East.. and now SOUTH Asia Business – 15/05/2007

East Asia Business is proud to announce a link-up with Arun Singh OBE. Arun is an international lawyer, interculturalist and former partner of KPMG, where he headed the India Business Group for KPMGEurope. He has concentrated on cross-border trade and investment and outsourcing across a varied range of countries.

Since 1989 he has advised a number of companies and organisations on Cross-Cultural awareness, teams, negotiations, meeting, presentations and management in a range of sectors, and since 1998 in relation to outsourcing projects. This work is generic and country specific advice (including India, UK, US and China), training and consultancy and extends to positively leveraging the diversity of an organization.
EAB will be pleased to involve Arun wherever our clients need to consider the Indian dimension as well as those further East

Partner in Benelux – 26/04/2007

East Asia Business is delighted to announce a new partner in Benelux: Japan Consulting Office is a bright new entrant to the field of intercultural management consultancy and training in Brussels. It is led by Olivier van Beneden, a Japan expert with great personal experience of working inside Japanese companies. He is a fluent Japanese speaker and maintains a high level network of contacts in industry and institutional bodies in Brussels.

The New Korea: Collective Dynamism – 26/03/2007

As Asian philosophy tells us, you can never step twice into the same river; all things pass and change is inevitable. Korea and its business culture is no exception to this rule. So what’s new?

The cries of “Pali, pali” (“quick, quick” or, roughly translated, I want it done yesterday!) resound around the open-plan offices of a nation in a hurry to join, as they call it, “the leading group of nations”. Self-improvement vies with self-reliance as watchwords of the Korean way. Change is real, but from where to where?

Scarce natural resources, high population density and a long history of external military aggression has made South Korea a strongly collective culture – “arms bend inwards” is an old Korean proverb, meaning “we look after our own”. But things are changing. Yes, Koreans are still much more comfortable within their own language and their own well-established groupings (company, school, region, family tree). But the process, started in 1988 with the Seoul Olympic Games and accelerated in 2002 with the FIFA World Cup, made Koreans more open to and welcoming of foreign visitors and business partners. As the economy has recovered quite strongly from the IMF crisis in the late 90’s, the average Korean has more disposable income, therefore more choice. More choice means they can differentiate themselves as individuals. Thus, the growth of individualism. Of course, other factors such as the urbanising shift from extended to nuclear families and the reality check that arose from the slow demise of the lifetime employment idea also played their part.

One thing’s for sure; the young generation coming into the workforce now face a more challenging but also more exciting prospect of, for the first time, developing their own personal career path as a specialist in a particular field (eg. IT, marketing) rather than as a generalist member of a large conglomerate, where the individual is necessarily subjugated to the needs of the organisation. Teamwork and hard graft comes quite naturally to young Koreans, but starting now, they will be inventing themselves as they go along! So watch out, world!

The culture of Korean business was excellently described by Professors Cho and Yoon of Ajou University as “dynamic collectivism”. Perhaps a more appropriate label for the 21st century is “collective dynamism”.

W + E = WE – 03/08/2006

For companies with teams that bridge the Europe/US:Asia gap

WplusE is a new and revolutionary approach to building teams that cross West:East cultural frontiers. As a consultancy specialising in dealing with this particular cultural nexus, EAB has identified key differentiators that undermine the performance levels of both ongoing and project teams whether they be based in USA, Europe or East Asia. By using highly experienced facilitators and high level animation skills, EAB’s faculty takes a three-step approach to the job of releasing the team’s real potential:

1. Extract the Western prejudice about the East and see it for what it is – stereotyping. Go on to examine in a fresh light the underlying rationale for Eastern behaviour, working closely with the West’s own list of puzzles to be solved.

2. Extract the East’s prejudice about the West and do as above. Again, the East gets to set the agenda and comes back to it at the end of the session to verify coverage of the issues.

After time for reflection and a second round of questioning and exploring,….

3. Bring West and East together to check that they are working now at higher levels of understanding. Tabula rasa: starting afresh to devise together operational procedures that respect the preferences of both sides. This leads to detailed and committed Action Planning.

EAB will re-visit the client company after one week, one month and one year and where necessary re-intervene.

For more details, contact EAB on #44 20 8361 5152.