An Irish executive broke the thin glacial silence in the loo with a puffy fart. There was a sudden moment of stillness among the others busy leaking into wall closets. The Irish guy laughed out and made the inappropriate exhaust looked funny. It worked …others too felt it was an uncontrollable funny moment of air seepage. I too felt the same….but then does an exhaust from an eastern outlet would be treated the same? It would have easily brought in an air of embarrassment and questioned the very basis of personal hygiene and public conduct.
Along with the English language, corporate culture moulded in the cold speckles corners of the western boardrooms over the decades, by spirited men in cotton blended woollen suits, has entrenched the world (at least the common wealth nations and other territories where the west had influenced) in building and fine tuning the governance framework.
Hence the corporate cultural symbols are mostly western and every new entrant, naively gazing at the maze ahead, is expected to pick up the nuances and ever evolving cultural ethics at a pace that demands an instant metamorphosis.
If your pedigree had not peeped out of the fringes of small towns and highland villages then you are in for tough days. You are always on the lookout of being conscious of being relentlessly right in the way you exchange greetings while meeting clients, conducting oneself at meetings, having the fork on left and knife on the right and clearing the cutlery from outside working towards the big white china; and of lately to be seen in corporate power lunches having more of salads, brown and high fibre breads and fruits.
The east had always been tolerant to new cultures, religion and food habits and so for the corporate culture as well. A typical bollywood adaptation of a local would be a bhaiya in white dhoti and baniyan with a one room office adjacent to the go down/whole sale outlet perched on the glazed floor bending forward resting their overgrown belly and elbows on a wooden desk cum drawer that opens up to accommodate bundles of cash and registers that need to be used ad hockly. A few meters away an assistant, one of the few lads who had done well at the village school especially in arithmetic, would be eyeballing a thick register with a convex spine -like a rainbow- changing colours to suit the bhaiya’s temperament.
From a floor level desk-cum-drawer to a boardroom, it’s been a huge leap. It’s a fine balance between the real self that’s evolved over years picking up slices of life from the people and the stories around and the sudden impact of a whole new way of life that eats up half of your adult life.
At a time when the West is incorporating more of the Eastern techniques in exploring the power of the inner self into the corporate culture, may be its time for the East to redraw the blue print for a corporate culture rooted in the ancient secrets of power of the mind together with preserving the creators balance of the life’s forces.
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