Page 303 - Cultures and Organizations

272 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

He proudly presented it at a conference of country managers from IBM’s
African region.
Geert’s announcement met with less enthusiasm than he had expected.
During the ensuing break the country manager of IBM-Ghana, one of the
fi rst Africans to have reached this level, stood next to Geert in the men’s
room and told him in his deep voice, “I want the American test for my
people.”
This true story tells us that the problem of selecting personnel in the
African subsidiaries of IBM was not a lack of skills: given the same care to
the process as is usual in other countries, enough capable candidates could
be selected. However, to the African country manager, this was a matter
not of solving a problem but of satisfying his national pride, which he felt
to be hurt by the fact that his compatriots would not get the same test as
the Americans. 81
Africa, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is a development econo-
mist’s headache. In 2009 thirty-two of the forty poorest countries in the
82
world were African. African countries are plagued by a population explo-
sion, with growth rates of 3 percent annually, leading to a doubling of the

population within twenty-five years. They are also plagued by AIDS and
other epidemics (which may be nature’s answer to the population explosion);
by extremely bloody wars and massacres (man’s answer); and by ineffective
governments perceived as corrupt and as enemies by their own people.
In many of the fifty African states, with a few favorable exceptions, basic

government tasks such as health care have deteriorated or disappeared.
The extreme case is Somalia, which Siad Barre, president since 1969,
fled in 1991, leaving the country in chaos in the hands of competing war-

lords. Foreign interventions by Americans and Ethiopians were unsuc-
83
cessful. In the 2000s the Somalis hit the world news as highly profi cient
pirates hunting commercial vessels for ransom, and there was no govern-

ment that could be held responsible.
It was evident that Western logic often did not apply in Africa. The
example of Bond’s Chinese Value Survey led Geert to suggest a similar
exercise for Africa: asking Africans to develop a values questionnaire,
administer this instrument in both African and non-African countries,
and see whether any new dimension emerged that explained why Western
recipes for development don’t seem to work in Africa.
The project was undertaken at Geert’s former institute, the Institute
84
for Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC), by his successor, Niels