The pygmalion effect

The Pygmalion effect or most known as the Rosenthal effect says that “one's expectations about a person can eventually lead that person to behave and achieve in ways that confirm those expectations”

taken from http://www.users.muohio.edu/shermalw/edp603_group2-f00.html

The Pygmalion is one of the key elements that a manager should take into account when managing consumers, employees, potential clients, bosses etc. because this way the expectations that this entire people have about you or the expectations that you have about them would have a very big chance to become truth. For example if I am the owner of a company and I talk to my employees in a certain way that make them think that I expect a lot from them, they will work harder and better, because they may think “my boss expects a lot from me I have to give everything in my work”. If you havent undestand yet how to create expectations in the other people and how the pygmalion effect works, i recomend you to see the movie pursuit of happyness with will smith, here i put a part of the movie that really teach me how to create expectatives. I think this movie is a pretty good example of the pygmalion effect because at the end all the expectatives that this guy has become truth.

I think that it is really important for you to take into account this statement not just for work but also for life , because it makes you see how important are emotions in humans, and that if you know how to manage this emotions, you will have more chances to succeed in your life

Business vs. cultures

After being on a very interesting conference given by Nick B Meyer in Universidad EAFIT about cultural dimensions all over the world, I realized the importance of this topic when doing business with different cultures around the world, and the importance of studying the person with the one you are going to do the business, for example is not the same thing to do a business with a Colombian guy (which have my same culture) than with a Chinese guy (has different culture), off course if you have a meeting with the colombian guy and you be late for 15 minutes it won’t be a big problem, but if you be late with the Chinese the business would be in risk.

In the conference Meyer talked about different cultural dimensions, but there was one that caught my attention because of the importance it has in today’s world:

- Masculinity vs. Femininity: It talks about the role of the genders in every culture, after doing a research studies found that female roles tend to be similar in the different cultures they tend to be modest and care. In the other hand masculine gender tend to be different, but with similarities like competitiveness and hungry for success.

For example Japanese people (Masculinity 95 on the scale of Hofstede) may be different than the Chilean people (Masculinity 16 on the scale of Hofstede), in this case Japanese people tend to be more competitive and ambitious than the Chilean people.

(stadistics taken from http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/masculinity/)

For concluding my intervention I would talk a little about the role that the manager of a company has to take when dealing with other cultures. I found in the interenet a very interesting paragraph that describes how fro me a manager should think when doing business that says “For those who work in international business, it is sometimes amazing how different people in other cultures behave. We tend to have a human instinct that 'deep inside' all people are the same - but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country - the chances are we'll make some very bad decisions” (Taken from Geert Hofstede cultural dimesnions, URL: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/).

I think that is important that comapanies develop cultuaral skills in their employees (sepcially the ones who negotiate) because this way there will be more possibilities of succes .