We use the culture abacus to create a gap analysis between 2 or more national, functional or corporate cultures and then plan ways to manage the gaps through better working practices, meetings, decision making and communication.

It can also be used to analyze and deal with legacy cultural differences before and during merger and acquisition processes and integration as a “cultural due diligence” tool.

This video models the use of the culture abacus in practice

If you enjoyed this check out the video on the first tool for cross-cultural success The Onion.

Find out more about our cross-cultural training programs or listen to our podcast cross cultural skill development.

These more connected organizations are necessary to success but those connections can also cause delay, cost and dissatisfaction.

In this video Kevan Hall asks “are companies too connected to be effective?”

If you agree you might also enjoy our podcast Too much cooperation going on? or our book Speed Lead faster, simpler ways to manage people projects and teams in complex companies

Kevan Hall CEO of Global Integration shares three secrets for building a truly integrated global leadership group.

Don’t forget to check out and subscribe to our other videos at YouTube

If you found this useful, look out for the next 2 culture tools videos - the abacus and the 5 choices tool.

Find out more about our cross cultural training or contact us

However, the practice of leadership has changed hugely. We operate in multiple locations, across timezones, with highly diverse groups of employees and in much more complex and fast moving organizations.

This gap between the new reality of our environment and the old-fashioned skills we teach on our leadership training programs not only means that a lot of leadership training is a poor investment, it may even make things worse by promoting out of date solutions to today’s real leadership challenges.

After 16 years training leaders of ever more complex teams in over 300 of the world’s leading companies in 40 countries and delivering over 100,000 participant days of training we have reached some startling conclusions with major implications for leadership training and development.

Successful companies grow, and as they grow, they become more complex and it takes more time and effort to get things done. Eventually complexity undermines what made the company successful in the first place; the old, entrepreneurial spirit breaks down, bureaucracy increases and progress slows.

Three key leadership training myths are getting in the way of us developing the leadership skills and leadership training programs we need in this new more complex leadership environment.

1. “It’s all about teamwork” - Even great companies are struggling with an epidemic of cooperation – Managers spend 20% of their time in unnecessary meetings. Everyone feels the need to be involved in everything and teams are the answer. Team working is no longer a technique but a corporate value. Yet teams often do not work and are expensive and difficult to run. But still our leadership training tends to assume that teamwork is the answer to any problem.
2. “Communication is the answer” - Lack of communication is a problem of the past – the challenge now is how to disconnect from the mass of trivia and see the few really important messages. The average FTSE Company pays its people to write, send, read and delete over 240,000,000 pointless emails per year. Yet still we leave our old-fashioned leadership training programs with the assumption that more communication will make things better.
3. “We need to be in control” - Decentralized control and information in manufacturing have given us a quality revolution over the last 15 years. Management control in other areas however, has become more centralized and this is causing a damaging cycle of micromanagement and low expectations of people at work. Yet still our leadership training programs promote unrealistic expectations of leaders who know all the answers and over-manage their people.

Most leadership training programs still carry these inaccurate assumptions from a much simpler leadership past. Leaders are working harder and harder to apply out of date skills to more complex, multi-site, virtual, cross-cultural and matrixed organizations. The answer is not working harder with the old skills but implementing faster and simpler ways of working.

Find out more about our book on these themes “Speed Lead – faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies”,

Our Speed Lead leadership training offers some challenging but practical alternatives in all of these areas.

See how your organization compares for unnecessary cooperation and communication at our free “Speed Survey”

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The literature on innovation is littered with references to chance connections where people have bumped into each other in corridors or been working on completely differently projects and have somehow cross fertilised ideas and allowed new things to evolve.

When people, are on the same site these things can happen as a free by-product of proximity. A number of industries in recent years have moved towards locating their R&D people in the same place in order to allow that to continue to happen.

However, in global and virtual organisations, we have people distributed in multiple locations, cultures and timezones and it may not be realistic to bring them all together except for very occasional large events – we need ways to make distributed innovation work in this virtual environment.

The challenge is to make expertise visible and create opportunities to cross fertilize ideas in a cost effective way – without sharing everything on the off chance something will be useful.

How can we get that same spontaneity and serendipity through technologies that recreate that “water cooler moment” where people bump into each other?

First we believer there is  an interesting emerging role for social networking technology such as Twitter in creating those connections, the loose ties that allow us to reach out into our network, spot emerging trends and find individuals who might be useful to talk to.

In these early stages there is the potential to cooperate but not a real concrete opportunity so we need to find economic ways to uncover the potential without incurring high levels of cost in meetings, travel and traditional cooperation costs..

Second we are designing what we call “cloud meetings” - networking meetings designed to allow real networking (as opposed to passively watching PowerPoint presentations of how important networking is) where people have opportunities to cluster around common issues and interests.

Third, we need a structured process enabling people who find some common goal to coalesce into “spaghetti teams” (for dense cooperation) and “star groups” (for a “lighter” coordinated effort) to work on these issues – where it makes economic sense to do so.

We have found that central direction of these teams and groups from the top down is relatively unsuccessful, so we concentrate on ways of creating distributed innovation and leverage from the bottom up.

If you face the challenge of enabling creativity and innovation in your virtual teams or organization and would like to find out more please contact us.

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It reminded me of an experience at a Munich hotel I had some years ago.  It was the opening night for a brand new airport hotel. The manager of the restaurant came across very proudly and said, “Don’t worry, sir, we can get you served and out of here in 30 minutes”.  I replied, “That’s the last thing that I want, because I’ve got an evening in a hotel, I know nobody here, I want to read my book and I’d like the meal to last for a couple of hours.”  We had an interesting discussion about different cross-cultural ad contextual assumptions about what is good service – fast or slow.

When I first moved to France, I found waiting a long time for meals quite frustrating because I was used to being served quickly and equated this with good service.  But eventually I appreciated not being in a culture where you had to book a table at 7 or 9 because they expected you to be out in two hours. In France a table was for the evening. Having time to relax with friends and not feel rushed was an integral part of the experience.  I missed that a lot when I came back to the UK, often feeling under pressure to finish my meal faster than I wanted to, to get out, for the benefit of the restaurant -  not at all for the benefit of the customer.

So there are cultural differences in how service, and speed of service in particular are perceived and there are also times within our own culture where we want different types of service.

The simple solution for restaurants and other service providers - why not ask?

When people sit down, ask “What type of service do you want?  Are you in a rush?”  There is nothing more frustrating than being on a tight deadline and worrying that your meal won’t arrive.  Alternatively, if you have the evening to kill or you want a relaxed experience, you wouldn’t appreciate being rushed through three courses and out of there.

Good customer service is about meeting and exceeding expectations, so why not find out what those expectations are. This is particularly important where you are providing service to multicultural groups of customers but appreciated even within a culture.

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This way of working is now commonplace - it is the new “normal” way of working

However less than half felt their organisation provides sufficient support for virtual working. (only 33% in public sector)

We have been running virtual teams training for 16 years now after pioneering virtual teams training, yet we still see many organizations who do not reflect this reality in their team training or have programs that are basic teamwork skills unchanged since the 70s with a couple of slides added on working through technology.

Virtual teams are more than this and require some different tools and mindsets - it about time our skills caught up with the reality of this “normal” way of working.

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