John Cole: Well good morning, good afternoon,
and welcome to the Library of Congress
[ Library ]  . I'm John Cole, I'm the director of the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress, which was created many years ago
to promote books and reading and literacy and libraries.
One of the ways we do it is through programming here
at the Library of Congress.  We're pleased to have authors of current books speak to us
and to have their books signed.  For us a book signing goes along with getting to know an author.
Most of the books that authors who appear here --
all of the authors who appear here under our auspices -
are addressing topics of particular interest to the Library of Congress,
or they've used their books, they've used the Library's collections
in order to write their books.  And today, of course, is no exception.
The topic and our speaker are of great interest to the Library,
and that is proven by the fact that this program is co-sponsored
by the Hispanic Division -- Georgette Dorn is here.
And also by the Office of Workforce Diversity -- and Gil
[ Gilbert ]  Sandate is here.
And we're very pleased to have this particular program co-sponsored
by these other organizations.  Many of you know our speaker, Ned Crouch.
I did not know Ned until we started talking
about this particular program.  His topic, Mexicans and Americans, is a wonderful topic
to which he's brought great thought and foresight and experience.
He has, Ned was raised in a diplomatic family,
lived in Colombia, France, Spain and Mexico.
As many of you know he speaks five languages,
and he has spent a lifetime examining the cultural dynamics
and differences of people from different countries.
For more than 30 years, he helped global companies expand business
opportunities in Mexico, and he's conducted seminars
on developing intercultural relationships in Mexico
for many multinational corporations including General Motors
and Chrysler.  It's my pleasure to introduce Ned Crouch.
Ned?  [ applause ]
Ned Crouch: Thank you, John.  John Cole is a gentleman and a scholar,
and I appreciate your introduction.  And I would also like to thank Gil Sandate who John mentioned,
Director of the Office of Workforce Diversity
and also Dr. Georgette Dorn -- both gentle people and scholars, too.
I would also like to thank the United States/Mexico Chamber
of Commerce, "Latina Style Magazine,"
and other organizations including the Organization of Women
in International Trade who sent out e-mails
to their constituency announcing  that this talk would be taking place.
John, thank you for that biography that you gave
of me, but it's all lies.  [ laughter ]
Ned Crouch: That came from the publisher.
The fact is I never graduated from the first grade.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: But let me tell you how that happened.
I was sitting in class and it was April 9, 1948,
and I was in the first grade and that's toward the end of the year,
as you can imagine, but I was in Bogota, Colombia,
and that day a revolution broke out and all
of the international community went running for cover.
And that revolution ended up lasting 10 years and took 400,000 lives.
Well needless to say that was the end of my first grade.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: I and my family survived, thankfully.
We went on, lived in France, and in France I learned how to be a snob.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: And then I came back to the United States.
I went to the United States and went to St. Albans
[ School ]  ; it was my first year in the United States, and that was right here.
And I'm delighted to say I have classmates from some
of the five schools I went to in this area.
I went to 17 schools in 17 years, but I'm fine.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: Went on to live in Spain.
And in Spain I had a unique experience too.
I need a guinea pig from the audience, you, sir,
would you be my guinea pig?  Could you stand up here?
You know in Spain I went to La Salle Bonanova, a La Salle school,
and there they had brothers and we were supposed to kiss their hands.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: Would you pretend you're a Spanish priest?
Male Speaker: Okay.  [ laughter ]
Ned Crouch: Like this.  Okay now hold out your hand like that.
Okay, now I was supposed to kiss the brother's hands and I would say,
"Buenos das, hermano," like that.  Now if you missed that; I held his hand, but I kissed my own hand.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: Thank you, sir.
You were a great guinea pig.  He was a little nervous there for a while.
And that's the way I learned how to cope with different cultures:
always being an American, you know,  and not doing things exactly the way other people did,
but still getting along and respecting other people's cultures.
And I started learning how  to duck cultural bullets at a very early age.
And later on when I got into my business career, I saw Americans
in particular going to other countries
and making the same mistakes again and again and again,
and I ended up spending about 30 years doing it.
In fact, I graduated from a University in Mexico and went
on to doing business with Mexico over about 30 years,
and developed deep love and appreciation of the Mexican culture.
