CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

One of the most important criteria for doing international business is to overcome cultural differences. Cultural differences in engineering and business include wrong interpretation of the language, behavior, working style and difference in the definition of some key questions like what is the company looking for , what is the timeline and the what is the higher or lower areas of concern. In the starting, Austrian, British and German engineers were finding it difficult to adjust with different working style.The same differences were seen when we were taught about Channel's project. British and French engineers had different style of working. When Mark went to Germany there was misinterpretation of behavior. Mark was not comfortable with the way company chauffeur was asking him questions and the company chauffeur was not feeling the way Mark was talking about other things. Sometimes understanding of multiple definitions of respect also can have sour outcomes.Like in Asia respect is related to the seniority of the person in that field.Breakdown of communication, harm to personal feelings etc are some of the outcomes of different definitions of respect.There was different interpretations of the same word, ' Quality product '. According to the Germans want a perfect solution to every problem but according to the Americans needs and demands of the client is more important. For example, the Germans engineers were not able to work and give a final product to the American in the fixed time because they were finding the perfect solution to the problem but American were more curious to send the final products to the market. The Germans were thinking that the American are putting pressure on them and American were not so concerned about the 100% efficient solution. As a result of misunderstandings the project was never completed and the overall loss was over $20 million.