A Little Red Book

Aren't you supposed to place a nice novel beside your bed? Something nice to read before you drift off into your own dream world? I think a nice fantasy could encourage better sleep and more interesting dreams.

Business Leadership in China, this is my current bedside book. It's written by a successful businessman, Frank T. Gallo, who moved to China late in his career. Very late in his career: he was considering retirement when given the chance to live and work in China. So he continued his career and faced an array of new challenges in the new culture.

He had previously worked and lived in Japan, so he had prior experience learning about foreign cultures. But he had only first moved to China in 2004 and this book was published in 2008. I don't know how long it took him to get this book written and published, when you consider that, he may have only worked in China for a very short time before starting work on the book. There's no way you can consider him an expert on China, or even the specified regions in China, after living there for such a short time. But he does compensate for this by first having over 30 years of business and management experience to bring to the table and then include a lot of outside sources. It's obvious that he consulted many Chinese-business professionals while writing this book.

Gallo is a business expert and is knowledgeable about Chinese business. He's also interviewed a lot of other experts and is quoting them throughout the book. It's full of examples and is really a fun read if you're into cross cultural business or even just psychology. I've learned some interesting things.

Leadership is really about psychology, after all. Why do leadership strategies that work well in the US fail in China? He describes exactly this and suggests workarounds. What does it come down to, basically human transduction - how and why different cultures interpret things differently.

I recommend the book for those interested in understanding Chinese culture and psychology, especially if you have an interest in taking on a leadership role on the continent. But it's nothing profound. I've also never lived in China - no need to get into politics, but from a business perspective Taiwan is a different country and has a very different business culture. This is true regardless of your political standing.

Why Study a Foreign Culture?

Transduction is the process of transforming one signal type into another. Take a car’s speedometer; the speed is the output of a transduction system. The input, or source, is the wheels’ number of revolutions per minute. This is linearly correlated with the rotation angle (the position) of the dial on your speedometer. It is then tuned and this is how you get a reading in miles per hour. This is a simple example taking one reading of revolutions per minute and converting it into miles per hour. Complex systems are made up of several layers of transduction between a variety of inputs and outputs.

Transduction plays a large role in making measurements, such as the speed of your car. Therefore, it’s important to note that when taking any measurement there’s an associated uncertainty. For example, you can use a ruler to determine a bar is 5.25 inches long. Using a set of calipers you find the bar is 5.2445 inches long. Which number is correct? The calipers, they have a higher degree of accuracy? No, both measurements are wrong. Using the ruler, with divisions at every 1/16th of an inch, the measurement is 5.25 +/- .06 inches. Likewise the micrometer’s measurement is 5.2445 +/- .005 inches. These measurements do not contradict each other like the previous set: they are both correct. Any number, especially statistical data, is meaningless unless it has an attached uncertainty. This uncertainty is affected by the transduction methods and thus the transducer.

Forgive me, I majored in mechanical engineering. But wait, I’m not lying to you with my title: this is surprisingly relevant to culture and the role it plays in all our lives. Transduction isn’t limited to the scientific world. It is involved in any instance where an input of one kind is converted. Replace that speedometer in my first example with the words that I’m typing, now. They started out as thoughts in my head: a combination of things I’ve learned from different sources. They’ve gotten mixed up, rearranged and combined. That is the first level of transduction. They were combined into a new thought that I contemplated for some time. They were written on paper, another level of transduction: the transformation of thoughts into handwritten words. Then they were read over and critiqued for accuracy as I thought, “Are these words clearly expressing my thoughts?” They were edited accordingly, transduction again. I typed them into my computer and again ran through the editing process. Finally, you are reading and converting my words into information, thoughts, opinions, and ideas inside of your own head: the final layer of transduction.

Your thoughts are not identical to my original thoughts. This is what is lost in the transduction process; this is the associated uncertainty. I can only hope that you get a “good enough” impression of what I’m trying to explain. There was an element of uncertainty in the words I originally wrote down; each layer of transduction affected the uncertainty. The more you know about my writing style and me in general (the transducers at work here), the better you will understand my thoughts and the lesser the uncertainty. The more I know about my readers, the more I can anticipate their reaction to my words; the more I can control the thoughts that enter their head while reading. Knowing your audience is the first step when writing: it enables you to adjust your transduction methods and reduce uncertainty.

Communication is a transduction process. Our words, verbal and written alike, are transducers – transferring my ideas to yours. Culture is a transducer: it filters everything we interpret. Behaviors seen as polite in some cultures are seen as rude in others. Despite the same input our cultural transduction systems output opposite responses.
This extends much farther than culture. This is the key to understanding what people feel, why they feel that way, and how they communicate.

Human transduction is specific to each individual, but an understanding at the cultural level is the first step to being able to understand individuals, and more importantly yourself.

“So why study foreign culture?” is a naïve question. You may as well ask: “Why would you learn how to speak?” or “Why would you learn how to read?”