And during that time I came to realize that there were things that,
and at the end of my business career I could leave with other people
so that they could carry forward  and hopefully not make the same mistakes over and over again.
So that's the reason for the book.  I'd like to say a word or two about the title.
The title is, "Mexicans and Americans:
Cracking the Cultural Code."  Now the first question is, especially if you're American --
Mexican/American, who do you mean by Mexicans?
By Mexicans I mean people who live in Mexico
who identify themselves as Mexicans.  By Americans, and that's another question because if you're
from Colombia, you would say,  "You know I'm from South America, I'm American too."
So we have to recognize that we here in the United States,
as a gentleman earlier today said, "United Statesians" --
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: -- we are not the only Americans,
there are Central Americans and there are South Americans,
but the question is what do the Mexicans call us?
"Americanos."  And so that's why I say Mexicans and Americans, okay?
Its shorthand because if I put all of that into the title,
the title would be longer than the book.
Now cracking the cultural code, what does that mean?
Well all of us have the experience whether we know Mexico well or not,
all of us probably in this room have the experience
of going to another culture.  We go to India, we go to France and we feel a little bit of tension.
Why do they do things the way they do, it doesn't make sense?
Don't they realize if they only did it this way,
if they only understood this?  And when we start saying they don't understand,
then that's an automatic opportunity  to say maybe there's something I don't understand.
So one of the analogies that's used by people
who study intercultural relationships is that of an iceberg.
As you know an iceberg is floating along in the ocean only 10 percent
of it is visible, 90 percent of it is underneath the water,
and that's the way culture is too.  When we go from one culture to another, we tend to jump
from the top of our iceberg without,  even realizing what 90 percent is going on underneath the surface
of the water, and then we jump to the top of their iceberg
without understanding the 90 percent that's under the surface
in their culture, and we start making mistakes.
This is where we start saying "they don't understand."
This is where we start saying to ourselves
"if only they knew how we do it "and therefore, how everyone is supposed
to do it, everything would be just fine.
This is where stereotypes come from.  When you start assuming that Mexicans are lazy,
or Mexicans don't value time and things like that.
That's stereotyping that comes  from barely understanding your own culture let alone failure
to understand the other culture.  So that's cracking the cultural code.
Anytime you go to another culture and you think you understand it,
but you don't have the code book, chances are you're going
to make mistakes and value judgments.
So what I tried to do here was set  up a methodology whereby the visitor, or better yet,
the traveler to Mexico, whether you're on business
or whether you're there as a retiree,
or a traveler can understand the Mexicans better
and in the process hopefully understand ourselves better.
So that's cracking the cultural code.
Now in cracking the cultural code, I have drawn heavily on teachings
and writings of people who are a lot smarter than me,
namely cultural anthropologists.  Cultural anthropologists try to tie their observations to science,
and from my readings I think that there are three ciphers,
three code breakers operating underneath the surface
that when we understand those,  we can begin to interpret another culture.
And those three ciphers, operating underneath the surface that are
out of view are that we have difference sense of time,
we have a different sense of space, and the construction and use
of our language sets us to thinking  in very different ways -- three ciphers.
Now, let's start with number one, a sense of time.
Cultural anthropologists will tell you
that there are basically two kinds of time, two different senses
of time the way people see it.  Most Americans, and by Americans I mean Anglo-Saxons,
I mean those of us who speak primarily English,
we don't sit around and talk about time, the stuff of time a lot.
But if I were to say to you that time is
like an arrow coursing toward a target over there in the wall,
you'd probably say, "Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of time.
That works, that works for me."  Well if time is like an arrow going toward that wall over there,
then it's appropriate to say, well I can take that course
and I can divide it into equal increments
that I call minutes, and seconds, and hours.
Okay, that makes sense.  So we become very sensitive to the target on the wall, to the future,
target, something out there that we're always working toward.
And our getting there is a function of dividing
up into little increments that we can measure;
they're like an international standard embossed on a steel rod.
Now the Mexicans don't see time like that at all.
Again, the Mexicans don't sit around and talk about it,
but if I were to ask a Mexican what time is made of,
and they would think about it and I'd suggest that it looked
like a coil spring to them, and they would say,
yes a coil spring that's good.  Time is like a coil spring to Mexicans because time tends to go
around and around and around, it tends to repeat itself.
