Last Saturday we reviewed Financial Information and started looking at another cultural comparison. We did simulation of Financial Analysis at the beginning of the class and then moved onto analyzing income statement of Yahoo! Inc.
It was the first time for me to view financial information of the company and I found it very interesting.
Everyone knows Yahoo! Inc. to be a large internet portal where we can get a lot of information like employment and business opportunities, and investors relations through its search engine.
A lot of people use the portal site everyday for news, blog or emails but not many knows who founded Yahoo! Inc., its size and financial situation. Such information can be easily found if you searched for it on the internet but usually people don't care less about these things.
After that we did a new cultural comparison. It was about Individualism and Collectivism.
People in individualistic cultures focus more on their own personal interests while people in collectivist cultures are more concerned with the interests of the group.
In business, if we launch a product in collectivist cultures, people belonging to the same culture tend to buy the same product family so one can sell many products in that group but if we launched a product in individualistic cultures, such principle will not apply and cannot achieve large sales because people in individualist cultures focus on “I” and people in collectivist cultures focus on “We”.
United States, Switzerland and Australia are individualistic countries and China, Peru, Guatemala and Indonesia are collectivist countries.
Nepal is also in collectivist because there are many ethnic groups and languages and they emphasize belonging to groups, extended family relations, social loyalty, and community harmony. They stress a “we” identity and look after the in-group in exchange for loyalty.
What is the culture of your nation? Is it individualistic or collectivistic?
We also learnt that no culture or society is 100 percent collectivist or individualist.
After looking at culture, we learnt comparison skills. We practiced job interviews in English. There were two characters in an interview and we played both roles in turns.
Then, we had a small talk about the differences between the ways of writing Japanese resumes and English resumes. A lot of details are included in English resumes, such as work experience and other activities, whereas in Japanese, there are no details so you write all that on a different sheet of paper.
English resumes are to be in reverse chronological order (from new to old) but Japanese are usually in chronological order.
To sum up my day, I learnt many new things in Business English which are very important for any business person to be successful.
