kuechenserver.org

Tag: Travel

  • National pride

    Normally, I make it a personal principle to not blog about my job. However this job brings me to many different places in all different countries and one of these trips – the most recent one – nurtured my wish to share a few thoughts about national pride:

    This week I had the questionable pleasure to visit France once again. I’ve only been there for a little more than 24 hours, spending a good 10 of them in business meetings of all kind (Dinners with business partners, technical meetings and the like).

    And guess what? A good 95% of all communication was done in French. Of course. I do understand this to a degree – at least we are in France – but even though I made it crystal clear that I simply can’t speak let alone understand this language to a degree I’d call acceptable, nobody even tried to integrate me into a longer conversation. Of course, there were some small talk tries in English, but they faded away once we were 5 minutes into a discussion.

    On the other hand, I’ve been to e.g. Russia, Belarus, Jordan, India, Italy and Slovenia on business trips; countries where I feared greater language related problems. But, to my surprise, most of those countries seem to host a great deal of language wizards; in Slovenia for example to my surprise most people working in the service industry were fluent in at least two foreign Languages, English and German. And most of them also claimed to be able to speak a good bit of Italian on the side.

    But, it seems that there is not a big deal of English spoken in France and even if the people get along with the language, they feel that it’s unnecessary to switch to a language everybody in the room can understand.

    This is of course not so much the case in multi-national companies, but there is also the tendency to fall back to your local language.

    I myself also feel more comfortable in speaking German among Germans, especially when being in Germany – but within our company, where English is the official company language despite the fact that we are a German company, we even hold meetings with 40+ participant in English if there are only one or two non-Germans in them. So I know both sides, the one that prefers the native language, the other one that doesn’t want to exclude somebody from the discussion.

    Maybe it’s arrogant to go to a foreign country and expect to come along with English and German only, maybe it’s something you should be able to expect – I can’t tell. But, it seems that countries with better language skills can take part in the Global knowledge transfer; countries with little foreign language knowledge – e.g. China – on the other hand, seem to be cut out.

    I wonder how you would react if you had a guest from abroad in a meeting. Would you carry on with your native language? Would you try and switch the whole meeting to English? Is it okay to hold a meeting in English, if you have 40 participants and two of them can’t speak the local language? Is it on the other hand maybe even necessary?

    How much national pride is too much pride?

    I’m really interested in your thoughts about that. And thank all the French people I’ve met along the way who took the extra effort to communicate in English – especially Gwenael, whom I haven’t met for a way too long time.

  • Feeling private when being on the road

    It always shocks me, how private some people feel, when being on the road. I myself have written hundreds of E-Mails on a train, read plenty of confidential prensentations, heck even worked on (probably) classified documents for my customers. It took me about four years and this nice foil that 3M sells for a magnitues more expensive than the production price could possibly be in order to realize that this is wrong.

    Most of my fellow travellers however still mistake trains / airplanes and the according train stations / lounges / gates for something they are not: a private work environment.

    Probably none of them would ever think about disclosing their health status via phone on the train, though they deal with data sometimes even more sensitve than that on a daily basis in public.
    I turned this into a kind of sport. I try to find out for which company the person sitting next to me is working by just glimpsing on the notebook screen every now and then.

    Physical security is one of the couterstones of every security concept, so is controlling access to corporate information. I’ve worked with major companies on this topics, I’ve helped selling a vast amout of technologies to acomodate this, though the simplest of all rules – keep private things private – seems to not apply in public transport.

    I remember a nice comic that a large german computer magazine (c’t) printed a couple of years ago, showing a businessman in a crowded subway reading out his credit card’s digits and security information to his secretary over the phone – followed by “but don’t use anything less than AES-256 encrypted SSL connections”. Yeah, right. For all who thought that this was something that could never happen: it happened to me just a couple of weeks ago in a train, not with a credit card, but with Google Mail login + password.

    Phone conversations tend to be more public than notebooks; though noone barely leaves the seat when recieving or even placing a phone call nowadays. I’ve not learned about passwords, IT projects, live breakups on the phone, but also about various erotic adventures (or at least chances not taken), familiy matters and views on colleagues or superiors.

    Of course the ever-working businessman just HAS to be reachable and work all the time; that’s at least what the big telco companies, smartphone vendors, notebook producers want us to believe. But please: have you ever been so important that working on a concept or answering a phone call couldn’t wait 3-4 hours? If yes, have you had the chance to finish said document or place said call hours, days or weeks before traveling?

    See? Procrastination is a big problem, more and longer travel times combined with us being told to feel guilty to not work when traveling adds up to the problem. But the easy solutions, like discipline, privacy or not doing anything for a moment just don’t come that easily to one’s mind. Maybe it’s the people’s fear of not being important?

    And now for something completely different:

    I’ve decided to try to a) blog a little bit more, b) try to focus on security related topics (for more presonal things, you can follow my twitter account) and c) try to reach a broader audience by switching the language.
    Hope you’ll enjoy.