And also a coil spring is subject to the pushes and pulls
of outside influences and so for the Mexicans sometimes time goes fast
and sometimes it goes slow.  Now as I go through this talk, you'll realize that I'm going
to take you down the road to how Mexicans work
and then how they organize their national culture.
But just to give you a brief preview of that, how do our different senses
of time manifest themselves when we go to the airport
and check in to go to Mexico City?  Well the American comes up to the line, here comes the American --
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: -- get in the back of the line and our target is
that ticket agent up there and there's 60 people between us
and the ticket agent and we're already agitated.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: Why?
Because there are 60 impediments between us and our target
and we're already huffing and puffing and, you know saying,
"Look at this, it's going to take us forever."
The Mexican doesn't have that reaction at all.
For a Mexican, time is like a coil spring.
What that means is for the Mexican is
that sometimes time goes fast, sometimes it goes slow.
Now is time to be patient, "hay que pacientar," that's being patient.
Patient is actually a verb in Spanish.
And they're patient then, they're saying to themselves,
now is the time to go slow, we're all going to get there
at about the same time, when we get on the plane
and it takes off, we'll go fast.  So that's the Mexican attitude.
The problem comes up when an American businessperson
in Mexico looks at his watch and says, "Well time is money,"
and the Mexican turns to him and says yes, time is money.
Well the reason Mexicans say time is money and they agree with this is
that they're basically very agreeable people.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: But they don't necessarily believe it,
but they do value time very much.  When you get to know a Mexican better, and they open up with you,
and they're being honest with you, what they will say to you is,
"You know everybody in the world understands that time is money,
but really that's a little bit shallow."
If you get into a taxi anyplace in the world, in Thailand, in China,
anywhere, the taxi driver turns the meter and you're charged
by the click, but that doesn't really tell you very much.
Mexicans will tell you that money is really a very poor substitute
for time.  The amount of time we have is fixed for everybody,
and we only have so much.  The amount of money we have can vary widely from one person to the next
or from one time of your life to the next.
And so when I lend you my time, when I say I would like to have dinner
with you, that's my gift to you and please don't abuse it.
That's the Mexican attitude toward time, make sense?
Okay, next point, next cipher;  operating underneath the surface, sense of space.
Cultural anthropologists will tell us
that everybody has a sense of space, all of us.
We understand that pretty much, don't we?
We all have a sense of territoriality
and things of that nature.  Now most Anglos, and when I say Anglos again that's a cultural
reference and that has nothing to do with your race,
your national heritage, or so on.  If you're primarily English-speaking,
most people in the rest of the world will refer to us as Anglo-Saxons.
Most Anglo-Saxons have a very keen sense of personal space,
and we're very individualistic.  Wherever we go we have a little circle around us
and that is us that is where we are.  We go into a store and what's the first thing we say?
How about, "just looking around, just looking around," what does
that tell the shop owner?  That says "I've got a circle around me, it's a protective shell,
and I know you know I've got money in my pocket, I know I've got money
in my pocket and you're not getting it unless I'm ready
to give it to you, okay?"  So that's sort of keep away, that's a keep away kind of thing.
The Mexicans are not that way at all.
They go into a shop and they recognize that they're
into the shop owner's space and they say, "buenas tardes,"
good afternoon, how are you?  And there's an exchange, a welcome to my space kind of exchange.
We're in a store in Mexico in the resort area,
and this young lady follows us around,
and she's only this far away from us, okay?
We start feeling nervous.  What is she doing?
Is she checking on us?  See now the Mexicans don't feel that way at all.
Mexicans will say she's just there to help us if we need help.
An Anglo, okay you're in Cancn and it's a Sunday morning,
you want to get up, you want to go to the beach, particularly us guys,
you pour a cup of coffee and you go out onto the beach
and you sit there, you want to be alone,
you want to commune with nature.  Now a second person who comes out is another Anglo,
he sees you sitting there and so he walks his way halfway
up to the horizon up there on that part of the beach.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: And then a third Anglo comes out and he walks halfway
down to the horizon on that end.  And you keep doing that until finally it gets so crowded
that you have to tolerate other people being close to you.
