As an anthropologist, I spent several decades doing research on the indigenous people of Brazil. I lived in local native communities, tribal communities, for some four years. People on the United States would often ask me, wasn't that really difficult for you? Really stressful? I would answer that, it wasn't all that difficult, because I knew what to expect. I thought to that things would be different, and so I was prepared for them. What I wasn't at all prepared for, however, was the Brazilian national culture. I hadn't studied much about it at that point, and I expected that it would not differ significantly from American culture. After all, both were modern nations with all the technological advancement and knowledge that entails. These expectations we basically confirmed by my experience. But I wasn't prepared for some of the very little differences that ultimately proved difficult. My first experience of such little differences occurred when I was just 22 years old. I was a first year anthropology graduate student that summer, and I traveled down to Brazil with two other students. We had flown down from New York on an overnight flight to Rio, arriving in the morning, not having slept much ourselves. We found ourselves a hotel room and checked in. And being Americans, we decided that it would be best not to waste the day since we were only there for three months. So we hopped on a bus, rode to the National Museum, which is located in the Quinta da Boa Vista, in the former Emperor's palace. We located the anthropology department, where we were met by a receptionist. We told the receptionist that we were there to see the famous Professor Humberto DaMatta. Or, Roberto DaMatta. Our own professor at the University of Chicago had arranged for us to work with DaMatta, who was one of the best know anthropologists in Brazil. We were eager to get started. Receptionist called up Professor DaMatta who came to greet us. I recall vividly he was dressed up in a white lab coat. We said to him, Professor DaMatta, we're here to work with you, to study with you. He looked at us like we'd come from Mars. We must have been an odd sight indeed as we were pasty white from the winter in Chicago. Sleep deprived from the flight. Most likely with bloodshot eyes and a disheveled appearance. We explained that our professor had made arrangements for us to come down. Roberto looked at us for a minute and said okay, so you want to study with me? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go back to your hotel room and get a good night's sleep. Then I want you to spend two weeks on the beach getting a sun tan. Then come back and we'll talk. Of course, we were flabbergasted, we were frustrated. It seemed to us we were wasting time. And how American is that, the idea of wasting time? And this again is one of those little things. In retrospect however, I could see that we were experiencing a culture clash. In this case over the sense of time. The idea of wasting time and needing to be working constantly came to strike us after the three months as truly a middle class American cultural pattern. Contrasting with the more leisurely, and probably more sane, sense of time in Brazil during that period. You may be wondering, what does that to have to with the performance of teams? An example from the business world will bring home the point that little things often really do matter. I was getting a training session for managers in a major global pharmaceutical company. I'll just refer to it as Global Pharm. I learned that the company had problems in it's sales department. They had recently successfully hired sales personnel from a leading competitor of theirs, which I'll call Northeastern Therapeutics. Both just made up names for these purposes to this video to protect the privacy of the companies and the individuals involved. Global Pharm had hired many of Northeastern's top sales people. But within a year, a significant number of them had quit. Why? The problem turned out to be traceable to seemingly small, indeed minuscule, cultural differences. Of course there were many of these differences, and I'll just mention one of them. At Global Pharm, salespeople were required to write out their sales expenses in narrative form. Explaining how they spent the money on meals, hotel rooms, cab fares, and so forth. The company from which they were hired, Northeastern, had a different method. They used drop down menus on a computer rather than narratives as a way of reporting expenses. You'd just select the expense and then click on it. Of course, this was only one of many, many small cultural differences between the two companies. But it was one on which the salespeople eventually focused. They worried that the new company for which they were working didn't trust them. And that's why they had them do the long-hand reports. So, they felt that they were being closely monitored. Of course this wasn't true, it was simply the cultural pattern at this global firm company, nothing directed at the newly hired salespeople from Northeastern. Still, the sense of discomfort and suspicion ultimately contributed to the decision of some of the recently hired salespeople to leave the company. What these salespeople were experiencing was a mild, but still disruptive, form of what anthropologists refer to as culture shock. We'll look more closely at culture shock in our next video.
