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If you want to improve your understanding about these sort of differences between cultures, I highly recommend reading "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer.

The book The Culture Map goes through that and lot of other "Culture X is more Y than Z" in a readable level of detail.

Along these lines, it's worth reading The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It gives some interesting insight into how different cultures approach management and decision making. I think it also applies when thinking about people from within the same culture to some extent.

I can highly recommend “The Culture Map” which I’m about half way through right now. Really helped me wrap my head around this, and other cross-cultural communication pitfalls.

+1 for The Culture Map. I would recommend for both old timers and new comers to multi-national/ multi-cultural workplaces.

Again, you interpret everything through your prism. Sometimes it’s worth to be more empathetic and just go with it.

This book taught me to value my cultural norms less and be more accepting of others: “The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business”

I really liked book by Erin Meyer "The Culture Map" it gives a lot more insight into those kind of things. She is American that moved to France and was working with multicultural teams.

"Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd."

This approach depends very much on culture. For example, US culture is very much, get to the point, start with the conclusion. German culture requires you to outline how you got to the conclusion.

Interesting book on this topic: The culture map, by Erin Meyer. (https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Map-INTL-ED-Decoding/dp/16103...)

It has a whole chapter on this topic: 3 - Why versus How, the art of persuasion in the multicultural world.

> One of the great mysteries of the world is how Americans think they are so straightforward and direct and honest... and then they ask a German if their butt looks big in these pants, and burst into tears on hearing the answer.

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer goes into this a bit; one of the key traits she uses to assess cross-cultural communication is how directly cultures give/take negative feedback.

There are two things to reply to here from that book:

1. The stereotype for a lot of the world is that Americans are direct, much like you said here -- but this isn't the case for ALL types of communication.

2. There's a scale specifically for negative feedback from "direct" to "indirect" for various cultures and the US is shown in the middle of that scale.

The UK is also listed around the middle, but more toward the "indirect" side than the US.

For more extreme examples, Russia, Germany, and France are listed as tending toward more direct negative feedback, whereas Japan and Indonesia are listed as tending toward more indirect negative feedback.

It's a fascinating book that really opened my eyes about ways to perceive cultures and communication, so if this is anything you're at all interested in, I'd really recommend it.

> On a mildly more serious note, I remember well my first ever serious business meeting in the US, where we pitched a potential joint venture to another company. 30 minutes of mutual praise about the awesome potential of the idea and positive affirmations of how we're totally going to do this ensued... and immediately after we left, my (American) business partner dropped the smile, said "welp, that went badly" and stated that there was no way in hell they'd proceed.

This kind of situation is also discussed in the book! ;)

Edit: I bring this book up relatively frequently, but I'm not associated with the publisher or author at all. The book was an absolute revelation for me in that it gave me a way to conceptualize cultural differences rather than the traditional/stereotypical "good/bad" scale, so I like to pay it forward and recommend it to people who seem like they might be interested in it.

I'll second the recommendation for The Culture Map, I found it very useful.

Difficult Conversations is a very good book. I'd also recommend The Culture Map.

Yes, you do want to have those conversations where you try to discover and work through the reasons behind behavioral or performance problems.

When communicating the problem, however, you often need to communicate expectations. Discussing and listening to feedback on the expectations is vital. But clarity in presenting your view of the problem is just as vital, so as to be talking about the same thing.

The initial discussion I was responding to was about delivery of an assessment. You should have many conversations and observations before you reach the point of assessment. Once there, you've moved on to instigation of correction or improvement (either for you or for the other person, often both).

This isn't specifically about tech, but The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is really worth reading.

I'm not 100% sold on it being correct, but it does give you a framework to think within when you're working with other people, no matter which culture you're from.

Forbes have a decent write-up:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2014/10/06/the-culture...

Author of the essay here -- I know they say you shouldn't read the comments, but the discussion on here was so thoughtful I just had to create and account and jump in.