Mexicans are not that way at all.  You look over your shoulder and here comes a Mexican gentleman,
and he says, "Oye mama, come on, here this way,"
and all of a sudden you've got coming up behind you,
you've got the nursemaid, and the dogs, and the cats, and the kids,
and everything else and they plunk right down next to you.
And here you are suddenly your space is violated,
your personal space is violated and if you're like me, blue-eyed,
gringo, I can say it, I am one, you start getting agitated, okay?
And so once again you say "good morning" very politely,
you finish your coffee, and you go back inside.
And the Mexicans are looking, they're saying, "what happened?"
And you're saying to yourself, "what's the matter,
can't they see they just had violated my personal space?"
Well the answer is no.  Why did they come and sit right next to you?
Because that's where the people are.  [ laughter ]
Ned Crouch: It's that simple.  And yet suddenly this sense of space, and the difference
in the sense of space where we feel personal space very keenly
and they are more in tune with group space.
Suddenly our different senses of space have ended
up in maybe a racial incident - international racial --
because they're saying "why did he leave?"
Maybe it's the color of our skin, no, different sense of space.
Now the third cipher is the construction and use of language.
Not just the different language,  I mean we all know we use a different language,
but what about the construction and use of language.
We all probably have some experience,
I don't know where everybody in the world, we have people here obviously
from all parts of the world, but in most Western languages,
other than English -- in French, Spanish, Italian,
and so on -- there's gender.  Most of us are familiar with the fact that Spanish has gender.
That can set people to thinking in a little bit different direction.
How does that work in Mexico?  In Mexico because of historical factors, nothing is more revered
than the mother, and respect  for the woman is extremely high on the cultural values.
Well even if you know Susana well enough
that you would call her Susana at home or at the caf and so on,
in the office or at the clinic, you would call her "doctora."
So important is respect in Mexico,  that you're always offering honorifics,
you're always building somebody up.  The English language is not built that way.
We don't have to contend with the kind
of thing that they contend with.  There's also in Spanish as there is in French and many
of the romance languages, a formal 'you' and an informal 'you'.
And the way, as a 63-year-old, for those of you
who haven't done the math yet --  [ laughter ]
Ned Crouch: -- American male, I have to be careful whether I refer
to the policeman who pulls me over as usted or t.
Chances are he's much younger than I am, but he's got a gun.
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: So what code I use in order to communicate properly
with him is very important.  Now in the English language, we don't have any
of those things to consider.  And as a result, very frequently
in the United States we don't have the words
that are appropriate for proffering respect.
And suddenly, "Yes, sir," over the past generations has become, "Yes,"
has become, "No problem, you guys."  And we don't see any problem with it.
With me, with my little circle around me, I'm the same way
with this gentleman, as I am with a Spanish priest,
or as I am with the president of the company.
I'm the same person; I'm me, that's not true of the Mexicans,
where they tend to change depending on the group space.
Now Mexicans are very group-oriented,
and I tie this to their sense of space.
Mexicans will see them as, for instance in this room,
surrounded with four walls and we are all together
with a common purpose in this room, we're part of the same kind
of people, we relate to books.  We like reading and we like travel and we like things cultural.
And so that defines this group, and that's much more important
than an individual at this particular time.
Probably the stereotype or the archetype rather
of a Mexican is his family.  Family is surrounded by a big wall in their house,
and what do they do inside that house?
They look inwardly to each other.  We're sitting in back of the biggest picture window we can look out of,
that we can afford, and we're looking outward,
the Mexicans are looking inward to their group.
And they're looking inward to their group for approbation, for guidance,
for help in a time of need, and things of that nature.
That's the fundamental difference between individual orientation
and group orientation, and it plays out in the workplace such that,
such that the members of the polishing department or people
in the kitchen or the architect's office, see themselves as working
as a family, a team, a group.  There's a large social component to the Mexicans group orientation.
But back to language.  I mentioned the construction of language
and there's several things there,  but there's another one that's extremely interesting and that is
that in English we use the conditional.
We say, "If I had gone to the movies,
I would have invited my friend John."
Well we express the conditional by the word "if," but then the words,
the verbs "invited" and "gone" are actually in the past tense,
and so the Anglo ear hears, "Well you didn't go to the movies
so therefore you didn't invite your friend John."
