Cross Cultural Management in Campus Life

The classical cliché between educators and practitioners is always about: “can we adopt what we learn in the class to everyday life?” It’s been a lifelong argument between academics and practitioners, leaving the students in the middle.
When talking about subject like cross cultural management, it’s actually the other way around. Cross cultural is in everyday life. Even when you an Indonesian who never been abroad, when you carefully take a look, there are a lot of cross cultural encounters in our daily life. The challenge is then how to put down what we see and take for granted daily into something academic. Next challenge of course how to refer back what is in theory back to real life. It’s a continuous cycle which can be as interesting as well as tedious.
To make it “grounded” to real life, here are the list you can do in implementing Cross Cultural Management (CCM) in daily campus life:

1. Read your text book.

The textbook is the resourceful info about cross culture management. Without reading it, you don’t have a clue what is CCM.

Reading it is not as easy as it seems. As I said to my students in CCM class: “this is the kind of book where you need to read it by the pool and under the tree. Its higher level kind of book. In literature, it’s like reading Rosihan Anwar’s kind of book”. Unfortunately, most of my students don’t know Rosihan Anwar. Too bad So Sad.

2. Maintain & develop your cultural network

This can be by simply having lunch with your expatriate friend (if you have one), or asking questions when attending seminar with foreign guest lecturers

3. Join exchange program (obviously)

Joining exchange program can be a once-in-a-life-time experience to students. Going abroad, meet different nationalities, cook together with them, go to the local market: all are precious CCM encounters

4. Make a small CCM research

Just do it by making your friends as respondent to analyze the culture behavior of your fellow students. We can be very surprise with the result.

5. Try something unusually cultural

Such as write an email to a professor abroad regarding a subject relevant to you (e.g. thesis) and experience remote CCM

6. Bring Culture into your class

I once asked one of my college friend, a Peruvian who live in Canada as one of my guess teleconference speaker in my CCM class. He was happy to do it for free for me, despite the 12-hour time difference, and my class enjoyed it.

If you are a student: ask your lecturer if you can invite one of your pen-friend abroad into CCM class, in return of additional points

7. Last but not least. Pass the exam, so you are CCM- certified

Written by: Elia Oey – Faculty Member of IBM, Lecturer of GSCM, CCM & OM