The proportion of our business delivered in Asia has been increasing steadily in recent years but as our consultants were based in Europe and the Americas travel costs could add significantly to the cost of workshops and consulting assignments.

In order to look after our global customers more effectively and develop our business in Asia I am pleased to announce that we will open an office and be available to schedule programs in Singapore as of 1st February 2010.

For queries about scheduling, please contact your normal global account manager or contact us here

Same great quality – local travel costs

You can read the abstract here but in essence, the researchers studied how very different cultures (Western cultures compared with individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages) used non-verbal responses to express emotions.

They found that vocalizations communicating several negative emotions - anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise were recognized across both cultures

However most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals that are often  ort recognized by the other culture.

If this is more widely true it has consequences for cross-cultural communication – do we read negative emotions easily but have more difficulty picking up the positives from someone from a very different culture – maybe we need to be more explicit when expressing positives in a cross cultural context.

Have a great Christmas

Sound familiar?

p.s. This link may not be available to view in the USA due to YouTube copyright rules.

Mais de Jornal de Negocios

In this short session we will focus on how to streamline cooperation and communication, decentralize control and build new forms of community based n the Speed Lead principles,

Download the event brochure and booking details here speed-lead-masterclass-porto-oct-2009

If you would like to host a similar Speed Lead event please contact us here

In our latest podcast Managing the HQ & Local relationship we discuss some of the reasons for this and what we can do to create more positive HQ and local relationships.

If this is a challenge in your team or organization we can help with training or consulting support.

It is  a logical response driven by both cost cutting and the needs to get more synergies and share scarce skills across the organization.

In the past month we have been contacted by major companies in the Pharmaceutical, Financial services, FMCG. Energy and other industries who are actively restructuring their central functions to be more integrated.

Whatever the motivation this increased integration of central functions is leading to more and more matrixed, virtual and international working.

In most cases the focus right now is on the strategy and structural issues in making this happen, after this attention tends to move to aligning critical systems with the new structure. It can be a long time before anyone thinks about the skills implications- and it is the skills, not the structure, that makes these more integrated and complex organizational forms work. It is great to see some progressive organizations getting this on the agenda right at the start of the project.

Find out more about some of the people management challenges in operating more integrate central functions in our podcast Creating a more integrated IT function the focus is on IT but many of the challenges are relevant to other functions too.

See more about the skills needed to succeed in complex organizations.

Is your organization creating more integrated central functions too?

Not surprising really with the increased complexity of the environment and more limited face time to resolve issues.

As the article points out it is all about the skills and processes surrounding remote working that makes it work or not.

We developed the first ever commercial remote and virtual teams training and have delivered over 100,000 participant days of training to over 300 major organizations in over 40 countries - find out more about what we think is important in virtual teams training.