Chapter 5: Time

Overview

Once upon a time, many years ago, in a large wooded country in Northern Europe, a powerful and prosperous company had its headquarters. Naturally the company had a mighty leader (let s call him ML for short), a very important man, and many less important people called managers .

One day one of the big managers (we ll call him BM for short) decided to hold a meeting with a lot of his less important managers and even some non-managers too (they are called workers ). He also invited ML to come to tell everyone about how well the company was doing.

Anyway, the day dawned and those invited assembled in a big room to hear how BM s staff were about to launch an exciting new development in a country far away that would make the whole company rich beyond its wildest dreams.

The seconds ticked away. It was time to start, but ML wasn t there. Another sixty seconds, and still he had not arrived. Three more minutes ticked away as people looked uneasily at each other. After five minutes BM stood up. Lock the doors, he said. People looked at each other. Had their ears deceived them? Lock the doors, he repeated, and added, The time for waiting is past. We will start now. And they did.

After three more minutes ML arrived. His attendants tried the door but they couldn t get in. Their faces were red, and ML s face was a delicate shade of purple. But there was no help for it; they had to go all the way back to their offices and miss the fun!

Inside the locked doors everyone was very happy that BM had stood up for his principles, because everyone knows that being punctual is a sign of respect for other people, and that people who are regularly late for appointments sooner (or possibly later) will end up in a Very Bad Place Indeed.

Of course this all happened a long time ago and both ML and BM have gone their separate ways. But whenever people in the powerful and prosperous company in the north are tempted to make just one more phone call or finish an important piece of work before going to their meeting, they remember the story of ML and BM, and they put down their receivers and switch off their PCs and hurry down the corridor to their appointments.

Anybody not born and brought up in one of the relatively small number of clock-obsessed cultures (led by the Nordic countries , Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and followed by among others the U.K., the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore) is going to find the above fairy tale impossible to believe. However, I know that the main points of the story are true. The CEO of a large Swedish multinational corporation was locked out of an important meeting by a manager because he came late. And equally surprising, perhaps, was that the manager didn t lose his job and was generally admired for his actions.

There are two main ways of looking at this story:

• You regard the manager who locked the door as a power-mad petty dictator with a bizarre set of priorities, focused on rules and details, and lacking in respect for his senior. After all, what s a few minutes in the scheme of things?

• You applaud a man who by his actions said the same rules apply to everyone, and that the rule of punctuality is an indicator of your respect for your fellow men and women. Wasting someone s time is not only rude, but it is a sign of inefficiency, or worse , arrogance .

The alternative you choose indicates which culture you come from. It also gives an indication of your own individual perception of time, because we don t all conform to our cultural stereotypes when it comes to punctuality. Of course, many Germans and Swedes always arrive late at meetings, just as the only person I know who has never been late for anything is a Spaniard (who obviously doesn t share the ma ±ana mentality that is supposed to characterize many Latin cultures).

Punctuality is about prioritizing clock time above other things, whether that means leaving a discussion unfinished , a task uncompleted, or a colleague ungreeted. People who follow clock time believe they are being efficient, but is that always the case? Many cultures, like Turkey, India, and most of Latin America and the Middle East, believe that time is an endless rolling cycle in which many things can be done at once. They also believe that time includes what you want it to and should not be used to exclude activities that do not happen to fit into neat bite- sized pieces.

The area of intercultural contact where problems and misunderstandings are most likely to arise is how we regard time. How we divide it up, the practical and symbolic value we place on it, and what it s for are all questions that divide cultures, but because it s easier to define differences in the way we present business cards or hold our cutlery, it s an area that is often ignored.

Whichever group you fall into (the clock watchers or the more relaxed types who believe that time is elastic and will always stretch sufficiently to allow them to do what is important), you will have to spend some time trying to understand the other group if you don t want to drive your counterparts crazy. Why not arrange a meeting to discuss the subject? Just make sure you arrive on time!

• MORAL We grow up with attitudes and beliefs about time that we rarely question. When we go abroad it s important to re-examine them.