Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap When Working with Indians
Craig Storti
Language: English
Pages: 228
ISBN: 1941176119
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Storti's cultural observations about Indians are spot on."—Ranjini Manian, CEO, Global Adjustments, and author of Doing Business in India for Dummies
"This is a must read! It provides rich insight into why routine interactions are often misconstrued, and offers practical advice on how to present material so both the East and West can relate."–Nikki Webster, Learning and Development Director, CNA Insurance Companies
Westerners and Indians are working more closely together and in greater numbers than ever before. The opportunities are vast, and so is the cultural divide. Misunderstanding, misinterpretation, missed deadlines, and frustration due to cultural differences raise havoc on success.Any Westerner conducting business with Indians and any Indian trying to figure our the West will recognize the challenge.
In this revised and expanded edition of Speaking of India, author and intercultural communications expert Craig Storti helps to ease the frustration and bring cultural understanding in business and life. With a new foreword by Ranjini Manian, the book also features new content on managing remotely, and the results of a five-year cultural survey.
Craig Storti is a nationally known figure and a leading voice the field of intercultural communications and cross-cultural adaptation. He is the author of numerous works, including Americans at Work, Art of Coming Home, Cross-Cultural Dialogues, and Culture Matters—all available from Nicholas Brealey Publishing—as well as a cross-cultural workbook used by the US government in over ninety countries. Craig lives in Westminster, Maryland.
The Tastes of Ayurveda: More Healthful, Healing Recipes for the Modern Ayurvedic
Arthasastra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft
Company’s workforce (“We told you so”) Fixing the cultural piece will not cause these problems to go away, but it will mitigate many of them and, more important, create the circumstances—mutual understanding and trust—that will enable all those involved to put in place the other measures that sooner or later will send these problems packing. Which Westerners? Before we go any further, we should probably be more precise about these Westerners we’ve being going on about. Can we really make.
English to other Indians who speak exactly the way they do, and they have therefore come to regard this way of speaking as standard English, as opposed to what it actually is: standard Indian English. It is only when they speak to someone outside of India, therefore, someone who has not grown up hearing Indian English, that Indians discover they talk with an accent and use unfamiliar vocabulary. (This is true of anyone who has a regional accent, of course, such as an Englishman from Yorkshire or.
Advice for Indians Here are a few quick tips for how Indians can make their conversations with their Western colleagues go more smoothly: „ Slow down. „ Don’t assume your accent has disappeared just because you attended an accent reduction class for a week or two; it may have been reduced but usually a week is not enough to eliminate an accent. „ Remember that Westerners may be embarrassed to ask you to slow down or repeat something; just because they do not ask this does not mean they have.
Indias, share a common subculture that makes them more like each other than like the Indians of their various homelands. Indeed, in many ways they have more in common with urban professionals in London and Los Angeles than with the bullock-cart drivers they drive past while commuting to downtown Bangalore. About these Indians it is possible to make accurate and useful generalizations, so long as one remembers the first rule of all generalizations: they must be taken with a grain of salt.
Westernized, of course; he will most likely adopt Western behaviors in some circumstances but not others and will typically revert to “type” (his Indian self) when he is Indians, Westerners, and the Cultural Lens 7 under a lot of pressure. In other words, while Westerners can reasonably expect fewer cultural misunderstandings with Westernized Indians like Raj, they should still be careful not to mistake a few outward trappings of Western behavior for a complete personality change. Just how.