We all know that intelligence is a good thing; however, it seems that new “flavors” of intelligence pop-up with annoying regularity. A few years ago it was emotional intelligence – this was cited as a “must have” for successful organizational players. Then we had social intelligence as the key skill. Now cultural intelligence is the hot topic!

Cultural intelligence, it is claimed, will help you manage effectively cross-cultural differences. It will lower the cultural barriers caused by “us” and “them” thinking and allow you to predict what “they” are thinking about and how they will react to your behavior patterns. This is pretty useful when dealing with people from diverse cultural background overseas or even within the USA.

When you consider the hot water that organizations get themselves into due to lack of cultural intelligence then it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Here are a few examples:

• The Swedish furniture giant IKEA somehow agreed upon the name “FARTFULL” for one of its new desks. Enough said!
• There are several examples of companies getting tangled up with bad translations of products due to the word “mist”. We had “Irish Mist” (an alcoholic drink), “Mist Stick” (a curling iron from Clairol) and “Silver Mist” (Rolls Royce car) – all these products were a disaster in Germany as “mist” in German means manure. Fancy a glass of Irish Manure?
• In the late 1970s, Wang, the computer company could not understand why its British branches were refusing to use its latest motto “Wang Cares”. Of course, to British ears this sounds too close to ” Wankers”(a British term for masturbation) which would not really give a very positive image to any company
• In 2002, Umbro, the UK sports manufacturer had to withdraw its new sneakers called the Zyklon. The firm received complaints from many organizations and individuals as it was the name of the gas used by the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps.
• Honda introduced their new car “Fitta” into Nordic countries in 2001. If they had taken the time to undertake some cross cultural marketing research they may have discovered that “Fitta” was an old word used in vulgar language to refer to a woman’s genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. In the end they renamed it “Honda Jazz”.
• A nice cross cultural example of the fact that all pictures or symbols are not interpreted the same across the world: staff at the African port of Stevadores saw the “internationally recognized” symbol for “fragile” (i.e. broken wine glass) and presumed it was a box of broken glass. Rather than waste space they threw all the boxes into the sea!

Given these examples of cultural ignorance, maybe developing cross-cultural intelligence is a pretty smart thing to do after all

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