Why should we go abroad?

French

Nowadays, international experience is becoming a lot more common than it has been in the past. In 2016, around 300 000 French could leave France to go abroad. In addition to economic reasons or professional opportunities that encourage some people to leave their country, why leave?

 

A false start

For a few years, I had a boss named Guillaume; which was also my friend. He was involved in a project that helped men and women going to Asia for professional matter to move successfully from one culture to another.
Guillaume lived in Singapore for 17 years. From my point of view, he was the French specialist of Singapore; who knew the men and women of this country, their culture and their way of life. Guillaume used to say to me: “You can go to Singapore just like Christopher Columbus went to America”. By this he meant:

• Not knowing where you are going, when you are on the road.
• Not knowing where you are, when you have arrived
• Not knowing where you truly stayed, when you came back home.

What did he mean? We can go to Asia having our own thoughts and representation methods, just like Christopher Columbus did in his time. Our lack of interest, thus, prevents us from understanding the country in which we are staying, but also the people we meet.

At first, the idea of going abroad is in the mind. Going away is like an inner path which consists in accepting the questioning of long held ideas, projects and values.

 

Leave as a conqueror or as a researcher

One can go abroad to conquer… Asia has known western religious who came to convert the population to their religion. Lots of conquerors came to Asia to make war in order to take control of the new trade roads. Today, Asia knows western businessmen who come to conquer its wide market.

The researcher has nothing to conquer… His decision to leave comes from an intellectual or sometimes spiritual approach; his goal is to learn, search and discover. It is equally well suited for a scientist, a philosopher, a linguist, or even an artist, or an anthropologist… what is, then, our approach when we go abroad ?

 

Heirs of our forefathers 

In 1582, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit, arrived in Macao. His goal was to make the Chinese aware of Christian religion. China will change him forever. He would later become the first Catholic missionary close to the Emperor. Instead of looking for what was dividing Confucianism and Christianity, his discovery of China led him to try to find connections between those two traditions. How to translate “God’s” name in Chinese? Should the worship be brought back to the Emperor? How can one honor its ancestors? What role should Confucius be given in the Christian religion in China? These questions are still, nowadays, at the center of a sometimes difficult dialogue between the Western World and China.

On October 18th, 1860, Prince Gong ratified the first Convention of Beijing and brought The Second Opium War to an end. The United Kingdom, France and Russia imposed on China freedom of trade with opium but also freedom of religion… During this war, the Franco-British army burned down the Summer Palace, considered The Versailles of China, where the imperial court used to reside. The Westerners have erased those facts from their memories, especially because theses facts are not mentioned in our history books and schools. Who remembers that Paul Claudel, a writer, was the French consul at Hankou (Wuhan), where France had a concession until 1943 ? In China, however, every schoolchildren is learning about the vandalizing and destruction made by Westerns Countries at the time.

When we want to give lessons to the Chinese, let’s remember our past days in China. Let’s stay humble, and keep in mind that the Chinese engaged in a conflict on European ground did not burn Versailles, they supported the Allied war effort during the First World War, and are now buried in the Chinese cemetery in Noyelles, France.

When we talk about our own countries with our Chinese friends, we need to remember our shared history, the motivation of those who went there before us, the way they behaved in China, the things they built or destroyed, but also what they gave or took… We have to learn lessons from our shared past in order to avoid making mistakes again. This is true for both the “Great History with a capital H” and what we can call the “little history”.

As soon as we get to a new country, our hosts’ opinions on us are conditioned by the acts of our ancestors, by the memories they have left there, their behavior and their attitudes.

 

Years to understand ... 

Great French explorers have experienced it. In 1534 Jacques Cartier explores for the first time Canada’s coastline. He has left France to find a new way towards Asia. He did not find what he wanted, but he discovered a large land to explore. On his third trip he discovered Canadian ? gold and diamonds ? which were proved to be only pyrites and quartz according to specialists. Jacques Cartier did not find either a new passage to Asia nor gold. A few years later, Samuel de Champlain, explored Canada’s coastline again and admitted that Jacque Cartier had found a limitless land to explore. He understood that Canada’s wealth was not its “gold or diamonds” but its wide forests and lakes.