Now in Spanish you would say, "Si yo hubiera ido al cine,
yo habra invitado a mi amigo, Juan," which goes
from the subjunctive to the conditional,
two different levels of conditionality.
The Spanish ear hears something quite different,
and that is that no, "It's true that you didn't go to the movies,
but if you had you would have invited your friend John."
You see that subtle shift?  That's saying the case isn't closed, it's still open, stay tuned.
[ laughter ]  And the construction of the language is what sets us to thinking
in certain specific ways.  Now I mentioned construction
and frankly the Spanish language is much more complex
and much more capable of dealing  with different levels of conditionality.
The English language is much more geared toward is it open or closed?
Are you with me or against me?  Is it black or white?
And how many times have we heard that in our experience?
But that's the language that sets us to thinking in that direction.
Use of language, I mentioned construction,
now the use of language.  We use language to convey content, to be factual,
"Nac norteo hasta el tope y me gusta decir verdades,"
"I was born Northerner up to the top and I love to tell the truth,"
that's the way one song goes there.  That's one way in Mexico, but in Mexico they also prefer,
probably, to speak with style.  Style is a very important component to the way they use language.
And so where we're transmitting information and content,
they may be talking about style.  So I can look out the window here, and thankfully there is a window,
and I can say, "You know it looks to me like it's going
to continue raining today."  The Mexican will say, "Yes, it's going to rain."
On the other hand, I can look out the window and say,
"You know it's cloudy now, but I think the clouds are going to part
and I think it's going to be sunny."  The Mexican would say, "Yes, I think it's going to be sunny."
[ laughter ]  Now we're talking about the weather,
the Mexicans are just being agreeable.
The Mexicans just want to get along.  If there's one thing that really bothers Mexicans,
it's to think that they've offended you in some way.
It's a wonderful trait, but we have to understand
that in a business context or when we go down there as a retiree
and we want to get our house built and we want to know
if the doors are going to be delivered on time,
you say to the Mexican, "Will the door be there by Friday?"
What will he say?  Audience: "Yes."
Ned Crouch: What does he mean?  Audience: "Maybe"
[ laughter ]  Ned Crouch: Exactly.
Now the difference is this, everybody has the same problems
of price, quality, and delivery,  but you just handle things a little bit differently in Mexico;
you're a little more indirect and in Mexico you have
to coax bad news out of people.  So you say, "I'd like to have the doors by Friday?"
"Yes." "Well is it reasonable to expect that they be here?"
"Well you see if they come in, then I can get them to you by Friday,
if you're willing to pay an up charge for UPS."
Oh, okay now you're getting a little closer.
If you were to talk to an American contractor and say,
"Are my doors going to be in by Friday?"
He'll look at you in the face and say, "Are you kidding?"
[ laughter ]  Mexicans would never do that.
So what you do is, what I do for instance, when I need delivery
by Friday, I don't say, "I need delivery by Friday,"
because Friday remember the coil spring, it's a little bit arbitrary.
I mean time goes around and around and around.
This Friday looks a lot like last Friday.
[ laughter ]  And probably like next Friday, okay.
So what I do is I say, "I would like to have these doors by Friday
because that's when my wife is coming to look at the house
and we want to show my wife just how well we work together."
Now you're saying something.  Now you're tying something not to an arbitrary schedule,
but you're explaining your needs in terms of personal needs.
Friday is arbitrary, the wife's visit is very real, make sense?
Okay, I used the analogy of the iceberg before.
It's an analogy that many people use to explain culture
and where cultural miscommunications come from.
There's another analogy and that is three concentric circles.
The middle circle you might refer to as what I talked about,
those codes that are operating underneath the surface
that we rarely talk about that are explicit --
excuse me that are implicit, but not explicit,
that are sort of assumed among everybody.
Like for instance that Anglos feel urgency
about a schedule which Mexicans don't.
Mexicans feel urgency about a personal aspect of something.
That's the inner circle.  The second circle is work.
How we work, how Americans work, how Mexicans work,
and what are the differences?  How do we interface?
Work, I believe is the most fundamental,
economic activity of humankind.  And then the third level would be the top of the iceberg.
