In 13 U.S. states, one can hear the voice of the benevolent Tom Shane on the radio trying to convince listeners that “you now have a friend in the diamond business.” I often wondered if that tag line sells, as most of my U.S. friends make it a point not to do business with friends and family. I suspect they may have spent lots of time watching Judge Judy on TV scowling at petty criminals suing one another over $50 and a heavy heart. According to many, friends are for parties and picnics in the park. They are not there to be relied on when in need of professional help or money to attend to an unexpected bill.
Interestingly, other cultures will only do business with friends and family–and those are the ones who buy from their Diasporas when living abroad. They only buy from friends and family because they are the only ones, they feel, who can be trusted.
As a cross-cultural mediator and consultant, I love paradox and always try my best to understand why certain cultures behave the way they do. So here is what I learned about the reason Americans tend to avoid dealing with friends in the United States: the culture is based on conflict avoidance. We diffuse and do everything we can never to upset the other party. With the convenience of email, we even learned to deliver bad news electronically instead of saying it face to face. It’s easier on everyone. Like this, we can all get upset or hurt in the privacy of our own homes instead of running the risk of losing face in public.
The problem is that when we engage in a business transaction with people, we run the risk of having to deliver bad news. We may have to voice our discontent and request that the service be improved. That’s uncomfortable, so we involve attorneys to do it for us. Not so good when you have to turn the attorneys loose on your friends! So we avoid doing business with friends at once.
In comparison, several cultures favor dealing with friends because:
1) A friend shares our values and beliefs;
2) A friend is part of our social network;
3) A friend will go the extra mile to please;
4) A friend is someone we feel comfortable talking to when things don’t go well.
As a result, Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese Diasporas excel in the United States because those cultures are supportive of one another. Back home for them, opening a business was a great challenge because few banks would loan money to people who just have a business concept. In the U.S. small businesses thrive, and obtaining a loan based on a concept is not as hard. What is hard, time consuming and expensive is advertising and promoting the business so people know it exists. But if you are Chinese, Mexican or Vietnamese, you can forget about advertisement and rely on word of mouth because your friends will buy from you. Not only do those cultures believe in their friends, but they rightly believe that the friend, once wealthy, will reinvest in the community and share her money with them in some ways. It’s part of being a group culture vs. a culture based on individualism. By coming to the United States, those cultures have it made, which can be seen by the large amount of immigrants who are excelling business-wise in the United States.
The truth is, avoiding doing business with friends wasn’t always the case in the United States either. Community and friends were all people had one hundred years ago; and attorneys did not dictate the way people should live their lives. As a result, people had faith in one another and had no choice but to confront problems when a friend let them down. People had the skills to turn conflicts into opportunities without the intervention of the law.
Friendship is at the core of a life worth living. Next time you think about hiring someone to do some work for you, consult your address book and reach out for your friends first. They may surprise you.
This reminds me of a wisdom we’ve come across while promoting our Business Foundations Course to Spanish-speaking communities – that Hispanic cultures traditionally rely on referral and trust to make new connections. In this way, one will be less likely to be successful with traditional advertising methods in these communities.
Although this is certainly true of Hispanic culture, I find to be also true in Western culture. Referral and trust are consistently the most effective and sustaining way of developing a constituency (at least for business services for beginning entrepreneurs). Although our communication style may be less direct, we still are more likely to rely on existing connections to influence our economic behavior, before resorting to a nonpersonal search. I ask openly if this behavior is a human trait first and then modified by cultural factors second.
I agree, Loren, that in United States we rely on referrals and recommendations FROM friends, but is it your experience that we eagerly HIRE friends because we believe that they are the ones who will serve us best? What I tried to convey by comparing a few cultures is that in the U.S. the concept of hiring a friend is partly taboo. In some other cultures, people will ONLY hire friends and not only people who are recommended to them. I hope this distinction comes out clearly.
This is a very good point, and one that came across in your original blog post. It appears the main cultural difference here is degrees of separation.