Full Circle Associates

Dina Mehta recently completed a 4 part blog series on Insights on Technology Adoption in India. Four blog posts worth reading not just for the Indian perspective, but the reminder that cultural context matters.

At CTC last week, Jason Fried gave an amusing and interesting (video, windows media) rant about virtual teams. He offered some pieces of pretty concrete advice, but little to no cultural context. His advice, while it may have proven integral to 37 Signal's success, is by no means useful in every context. I could recognize the value of some of the advice in my experience, and I was nodding in recognition. "Collaboration is about communication and not about control." Amen! And in some of the advice I was shaking my head saying, that would not be true in other contexts. Or idealized. Control is not always bad, but bad control is always bad. Am I making sense with this?

I assume Jason was trying to be amusing and play the rebel role he seems to relish. We need attitude and cheek. His talk was engaging and amusing. But his approach also reminded me that we tend to have very ego/cultural/domain centric views of the world and try to assume our practices have meaning and value in other contexts. Our cultural blinders and our arrogance may be amusing, but is it useful? (I'm holding myself accountable for my own arrogance - or at least trying.)

Context rules. Dina's series is a useful reminder.

Postscript --> related post by the Anecdote folks on Perspectives on Problem Solving

Tags: culture, virtualteams, DinaMehta