Those things that we can feel, smell, hear, and see in daily life.
That's the third level.  That level on which we misunderstand each other unless we've understood
what goes before.  So that second level is work.
How do Mexicans work?  How do Americans work?
And here is, you might say, to go back to the iceberg analogy,
this is very much how, where we begin to make mistakes,
but what the work styles, and that's what I'm talking
about now is work styles, operate right underneath the surface
of the sea, and they're a little bit obscure, but once they're explained,
they're easier to understand.  The first one we might look at is whether we
when we work are future-oriented, or present-oriented or past-oriented.
Well it's been said that Americans and you understand that to mean,
to be shorthand for Anglo-Saxons, people from the United States
who basically speak English and are in a big hurry.
[ laughter ]  We tend to be future-oriented with a tie to the present.
Mexicans tend to be present-oriented with a tie to the past.
That makes us very good at risk analysis, for example.
We're always sitting down and fussing over what could go wrong,
what's the likelihood it could go wrong,
and what would the impact be if it went wrong.
And we put numbers to it and we figure
out what would happen if the roof fell in?
Well we'd have to clear the building wouldn't we.
Mexicans -- those of you who arrived late don't know
that we just had a fire false alarm here and everybody had
to evacuate the building -- but the Mexican will look at you and say,
"The ceiling won't fall in."  You know it's just not there.
When we start fussing over problems of our own making, the Mexicans look
at us and what do they say?  "No problem."
That's where that comes from.  A Mexican doesn't recognize a problem until its right upon us.
And I don't mean anything demeaning by that.
If anybody hears anything demeaning in anything I say, it's not.
It's just different from the way most of us think.
The Mexicans will say, "No problem."  Now if a Mexican comes to you and says, "Hey,
we've got a problem," you'd better believe it.
[ laughter ]  That means we've got a huge crisis on our hands.
Okay, the jig is up.
In the second part of my book --  the first part is about those three ciphers that I mentioned,
the second part of my book is about work styles.
And this is where the book got labeled as a business book,
because what I do is I take the reader and I plump them down right
on a workbench next to Pablo in a factory.
Now you might say, "I don't need to know about that
because I'm not going to go down there to go into a factory."
But I don't think you can understand Mexico unless you understand what
the Mexican worker is contending with,
what he's up against on a day-to-day basis.
Now if you go to Mexico as a traveler, not a tourist,
and the difference is that a traveler wants to go and get
into the other person's context and their culture,
a traveler is somebody who --  excuse me, a visitor or a tourist is somebody who just goes
and keeps his own culture with him and sees about what you can see
through the window of an air-conditioned bus.
But if you want to go down to Mexico and really understand Mexicans,
it's very important to know what's happening behind the scenes
and what people are contending with.  And so that's why I go in so much to work styles
and things of this nature.  The Mexicans are present-oriented with a tie to the past.
Americans are future-oriented with a tie to the present.
This shows up in funny ways.  If you try to train a Mexican worker in the way to do something,
they're likely to tell you, and I've had Mexicans say this to me, "Okay,
I will try it your way, but if I don't like it,
I'm going back to my way."  Now what does that come from?
That comes from the fact that in the past they had a teacher
who taught them to do it a different way and they revere that teacher,
they love that teacher and respect himm so much,
that they're not going to change very quickly.
And Americans are more willing to accept change and say,
"You want me to do it that way instead of this way?
Okay, no problem."  And so we go ahead and do it.
Not so in Mexico.  This is one of the reasons that I think that the approach
that I have taken is more organic than the methodologies taken
by other people because I start climbing
up the ladder toward how people organize themselves
for the common defense and their political life and things like that.
Most people see culture as just a collection of differences
and bracelets and things like that, but culture is really fundamental,
very fundamental to human behavior and you have
to understand it as a survival mechanism.
It's -- culture is as much a way we wrap ourselves in a survival
as it is to know how to make weapons or to run in the face of danger.
