Page 147 - Harnessing the Strengths

130 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

When important activities need to be planned on “favorable
days,” possibilities for production become more limited. In
this respect, you need a lot of patience.
People in linear cultures often feel overwhelmed when
they have to deal with a barrage of people in an unstruc-
tured way. The tendency for people in crowded spaces to not
form a line but to all simply press forward together can, for
people who are not used to it, feel like an invasion of their
personal space. Perhaps the thing that annoys the sequen-
tially (linearly) oriented Americans and northern Europeans
the most is the synchronic (parallel) tendency of people to
make, in their minds, inappropriate claims on their time—
for example, by being late for appointments.
The way in which people in different cultures structure
time has consequences for business practices. Take a simple,
everyday example of buying food in the delicatessen. In coun-
tries with a sequential time orientation, such as in the United
States, Great Britain, or the Netherlands, you might fi gura-
tively or literally “take a number” when you walk into the
store, which tells you your place in the line. The person behind
the counter helps each person in the order of arrival before he
or she moves on to the next one. This is an effi cient system.
It is not, however, the only system that works. The pro-
cess can happen completely differently. Take for example
the delicatessen in Italy, where if you ask the shop’s butcher
for salami, there is a good chance that he will call through
the store, “Anyone else here who wants salami?” and in one
action will take care of all the salami orders for the remain-
ing customers on the premises. This is also an effi cient sys-
tem. The salami has to be unwrapped only once and the
knife cleaned only once as well. Moreover, this process
promotes a social interaction between the clients who have
something in common—in this case, the desire for salami.