Why Global Success Depends On Separating Language & Culture - Tsedal Neeley | TEDxCambridge
Imagine finding out when you arrive at work the following day that your company has decided to switch its official working language to a common language!
Tsedal Neeley, an award-winning professor in the Organization Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School, disrupts prevailing beliefs by revealing the power of treating language and culture separately.
The Language of Global Success, Tsedal Neeley’s award-winning book, expertly depicts the morphing changes in work practices, their influence on company performance, and the daily struggles and delights that resulted from an English-language mandate for a major company in Japan.
Tsedal Neeley has spent years studying Rakuten’s ground-breaking Englishnization policy, which has adopted English as the company’s official language.
This interesting book provides a novel expatriate perspective on global work and offers solid proof of the importance of language through a variety of information and insightful observations. It will be very helpful to scholars researching organizational psychology and international business.
Who is Tsedal Neeley
Tsedal Neeley is a professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School and also co-chairs the executive offering Leading Global Businesses. Neeley is a recipient of the prestigious HBS Charles M. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching in Executive Education.
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Tsedal Neeley Effectively Takes Down the Biggest Problem that Multinational Corporations have: The Language
Language is everywhere. It encompasses every aspect of corporate life, including greetings at the door, emails, casual conversations, and the everyday practice of key competencies. Therefore, organizations must acknowledge language as a basic component that is inextricably linked to other globalization-related requirements.
A lingua franca can help with globalization as shifting to a common language will inevitably have an impact on important organizational functions.
With extensive international experience, Neeley is fluent in four languages.
In her book, The Language of Global Success, Neeley delivers an in-depth study of one company, the high-tech giant Rakuten, in the five years after its English lingua franca mandate.
Neeley’s behind-the-scenes perspective examines how language affects and how employees who work in multinational corporations interact and deal with cultural and linguistic disparities.
The “Englishnization”
Hiroshi Mikitani was the billionaire founder and CEO of Japan’s leading online retail company, Rakuten. On Monday, March 1, 2010, Mikitani stepped to the podium at the Tokyo headquarters of his company and announced that,
English would now be their official working language!
This meant that moving ahead, all communications among his 10,000 employees worldwide would be conducted in English, including emails, conversations, documents, and even the cafeteria menu.
Mikitani called this process “Englishnization.”
His employees had two years to get proficient in English. Every employee is required to pass the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) within two years. Those who fail would receive a demotion, which means giving someone a lower rank or a less important position in the workplace.
Tsedal Neeley got a rare privilege and opportunity to study for five consecutive years about what happened at Rakuten after the announcement of Englishnization.
“I talked to 650 employees across Rakuten’s eight country locations. I collected over 20,000 pages of archival data and collected over 3000 surveys on multiple times. I was deeply immersed in the company during this period.”
- Tsedal Neeley, TEDxCambridge
Neeley claimed that an organization’s lingua franca is the catalyst by which all employees become some kind of “expat” — someone detached from their mother tongue or home culture — based on 650 interviews conducted across Rakuten’s locations in Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, United States, and France.
She discloses three distinct social groups thanks to her unrestricted access to Rakuten’s internal operations:
You can find more details about Englishnization from here…
Language and Culture can be Separated!
“I learned that people could be much more connected with each other if they treated language and culture seperately”
- Tsedal Neeley, TEDxCambridge
Neeley explains that there are lessons to be gained for all multinational corporations as they deal with language and cultural issues. Language may act as a conduit for a foreign culture, often in unexpected ways.
Her ground-breaking research and insights into how individuals adapt to change demonstrate what is needed to integrate different cultures and languages into a unified organization, which is required for sustained success.
Today, more than half of global companies around the world, including Suntech Information Technologies (SuntechIT), a multinational remote developers outsourcing company, have a common language, usually English, to standardize and facilitate global work.
SuntechIT is located in 12 different countries around the world. There are people from quite a variety of cultural backgrounds who speak different languages working at this company. Due to that, the staff at SuntechIT had numerous difficulties when it came to communication and other social events. They also decided to use English, the official language, as their main working language.
Neeley continued by stating that English is the fastest-spreading language in human history. Culture is defined as the customs, rituals, values, norms, and attitudes of any given nation. Language and culture are inextricably linked. Language is the expression of people’s cultures, communities, and countries.
The Biggest Fear of Taking up a Common Language
People believe that learning or using a common language would eliminate the cultures in their nation or country as many attempts to adapt to the foreign culture along with the language.
Nevertheless, Neeley wanted people to understand that language and culture can exist apart from one another.
“If you can speak a common language you have the potential of reaching everyone that a common language can be an unbiased means of communicating any culture and that you can mix languages and cultures productively”
- Tsedal Neeley, TEDxCambridge
While the Japanese employees were responding with anxiety, worry, and fear to Mikitani’s 2010 Englishnization announcement, those in the United States were cheering with thrill and delightful prospect.
The third group of employees that she investigated worked at Rakuten’s subsidiary offices in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Similar to the Japanese employees, they were also compelled to communicate in a lingua franca other than their mother tongue after the Englishnization mandate.
They also had to adjust to the numerous workplace changes that made up the Rakuten corporate culture, much like American workers. Because this group worked in both a language and a culture that was not their own.
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