Continuing Cross Cultural Implications of Corporate Social Responsibility

Dear friends,

We continue this topic today by beginning to look at the various lenses that are available for understanding one's own culture and then the culture of each person with whom we may be working, within our own nation or on a global contracting site. These lenses are discussed in more detail in my chapter, "Minimizing Risk: Best Practices for Managing Cross Cultural Concerns in Global Contracting", THE ABA GUIDE TO INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS, Third Edition, May 2009. For in depth appplication of each lens, please contact me directly so that we can work together to learn your specific concerns. I can then custom design the lenses to resolve your cross cultural conerns, at this First Best Practice level.

The lenses have been created by cultural researchers through the past many decades in an attempt to better understand and then to function effectively in differing cultures. Some of the lenses ask questions and your answers to these questions give you guidance to your own culture and then as always to the other cultures where you may find yourself working. Once you have identified your core cultural values in ways that give you a functinal understanding of the choices that you make on a daily basis, the also a functional knowledge of the cultural practices you choose, like the cultural heroes that you have, the rituals that you perform and the cultural symbols that you value, you can then begin to gain the same understanding of each person of another culture with whom you may be working.

The First Best Practice, gaining an awareness of what is a cross cultural concern, by learning through the use of the various cultural lenses, about your own culture and that of each other co-worker, lays a strong foundation for effective, meaningful and participative corporate social responsibility. When a corporation knows its own native culture well enough to be then able to have working knowledge of the foreign cultures where it has chosen to support global contracting work, then the foreign work sites begin to work toward minimizing the many forms of risk that they encounter on a daily basis. Minimizing risk in this manner clearly supports meaningful corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Warm regards,

Jane

Jane E. Smith, Esq.
LiSimba Consulting Services, Inc.
Building Relationships for International Business Success
http://www.lisimba.com/
jsmith@lisimba.com