Last week I visited an Indian company with a branch office in Norway. Unlike all of their offices worldwide, I noticed there was no Ganesha at the reception – the Hindu deity half elephant and half human.
Upon asking, the receptionist pointed me to the doormat with the company logo at the entrance.
‘We don’t have Ganesha, instead we decided to place this doormat to welcome our customer. I thought that would be a much better way to make an impression from the moment the clients step inside our office. But this has created a nightmare with the head office. The thought of people rubbing their feet on the company logo is too much for those guys in Bangalore.’
Here we see a collision between two worldviews. The Nordic values rooted in pragmatism and aesthetics in direct conflict with Hindu beliefs around purity and hygiene. From a Hindu perspective, how can the company’s logo go on the floor? That makes the logo impure and impurity does not bring prosperity.
On the face of it, it’s just a doormat. It should serve the same function everywhere. And yet we see how meanings can vary as we travel across cultures.
Who is right – the head office or their branch office? That’s beside the point, or maybe, that is the point.
The urge to prove oneself right by imposing one set of beliefs on to others is where the organisational culture starts to fall apart.
Mergers, acquisitions, takeovers and cultural transformation programme fail not because we don’t have the right processes in place. It is often because we fight, we argue and we impose our own beliefs on others. Call it Cultural Imperialism.
Listen to people without an agenda. Make an attempt to understand their beliefs. You will begin to see more. When you can see more, you can learn more and you will be better prepared to navigate uncertainty.
Sometimes a doormat can do so much more than the audit report.
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While Brahma creates the Cosmos and Shiva destroys it, Vishnu
