American Cross Culture

I got a chance to attend the American Cross culture training organized by the Indo American Chamber of Commerce. The trainer Sreemathi Ramnath did a wonderful job enlightening us about the culture differences.
Till the morning tea break, it was more an introductory session. We were running around the room trying to collect more info about everyone in the room. She was explaing about how much details we collect just from the name of the person,how we assume things and how we arrive at conculsions just based on the values of our culture.
The Iceberg theory - Our beliefs and assumptions builds our value system. Our behaviours will be based on the values. Our behaviour is visible, but our value system is not. We are making judgments based on the behaviour. We should think about their value systems before coming to conclusions.


Tea Break.

Then, she taught a simple tool to come to a judgement - DIN
D - Describe (Just describe the event with no judgements)
I - Interpret (Interpret the event based on the context/culture it
comes from)
N - Navigate (Judge)
Any judgement about things we dont know is almost always negative and not true.
She enacted a simple scene - Husband and wife, where wife behaves like a slave.
But she explained that (based on a different culture) the husband doesnt treat the wife as a slave, but he really takes care of her to an extent that he would sacrifice his own self to save her. She explained how our conclusion based on our culture was wrong.

Lunch was nice.

Afternoon, she classified culture into people culture and individual culture.America is conceived as a land of oppurtunity. The phrase 'Survival of the fittest' will easily define their culture. So, an individual's view is valued better in American culture. More emphasis will be given to task oriented values. eg: Individuality, Material success,

India or any other old civilizations developed on river beds. So sharing is the basic objective in people culture. The values which are inherited to the younger generation will be very much people oriented. Eg: hospitality, respect to elders.

Geert Hofstede did a lot of research on the way people behave based on the values/culture in which they are brought up.
http://www.geert-hofstede.com/
He assigned numbers to each country on 5 different classification.
Power Distance Index
Individualism
Masculinity
Uncertainty Avoidance Index
Long-Term Orientation

Country	PDI	IDV	MAS	UAI	LTO
United States	40	91	62	46	29
Germany	35	67	66	65	31
UK	35	89	66	35	25
India	77	48	56	40	61

I am posting what I could remember, will try to refine this later.