Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication principles guide the process of exchanging meaningful and unambiguous information across cultural boundaries, in a way that preserves mutual respect and minimizes antagonism. We can define the intercultural communication as being an interactive process which will lie within a cultural scope and which aims at giving direction to a relation.

Thinking Intercultural communication, I remember an example I had, while working as a business developer in Europe. I had to go to a meeting, to get information on a project we were working on.

Two groups had to do the presentation, Germans and Spanish, 5 people in each group.
We had no specific recommendations for the meeting, I had questions I wanted to be answered, as some others colleagues who were in the conference room.
The presentation started in the first time with the Spanish, and then in the second time with the Germans colleagues.

The meeting for the first group lasted 1 hour while for the second group, the meeting lasted only 15 minutes and the result was the same one.
In the first case, the Spanish needed to give much more explanations, which were not very useful for me in this case, but they felt obliged to give these explanations.
We could say that their message was rich and slow in context.

In the second case, the German colleagues answered the questions without entering in complex explanations. They did not feel the need to give many explanations; they just answered the questions we had quite simply, I had the information I needed, and I save time.
We could say that their message was poor and fast in context.

When we did our researches for our Intercultural communication project on Japan, I found an interesting video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyjenhfSnFU

Crisis Communication

How a crisis is dealt with can be a sink or swim situation for a company or individual. My personal experience with crisis situations comes from when I worked at Subs N Suds during my undergrad. March started with the computer system going down for the whole store. This meant that there was no way for employees to clock in, no way to take orders through the system, and no way to accept credit cards. The system was down for roughly three weeks because of the three companies that were brought in to fix the system, none were able to fix it. The system was finally fixed for one day, the next day the system was down again. That night after the store closed, the store was broken into and robbed.
The General Manager Sprang into action. He immediately got the owner involved to be able to gather the cash needed to Start the day. Employees were organized quickly to clean (once the police left). The Security company was brought in to determine why the alarm did not sound. Everything was handled well by the manager to make sure business continued as usual. Because of the actions of management, we were still able to turn a profit for the month.