Two thoughts to this convo:

1. One thing it took a few years of living in Europe to learn is that what seems like a logical way to learn or convey information is also -- at least partially -- cultural. I'm an experience first kind of gal -- and I judge theories by how well they explain experience. I also think it's a better way to communicate. But here in Europe the standard way of giving, say, a presentation is to begin with all the theory, definitions, concepts, and only then move on to case studies.

It was when I read Erin Meyer's The Culture Map that the whole thing clicked for me. I think it's worth reading the whole book, but here's a quick summary: https://www.mdttraining.vn/post/on-our-bookshelf-the-cultura...

One of her axes of comparison is "principles first vs applications first." It helped me to realise that my preference for applications first was also due to spending all my formative years in North America, being taught this way, consuming media structured this way, and so on.

2. I actually finally bought Salt Fat Acid Heat this spring, started reading it, and just the chapter on salt has already begun making a difference in my cooking. I do think cooking proves you can do something badly, every day, for an entire lifetime, if you don't either get some better theory or carry out a lot of experimentation and remember what works.

However... the reason I bought the Nosrat book was that I was starting to be inspired by cooking again, and what motivated me in that end was the Ramsay course! It gave me that sense of exploration and play again. So I think it's worth paying attention to what increases motivation, especially with something that can become quite a dull chore.

> I have always felt uncomfortable with the concept of "inside face and outside face". It comes off as disingenuous and dishonest.

Or is the unsubtle expression of the concept uncomfortable?

Americans do the same thing; you can see this in the casual talk Americans also have with cashiers or wait staff. Just because you're friendly and chatting doesn't mean you actually want to be friends and go out and do something together.

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer expresses this idea as a spectrum from a peach to a coconut: on the one end, you get a soft exterior with a hard interior; on the other, a hard interior with a soft exterior. The point though, is that everyone does this -- just in a different way.

I've known some Japanese people who've gone to the US, been confronted with the super friendly casual American attitude, then been horribly offended when it turned out that that friendliness wasn't "real." Part of this is the stereotype that Americans are "honest and direct," and part of this is that Americans tend toward the peach end of the spectrum, while Japanese people tend toward the coconut end.

A book called The Culture Map goes into this. You basically have low confrontational and high confrontational cultures.

I found that understanding the differences helped a lot when I started work in an extremely culturally diverse company.

https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

https://www.peterfisk.com/vault-entry/xl-culture-map-erin-me...

For anyone interested in this type of cultural difference, I would strongly recommend Erin Meyer's "The Culture Map" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSXNFJQ), which presents and argues for a series of scales that create a heuristic useful for comparing (not judging!) different cultures.

The goal is to realize and understand the differences so that you can anticipate and cope despite culture gaps.

I've read it myself, had two coworkers read it, and have recommended it to numerous other people who work in multicultural contexts and everyone has found it useful and insightful. It really recalibrated my personal way of looking at the world and people from other cultures.

Your approach sounds like a confrontational approach. In "The culture map" it is described that the US culture is far less confrontational than e.g. France. It might be difficult to engage in a discussion without disclaimers such as "let me play devil's advocate". As in this book is explained, an American was wondering why the French at the dinner table were laughing together after a heated discussion on a topic short before. A discussion is not a personal attack. However, in the US it is quicker felt this way.

Hence, that people are not trapped in filter bubbles should not be countered by an argument based on a personal confrontational approach about how constructively they engage in political discussions.

On the subject: I highly recommend "The culture map" book.

It provides a dozen of dimensions on communication and compares on real world examples how American, German, French, Chinese, Japanese and several other nationalities approach certain situations, and summarizes each dimension with a scale and puts each country in the left/middle/right.

https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

It talks things like "why X are so aggressive and direct" and "why Y are so $adjective".

You seem to have a conflict with your altruistic ideals and those of your employer. Note that a business is not a "social contract", and it is not a "co-operative".

It may be worthwhile to spend time understanding this closed culture, the decision making, and its overall impact on the business. I recommend reading "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer.