The ways in which people in various parts of the world manage time communicate very different meanings. Furthermore, these deeply ingrained ways of using time are often not on the conscious level, but can trigger highly charged emotional responses ranging from feelings of irreparable insult to outright exasperation.
Do we live that much longer?
If you have a ‘time is money’ mentality, the only thing you’re going to get in our region of the hemisphere is an ulcer; the result of expectations that are incompatible with deeply ingrained cultural norms for dealing with TIME in the Middle East.
A businessman invites another to lunch, promising to meet him at 11:00 am; at 1:30 pm, the guest has not seen or heard from his host, so he has lunch alone and returns to work. At 5:00 pm his host arrives and cheerfully announces that he has come to take him to lunch. The guest protests that he has already had lunch; the host is puzzled, wondering what urgency could have provoked such recklessness, after all, what did his guest have to do that was so important?
An IT company contracts for the delivery and installation of a new computer system on Friday so their client doesn’t have too much downtime. The customer would have preferred a weekend installation, but the IT assistants were not working on weekends. As it turned out, they also seemed to have a problem with weekdays, as no one showed up or bothered to explain until the exasperated customer called. “Oh, we have a problem, if we solve it we’ll try to get the job done before next Friday Inshallah!”
These cases demonstrate two diametrically opposed mentalities. One with underlying Western time values and the other Middle Eastern oriented. The objective is not to ‘judge’, but to see if these differences could affect our financial prosperity.
The ways in which people in various parts of the world manage time communicate very different meanings. Furthermore, these deeply ingrained ways of using time are often not on the conscious level, but can trigger highly charged emotional responses ranging from feelings of irreparable insult to outright exasperation.
Edward T. Hall in his study of how culture communicates without words, The Silent Language, makes some insightful observations. He identifies two constructs related to North American perceptions of time:
“Appreciation, expressed in the attitude that time itself is valuable and should not be wasted; Y
“Tangibility, expressed in the attitude that time is a commodity. It can be bought, sold, saved, spent, wasted, lost, offset, and measured.” It is these constructions that efficiently drive Western cultures to plan, develop systems to save time, forecast, set deadlines and financial goals. These are based on a linear view of time, stretching from the past to the future. These concepts are learned and distinctive of each culture.
What about our culture? How do you see time and how do these views affect business relationships, productivity and profitability? Do we need to make changes or concessions for business purposes?
I think the most fundamental difference lies in our perception of ‘fate’. These deeply held beliefs are verbalized in expressions of popular wisdom: il maktoub ma minoh mahroub (we cannot escape our destiny); al daher doulaab, marra illak or marra allayak, (time/luck is a wheel, once with you and once against you). The implication of these sayings is that man has no real control over the events of his life. How would planning for the future or even the concept of the future make sense in such a value system? In fact, proactivity could well be seen as challenging Fate and risking retaliation. In other words, time controls us.
In short, the main difference between North American and Middle Eastern TIME values is that one is an ageric culture and the other is a non-ageric culture. Edward T. Hall defines them as follows:
In AGERIC cultures, people believe that they have to act to get ahead or change conditions.
In NONAGENIC cultures, people believe that it doesn’t matter if you do something or not.
Think about the implications:
1. Time is not a valuable commodity in the Middle East, as it is beyond man’s control.
2. Money and success are based more on good fortune than human intervention.
3. Since time is not considered a linear continuum in the Middle East, the need to complete one task before starting another does not seem important. Hence the presence, in certain offices, of several people at the same time, each seeking a different service from the same official.
I am not suggesting that one set of values is superior to the other, but rather that we need to understand the different time language of each culture. We need to know the meaning of that language if we want to have good relations, be perceived as efficient, reliable and competitive in a global market that has become much more sensitive to the impact of cultural differences on the success and failure of international business relations. .
Hall identifies four isolates that communicate the language of time in each culture:
1. Urgency, communicated by the time and time of day in which the communication occurs.
2. Monochronism, communicated by the number of things that are done at the same time.
3. Activity, communicated by how it is perceived to be ‘busy’.
4. Variety, communicated by time intervals such as short or long duration.
How we handle these four time isolations determines whether or not an employer will feel insulted if we make them wait 10 minutes, show up an hour late, or reschedule more than once. Our treatment of time will also determine how other cultures will perceive our efficiency and reliability, and their willingness to trust us to do business with us. The time it takes to transfer and process information, to manufacture and deliver goods and services, and to conclude transactions will determine our competitiveness.
We need to understand and master the language of time as it is “spoken” by different cultures, a language more eloquent than words and more fundamental in managing change than A, B, C.
Remember, we are not immortal, so Inshallah, Boukra and Maaleysh, IBM, jokingly translated into Arabic, may not be our best formula for success.