Sometimes you're better off keeping quiet and ignoring the clock

What's worse: (A) getting interrupted when you talk or (B) getting no reaction? For Americans, the answer is probably B. While incessant interruptions can be annoying, silence can be destructive. When we speak in the US, we expect eye contact with audience members, and laughs, applause, and questions at the end. When the audience just sits in silence, it vexes us a great deal.

In some cultures, though, staying quiet while another speaks is of the utmost importance. In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review website, cross-cultural expert Erin Meyer tells of her frustrating experience presenting to a Chinese colleague who waited until the very end to assist in her presentation. The reason, she learned, wasn't malicious. Rather, Chinese people are taught to  sit quietly and wait until someone finishes speaking before saying anything.

The same can be said for how different cultures appreciate time. In another post, Meyer discusses the relative importance of time around the world, by comparing recent speaking engagements in the US and Brazil. In the US, the conference organizer kept Meyer on time with signs that indicated how many minutes were left in the session. In Brazil, her presentation got off to a late start, and exceeded the time allotted. But there, she was told she could have spoken even longer, given the interest of the crowd. Below is an excerpt from that Meyer's blog post:

In some cultures — such as the German, Dutch, British, Danish, Australian, and my own American cultures — we tend to value structure over flexibility. But in many of the world’s fastest growing countries, such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Russia and Nigeria, there is much more emphasis put on being flexible than on being structured.  In these cultures strongly emphasizing punctuality signals an inability to adapt and even a lack of priorities. 

Like most people, I don't like being late. But to me, the question of when to speak and when to shut up isn't just a question of time; it's a matter of respect. Arriving late to a class is unpleasant, even disrespectful; but leaving when an instructor goes a few minutes over time is just rude. So next time you're looking at the clock, think about the speaker who's waiting for a reaction and try to come up with a good question for the end.

If Life's Not Fair, Does Justice Matter?

Read enough blogs and e-books about leadership and success, and you'll see one bit of advice that overshadows all others: don't be a loser. Or, to be more precise: don't let a few losses keep you from winning in the end. This concept has created an endless number of platitudes that offer little comfort to the aggrieved: focus on wars instead of battles, be resilient in the face of adversity, and remember how long it took to build Rome. But embracing failure seems to deny one of our basic traits: a desire for justice.

If people are hardworking, kind, and generous, we want to see them rewarded with success; if they are hurtful or lazy, we want to see them punished. Our desires often don't become reality, leaving us with the conventional wisdom: "life's not fair" and "business is business." But the reality is that no matter how much we try to shake off this concept of justice,  we can't. Fairness is a part of us.

In a blog post today on the Harvard Business Review website, N.  Taylor Thompson, a fellow at Harvard University's Forum for Growth & Innovation, writes about how fairness is an integral factor in consumers' decisions. When Netflix decided to split its DVD and video streaming subscriptions two years ago from $10 total to $8 each, they expected to attract some customers interested in just one of the services eager to pay less for renting movies. But what happened? Many Netflix users considered the split an unfair price increase for the services and more than a million of them cancelled their subscriptions. What should Netflix have done? Explain why it had to raise prices. Maybe the company should have said how movie rights are more expensive on streaming video than on DVD, and that it wanted to provide as many movies as possible to its members? Or maybe it should have talked about the new costs associated with developing original content for subscribers, like the popular show House of Cards? No matter what, providing a reason would have been far better than telling people nothing. By sharing their rationale, Netflix executives would have shown that they wanted to be fair.