MIT Lecture: Intercultural Communication & Case Preparation
Many times people face complex situations when communicating with others from different cultures and backgrounds. Almost everyone would have had one such instance at a point in time in his/her life. With the rapid globalization happening and more and more people from different backgrounds collaborate together in work places, embracing the cultural differences and communicating with each other effectively gains significant importance.
Prof. Neal Hartman’s lecture on Cross Cultural Communications was an eye-opener and it gave interesting insights with strategic approaches to deal with inter-cultural differences. He highlighted the values and perceptions about culture by sketching out the key characteristics that are similar among various cultures. He then discussed about the Communication behaviors and connected it with business context by engaging the students in case discussions. The two cases that he chose, “Negotiation lost in Taiwan” and “Leading across cultures at Michelin” focused on contrasting scenarios which helped the students to be aware of the key differences in cultural context. Professor Hartman also engaged the students by conducting quizzes, in addition, he discussed about how to approach a case preparation and gave valuable perspectives, which the students warmly received.
Overall, the lecture enlightened the students on how to deal with Intercultural communications and it ended up as a more interactive session with many key take-aways.
Words from participants:
“In a vivid and engaging way, Professor Hartman taught us several ways to deal with cultural differences.” – Yumeng Guo.
“Simple, straight-forward and an inspiring lecture. I gained some key points which I can adapt in my life” – Supalak Tanasoonbuti.
Written by 2015 IMBA Siddharth Manoharan
October 20, 2015
