look like? And how do diverse ethnicities and religions affect expectations?
Putting important experiences into appropriate perspective. Managers inevitably draw an infinite number of conclusions from important, conflicted or questionable experiences. What did my boss mean by that? Is he suggesting that I’m going to get laid off? Does he expect me to be at this meeting? Was his anger directed at me? What kind of changes does he expect of me?
But international experience puts that analysis in front of our nose. We’re forced to resolve questions about the meaning of language and gesture. We learn quickly that different cultures organize and process information very different than our American way. Objective facts don’t mean much in many cultures and social values can pose much difficulty. Business practices like making appointments and contacts differ. Negotiating with some cultures can force us to completely rethink how we normally go about the process. Etc., etc.
Emphasizing the role and value of street smarts. Although a lot of less-experienced employees don’t understand the value of street smarts, that ability to deal effectively with all kinds of people and levels of hierarchy, an intercultural experience brings all kinds of issues to the fore. Sometimes the issues are shockingly immediate and embarrassing. It may be a misunderstood gesture, failure to understand how time is used, or even the American penchant for getting to business without taking the time to exercise a different culture’s social protocols and relationship behaviors.
The struggles for business success are now international, not merely local. The reality is that each of us comes from a long line of ancestors who were raised in many different cultures, even though we’ve been Americanized to the hilt. Success in today’s business world will require more and more intercultural and interorganizational moxie. An international experience will be key for many of us.
*Phyllis Korkki, “Overseas internships….” NYT, 3/24/2012.
*Susan Neiman, “Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts on an Infantile Age.” (esp. 211-213, 150-165)