Is "Culture" Just a Convenient Excuse for Management Failure?

Stop blaming 'culture' for management failure. It's an easy excuse. The best managers focus on specific, local issues.

The peril of cultural generalization in business analysis

When a French retail company asked me to discuss "Asian Business Culture," I felt an immediate frustration, echoing a notorious 1930s sentiment: "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver." While not actually said by Hermann Goering, the phrase captures the problem perfectly. Culture, like generalizing about entire nations or groups, is a tempting but often problematic subject of inquiry.

To approach the "culture question," I devised a three-level scale of sophistication. The lowest level is simply blaming a business problem on 'the culture' without further thought. This is an easy excuse, suggesting the manager doesn't understand the challenge but finds it convenient to blame the locals.

The second level involves mentioning 'the culture' but attempting an economic, political, or social explanation. This can be almost as crude as the first. For example, a manager might call the Japanese 'infantile', unknowingly recycling discredited theories from decades ago—a habit that surprisingly persists.

The highest, most enlightened level is when the manager drops the word culture entirely. Instead, they focus on the specific experiences of their colleagues and customers, creating a reasonable and informed explanation for any difficulties. At this level, deep market knowledge replaces easy generalizations.

Yet, despite my suspicion of the term, I admit culture does inform our individual 'flavour' or outlook. Culture, which derives from 'to cultivate,' can be defined as 'a set of deep value systems and reflexes which are hard to de-programme and which you share with your broader community.' However, I stress a vital caveat: these systems are the result of specific events and choices, not inherent or unchangeable qualities.

In Asia, the most important specific event of the last 200 years is undoubtedly the experience of Western imperialism. Being colonized or exploited was a traumatic encounter, one of physical and psychological violence. It represents a great caesura, affecting both internal national dynamics and international relations.

It is tempting to sneer at Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia as 'sleazy' and corrupt, contrasting them with the disciplined, manufacturing-focused, and education-worshiping North Asian nations (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan). This North/South cultural analysis is profoundly wrong for two reasons.

First is the role of outside factors. After 1945, the US, as the regional hyper-power, initially encouraged effective land reform in North Asia, fostering rich farmers and domestic markets.

As the Cold War intensified, the US retreated from similar policies in Southeast Asia (due to anti-Communist fears), leading to exploited farm workers and vast inequalities—a legacy still visible today.

Second is the importance of individuals. Leaders like South Korea’s Park Chung-hee were brutal but possessed an extraordinary ambition to build a manufacturing superpower. They disciplined their tycoons and forced a focus on exports. In contrast, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, despite his professed admiration for North Asia, failed to pressure his tycoons for export-focused manufacturing, resulting in a nation that stagnated relative to its northern counterparts.

If culture is a product of specific events, it can change. We saw this with China's shift from friendliness to xenophobia, and Japan’s transformation from a militarist, racist society in the 1940s to the polite, high-tech, pacifist nation celebrated at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Finally, focus on your immediate company environment. Your company's culture is far more likely to be the result of its own specific past events than of a link to the national culture. Foreign managers often feel disoriented in Asia, over-reacting to perceived differences (e.g., calling Japanese staff indirect or uncreative). This often leads them to assert their own 'cultural credentials' of being 'tough' and 'in charge,' creating a pointless culture clash that distracts from the actualproblems: poor leadership, marketing, or HR practices.

If you clarify these issues—macro and micro—in your mind, you will arrive at a more authentic understanding of your host country, making that metaphorical revolver completely unnecessary.