Mexicans are, since we are future-oriented
and we see the future as basically good, and change is basically good,
Mexicans are present-oriented, they see the future
with a great deal of apprehension.  We look at the future and we say, this is --
by the way somebody somewhere along the line is going
to ask me what the best review I ever got of the book was,
and I'm going to jump right ahead and tell you
that at one point I gave a talk like this at the Savvy Traveler bookstore
in Chicago, and this woman came up to me afterwards and she said,
"You just explained my mother."  [ laughter ]
And if I forget I'll get back to that later
and tell you how that happened.  But sometimes when I talk about these things,
this is what's happening.  Anyway, Mexicans tend to be worried about the future
and they look for models.  Now for many years Mexico bested on a national level
between the Soviet model and the American model.
And they designed their constitution and to some extent, and their forms
of government about the American model, but they kept swinging
to the left and trying the Soviet model.
So they would swing to the left and to the right,
but the point is they were always looking for models in order
to make that next step forward.  And so if people say why do Mexicans take a little longer
to get things done?  Well it's due to a lot of things.
It's due to indirect speech.  It's due to group orientation and it's grouped
to an adversity to the future.  The next thing is the individual versus group orientation.
How does this play out in the workplace?
Well most Americans are very independent,
and we see dependency and we don't like it.
If somebody is very dependent and can't make his own mind up,
can't be his or her own decision maker,
we see that as a sign of weakness.  Mexicans look at group orientation, their group orientation tells them
that it's good to be dependent on each other.
Remember they're looking inward and if one individual
within that group starts showing a lot of individual effort,
they look on it with a great deal of suspicion.
Mexicans can also be very defensive.  And how does that work out?
Well I had a manager in my office once explain to me
that his old boss had castigated him  because when the production wasn't going the way he expected,
the boss brought him in and bawled him out.
And then he said, "well the people  in the inventory department won't give me the inventory sheets
and this one won't give me that,  and that one won't give me -" this guy's supposed to be the manager.
The American vice president got very upset with him, he said,
"Now get out there and start kicking behind."
Well the Mexican was just crushed by this.
When a Mexican starts being defensive, all he's saying is
that I want all of us to work together.
I want you to understand that we're all in this together.
And so what you should say to the Mexican in a case like that is,
"I understand we're all in this together.
Now get out there and kick -- "  [ laughter ]
Okay. And then he will, he will,  but you have to keep reaffirming the fact that we're all in this together
and that we're all - the worst thing that can happen
in a Mexican workplace is for one bellhop
to start taking his brass buttons too seriously or for one person
to start playing favorites with the boss.
And this happens.  This is one of those little tricks that Mexican workers will play.
The Mexican worker will come up to the American boss and he'll say,
"Jefe, can I keep my lunchbox in your office
because my locker is broken," and if the foreign jefe says, "Okay,"
the next thing you know the Mexican worker's walking into the plant,
"The jefe let's me keep my lunchbox in his office."
All hell breaks loose.  [ laughter ]
The rest of them, it breaks down into a den of iniquity
and you start having all of these jealousies expressing themselves,
it's all about the relationship with the boss.
Equality versus hierarchy --  you know there's a phenomenon in the United States.
We all relate to organization charts.
How am I doing on time?  John Cole: Take questions -- Ned Crouch: Pick it up.
John Cole: -- for about five minutes?
Ned Crouch: Okay, talk fast.  We all relate to organization charts.
Organization charts, one box here, three boxes underneath it,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  But how do Americans get around the organization chart?
We believe in dotted-line relationships, okay.
So since we're individuals,  no individual is really truly better than we are.
So if we can develop a friendship with somebody over here,
whether they're in a related department or not, that's good.
Now the Mexicans have organization charts too, and the way they deal
with organization charts is a little bit different.
They have organization charts outside of the organization charts.
They have a whole social structure that exists outside of the company
and it's a system of patron/client relationships.
The person who got me a job here is not only in charge
of that department over there, but he's my patron.
And I then become his client and I, for my part,
will get somebody else a job in the plant
and I will become that person's patron.
These things can be family related  and they can have absolutely nothing to do with the company.
And a lot of times people are surprised that a whole group
of employees will quit and they never know why.
It's because they all got together and decided to go to someplace else.
And so this can slow up the process in a work atmosphere
where people want to get things done, but they can't just go ahead
and do them unless they've already checked things
out with their patrons ahead of time, okay?
