Cross-Cultural Communication: When High-Context and Low-Context Cultures Collide (And No One Understands What Anyone Else is Saying) — Will a Japanese company appreciate your attempts to get right to the point? Will a German company become bored if you beat around the bush, instead of directly addressing your points? It’s obvious there seems to be a communication gap here. When the behavior of people from other countries and…

Unlearning How to School — It was a dark and stormy night (okay, it was actually a sunny afternoon but that just doesn’t have the same dramatic effect). I was sitting in my room, constantly refreshing my emails (final grades were supposed to be put in today) when I saw it. The subject line read…

It’s honestly a classic cycle and one that makes very little sense. Obviously before your first job you will have no experience or at least relevant experience…..which is why you want the job..duh. As a mentor to many of my peers and someone that loves sharing advice (yes, that’s a…

The annual SWE Conference, or WE, is the largest conference for women in engineering and technology, arranged by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), to allow professionals and collegiate members from around the world to network, grow, and inspire one another to unlock their potential. Now that sounds a…

Organizational Behavior and Cross Cultural Communication — The art of negotiation is very important in any business interaction dealing with various cultures. Before classifying what makes a successful negotiator from an unsuccessful negotiator, let’s define what negotiation is. Negotiating is the art of influencing and communicating with members of cultures other than your own, with the goal…

A Penny for Bill Joy’s Thoughts — Meet Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who played a crucial role in developing Java, Jini, and even VI. With his extensive experience, it’s no surprise he’s not a Luddite. In his renowned essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Joy expresses his concerns that modern technology could pose…

The Lonely and Emotional AI: Ethics in Artificial Intelligence — “The Lonely” is an episode of “The Twilight Zone” in which an inmate named Corry has been convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years of solitary confinement. Four times a year, the supply ship along with the crew meets him to hand off supplies and updates on a pardon…

The concept of sustainability was originally seen as an operational concern mostly left to companies to handle, but has now evolved into a new focus to reduce costs and increase innovation. Instead of asking either “how can we turn a profit?” or “how can we minimize our impact?” managers are…

Should a firm create value for the owners, or should it care about the balance between stakeholders? — An ongoing debate in managerial science can be expressed by the words “shareholder-value versus stakeholder-value”. In the recent past, global challenges like climate change have led to the cry for sustainability which can be regarded as the three-dimensional structure of economic, social and ecological objectives (Wall & Greiling 2011). …