The Elements of Culture

Start here In your home, guests take off their slippers at the door. Nobody wrote this rule. Nobody taught it in school. Yet everyone follows it. Where did it come from? That is what culture is about.

In 2003, Prof. Shiva Subramaniam was working at TCS. A friend in Amsterdam asked him to give a talk on how to do business with India. He had never done anything like it. He still said yes.

The Dutch business people loved it. After that, he travelled from country to country giving talks on culture.

His lesson for you:

• When someone asks you to do something new, say yes.
• At worst, you will do it badly. At best, you will grow in confidence.
• Often, other people have more confidence in us than we have in ourselves.

If you never leave your village, you may not need it. But even a trader who travels 500 km must know what to do, and what not to do, in someone else’s house.

Today, many of us sit at home and work for clients in the US, Norway or Italy. If you understand their way of doing things, you grow faster as a person and at work. This makes you a global citizen.

Lecture example — the notebook The professor asks every learner to keep a notebook called “Being a Global Citizen”. Use a pen. Write your answers to every question in this week. Keep adding to it all your life.

Culture is a set of shared beliefs, values, norms and practices that belong to a group, an organisation or an institution.

Think of 100 people in 5 groups of 20. Each group has its own shared rules:

People inside a group are similar. The groups are different from each other. Each group is a culture.

1. Passed down. We learn culture from earlier generations. My father told me, his father told him, and so on.
2. It works without thinking. It gives us common attitudes, codes of conduct and expectations. They guide us subconsciously. Even when a host says “keep your slippers on”, you still take them off.
3. Born into it, not born with it. No baby is born with a culture. We are born into one. We slowly take it in from family and people around us. This is called socialisation.

In one line: Culture is the set of shared beliefs, values, norms and practices of a group, passed down from generation to generation. Exam words: culture, shared beliefs, values, norms, practices, subconscious, born into it, socialisation, global citizen.

Think of a trip to another country, or even another state. India is a great place to learn this, because every state has its own food, festivals and language.

Write down three kinds of differences in your notebook:

Learning about culture made the professor stop being judgmental.

• No culture is “better” or “worse”. Every culture has its own reasons.
• You don’t have to agree with another culture. You can keep your own culture.
• Just observe, like a biologist looking closely at a leaf.

Everyday example A classmate from another state eats with a spoon. You eat with your hand. Neither is wrong. Each of you just learned a different way at home.

Only about one-tenth of an iceberg is above the water. About nine-tenths is hidden below. Culture is the same.

Most of the time, we judge a culture by what is above the water. But the reasons for what we see are always under the water.

So if a dress in France looks strange to you, don’t say “this is not nice”. Dive under the water and find out why people dress that way.

In one line: We see only the top of a culture (food, dress, language); to understand it, look at the hidden part below (values, time, work, communication). Exam words: iceberg principle, visible vs invisible culture, don’t judge, observe.