Tight vs. Loose Cultures: Why it Matters for Support
It’s awfully difficult to break the world into two parts, and while the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World would very much like us to believe that there are two types of culture in the world, tight and loose, she has to resort to unhealthy contortions (and a few willful oversights) to do so.
But some of her observations are intriguing, and applicable to the support field. When working across cultures, it’s useful to understand tight cultures, where order, self-regulation, and status quo are important, and loose cultures, which foster innovation, adaptability, and a bit of chaos. Not surprisingly, the author qualifies India as having a tight culture, the US (and others, notably the Netherlands and Israel) as having a loose culture, with Germany, the UK, and Japan more in the middle.
How are you managing your international teams and customer groups in a multicultural environment?