In another foray into a new sub-culture, I went this week to a One Day Academy run for members of FEIEA: the association of in house communications professionals from a range of European multi-national companies. They were discussing the filters that condition our perceptions hoping this might help identify how people often manage to confuse impressions with reality. These filters might be between cultures, or generations or disciplines or any or all of these.

Presentations looked at those problems not always thought about or even imagined when legal documents are signed and a company merger or acquisition takes place across borders. These situations involve not just the feelings of fear and mistrust amongst employees as they move into a new world but those of building a new working culture out of different languages, histories, hierarchies, and attitudes to work.

English in its multifarious forms currently serves as a sort of communications glue across Europe.

One speaker who had been through mergers with three large pharmaceutical companies remembered how in the early 1990s the need for the creation of corporate cultures .. the arrival of the mission statement inter alia .. had been scoffed at by the English in particular as just the newest form of American Business-school speak and summarily dismissed! At that stage it might still just about have been the case that the directors of many companies assumed from each other a similar ethos - maybe they had even been to the same school - and being English did not have to ask what underlying values were. But with a realisation that in a globalised world we come from different backgrounds with different experiences and values, that era is well and truly over. A lack of some statement of values, some unifying framework which reassures, recognises and respects difference whilst integrating into a new culture can make or break a company.

During one of the coffee breaks a group of Austrians asked me "Why is everyone wearing that red paper poppy? What does it mean?" We talked about remembrance day, about how the Poppy appeal started, how it remains such a well known part of British life and how poppy sales continue to raise money for ex-servicemen from recent and current wars. In today's business-speak it is a symbol which has huge "buy-in". More humanly put it is symbol which found an immediate and lasting place in people's hearts.

Watching the Cenotaph ceremony on Sunday morning when not just the Royal Family, PM etc presented their poppy wreaths but also all the High Commissioners from those countries which had been part of the British Empire as they remembered and honoured their own dead, it struck me very clearly how Empires and identities do change and some things endure. Companies and countries alike today seem to be actively seeking an ethos which unites and where people can fit together - not an easy thing to do: consultation, decision-taking, leadership, symbols and even mottos are all part of this. Current debate in the columns of "The Times" to choose a five word motto to sum up modern Britishness make for very funny reading in a very British way but maybe conceals a few deeper truths.

And so we all struggle with questions of identities built around shifting interests and new groupings or completely ignore them and wait for coming generations to accept or reject new symbols or choose their own.

www.feiea.com

www.britishlegion.org.uk/content/History-of-the-Poppy-Appeal-508925.shtml

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2007/11/i-want-comment-.html

PeterBeckett
13 Dec 02:19 pm

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