All right.  I'm going to skip ahead except for one thing I'm going to say
about work styles and that is that there's a tendency in Mexico,
you talk about conflict resolution, here in the United States
when we have a conflict between departments or between people,
what we do is we sit down with a whole group and we go
over the job descriptions, the budgets, the schedules,
and things of that nature.  Once we've done that and we've sorted everything out,
then we'll deal with the people thing.
In Mexico you go around the room and you say, "Listen,
the most important thing is that we work together."
That's how you deal with a group.  You look the other person in the eyes and say, "Come on,
we're part of a family here, let's work together."
And then and only then do you start worrying about the hard copy.
Then and only then do you --  in Mexico if you start whipping out the papers first, that's a mistake.
Okay now let's jump ahead to the national culture
because we want to leave time here.  And let me just address one thing first
and that is the political situation.  Most of us know that Mexico has undergone a terrific transition.
The PRI, Party of the Institutionalized Revolution was
in charge of Mexico for 70 years.  And just recently, in 2000 the election elected a new president,
President Fox.  Now you go to Mexico and they say, "You know our government is set
up very much like the American government.
We have three branches of government;
we have the administrative, the legislative, and the judicial."
But it's not true.  They do have those three boxes,
but the way they see organization charts is very different.
Because they are hierarchical, they are very likely
to arrange those three boxes like this.
There's no question that in their mind
that the administrative is the important thing.
Here we go to Congress to lobby, in Mexico you go
to the administrative division to lobby.
We look at the PRI, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution,
and we say that's contradictory.  What is it a revolution with guns and bullets
or an institution with bread and butter?
It's both, and that was the genius of that system.
That is that they could be left one day and right the next day.
Right now they're undergoing an extreme change, but I have to say
that over the 70 years of the PRI period and I'm not an apologist
for the PRI, but there was never a military coup,
and there was tremendous progress  so that today Mexico is the 12th largest economy in the world.
Now intellectually I just want to say a few words
about Mexicans intellectually.  It wasn't until Moctezuma and the Virgin Mary fused in the 1500s
that the real Mexican intellect began to express itself.
You have to understand Mexicans today from the point of view
of their Spanish heritage as well as their Aztec heritage.
Most people think if you scratch the perhaps brown skin of a Mexican
that underneath there's a Spaniard, not true.
Underneath there's an Aztec,  and they understand that very, very well.
Mexicans believe there are two kinds of reality --
there's a Spanish reality and there's the Mexican reality.
And in the Aztec world there was no heaven and hell and good and evil,
there was only a murky morality.  And for the Aztec to go from the here and now
to the netherworld was a very easy transition to go back and forth.
And today Mexicans are among the most nimble people intellectually
in the world.  And it's very hard to pin a Mexican down.
Just when you think you've got an answer out of him,
he jumps some place else like and is having fun with you and he goes --
you're in a taxi cab and I've used an example of the taxi before
and that theme runs through the book.
You're in a taxi cab and you think that your destination is
over on the right, he'll say -- what'll he say?
Audience:  [ inaudible ]
Ned Crouch: "Yes, it's to the right."
And he'll turn right and he'll say, "I think it's to the right.
Yes it's to the right."  He'll turn right three times until he's faced left going
where he knew he should've gone in the first place.
And I'd like to conclude this part with a brief reading.
Referring to magical realism and magical realism, of course,
the Anglo ear wants to know, what are we talking
about here magic or realism.  In the Mexican mind they are two aspects of the same thing,
but referring to magical realism: "Like the writer,
the taxi driver spends long hours at his window on the world.
Some days he is the common man, the provider, the realist.
At other times when the choke of the street is overwhelming,
he is a philosopher treating impertinent questions
from the American in the back seat as a call to lofty discourse.
He seems to be saying, where would you have us go to escape?
We are stuck with our past.  Anything can and probably will happen to us in the future,
but would you have us dwell on the fire and blood,
live in perpetual defeat,  be realists with no place to go but to hell?
That is a cruel and negative view.  No good would ever come of it.
We live in a world we did not create,
but in that world we can live on our own terms in our own locale.
It is real, but reality is complicated by contradictions
that neither science nor religion can explain.
Yet in this we find nothing unusual,  and what's more there will always be another day."
Thank you.  [ applause ]
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