Ellen Stoddard-Jones: Native American Culture

Ellen Stoddard-Jones, 35, was a sales representative with a multinational data systems company headquartered in New York. She was a capable and ambitious graduate with a dual M. B. A. / Ph. D. from a prestigious European university. Most of her company’s international business was conducted in Europe and Japan while China was a growing market for its products. Ellen was recently transferred to be responsible for the Far East market. And she was fixed a schedule of the third time in two years to meet with representatives of a very large Taiwanese distributor whose product lines fit those of her company.

Ellen’s first trip to Taiwan had been basically positive, but somewhat unsettling. Very little business was discussed as she expected. Some
As the case is related to the issue of culture, we should know what a culture is firstly. There are varieties of definitions for culture based on people’s different perspectives. One definition I think the most appropriate is “culture means the values and perspectives shared by people who are conditioned by similar education and life experience” (Extract from MIT Sloan Paper). As researchers state that culture is not inherent but learnt. Where there you are, whose culture you will learn. In the case, Ellen was a Native American and always worked in US. What she said and did was all in American’s way. While Chen Wu-ping came from and lived in Taiwan which made his behavior was significantly branded with Taiwanese’s culture. And culture can encompass variety of experiences. These kinds of experiences are accumulated in the region (country, area and community) you are, the business (industry, company and department) you are with, and the group (school and club) you are in. Ellen engaged in a multinational company and most of her company’s international business was conducted in Europe and Japan. We may say that she knew very much about the culture of European and Japanese and had her own style to do business with European people and Japanese people, while Chinese culture was still new for her then she didn’t know very exactly how to deal with the Taiwanese people. Before her first trip to Taiwan, her
Ellen was not so patient enough to accept the Taiwanese way of doing business. She felt frustrated with Taiwanese’s slow approach to achieve business goals on her first trip. Then she surprised on the Taiwanese’s modest in their firm’s qualifications. In the final trip, she could not control her emotion but argued her products would be the best one for Taiwanese company. She could not wait another longer time for Taiwanese’s consideration of the proposal.

Empathy—it means you put yourself in another’s position and to anticipate another’s reaction to a situation. From the above analysis, Ellen placed great importance on her own proposal but could not put herself in the Taiwanese position to think about what they really concerned about. She laid stress on her company’s reputation and its advantageous products but ignored showing respect to the Taiwanese’s