When we go abroad, we are full of confidence, projects and dreams. We are ready to make concessions, in order make our dreams come true. But our journey is sometimes similar to the one of our forefathers went : a series of failures…. until we reach a point where we start questioning our initial dream. It’s only at this time that we can really understand the real opportunities offered by our journey.

We sometimes need more than a life to discover the meaning of what we achieved and to understand that a failure may be a chance. Without leaving, there is no discovery, but what we find is rarely what we expected.

 

“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not ? (Jeremiah 5 :21)

Picture yourself as a teacher in a classroom with Chinese students. You are explaining a technical concept and then ask your students if they got it correctly. Chinese courtesy will make everyone answer “yes”, whether the student has understood the concept or not. Answering “No” would be like considering him as a bad teacher whether answering “Yes” gives him reliability.
You’ll hear an answer but if you don’t know about China, your understanding might be incorrect.

? They have eyes but can’t see, they have ears but can’t hear ?, these sentence perfectly fits with our situation when we change from a language, country or culture to another. We are not able to understand correctly what we hear and see anymore.

Even if we use a third person as a go-between or a common language such as English to communicate, our concepts and references remain different.
I remember a student in Civil engineering who did his internship on a building site where he met workers that didn’t speak French and didn’t understand English. I asked him : “How did you do to communicate with each other”. He told me he used drawings to make them understand him, and Polish workers made drawings back to show that they understood him properly.

Leaving is like a path of humility. We need to question ourselves, to adapt, to reword and to learn again how to tell everything we thought was obvious before we left.

 

Change our ethnocentric view 

When Europeans draw a map of the world, they put Europe at the center. When Americans draw their own map, America becomes the center of it. If we want to build a common path, we need to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes, to understand their values, their convictions, their history, their fears and hopes.
This analysis is based on a humanist principle, but also a basic principle of selling. We cannot sell a product or a project to somebody without knowing his needs, his expectations or constraints. When we want to sell a product to a foreign country or to study abroad, we must be open-minded, and develop our vision and our ability to listen.

 

Leave to improve our ability to innovate  

Let’s forget a little bit about the ? leaving ? idea, so we can get a better understanding of how innovation works. History of modern science is highly instructive for all of us. For instance, medicine uses frequently Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging. Yet, this method uses the same characteristics as a nuclear magnetism found in the second part of the 20th Century by some physicists. Then, in the 1950’s, chemists have proved that the characteristics of the nuclei were affected by its immediate surroundings, which means other nuclei. They started using the nuclear magnetic resonance to understand how materials were made. Thereafter, the discoveries made by physicists and chemists interested doctors, so they started using nuclear magnetism variations to capture images of the human body. Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics and Medicine rewarded every step of this work. Each progress was made because the researchers were able to go beyond their own community because they were able to see beyond their communities and therefore learn from others.

Leaving his country can have the same effects on all of us. By trying to understand another culture, another community, we can then come back to ours to innovate and create. By analogy, we can take our brain as an example. The brain will degenerate himself if neurons are not connected. The brain regains life thanks to new connections between neurons.

There are no new bridges without crossing new borders :

• To innovate means going away to listen, observe, be amazed and see.
• To innovate means going away to put our own culture, projects and way of thinking into perspective.
• To innovate means going away to revisit our culture, our identity, our habits, our thoughts with what we’ve learned from others.

 

Leave to learn the best from others

The 19th Century considered as the one ? unequal treaties ? between Europe and China. France, England, Germany base, then, their laws to reinforce their economic interests. At the same time, Japan has been closed to Westerners for more than two centuries. Japan is self-contained. Japanese live like in the Middle Ages. In 1858, America, who was not on China’s ground, but full of ambitions in Asia, woke Japan up. Commodore Perry came in front of Tokyo’s harbor and confront Japanese to an ultimatum: to chose between a US military intervention or, to escape that by opening its borders to trade.

The Japanese decision makers made an incredible decision that was the first of its kind in modern history: Build the Japan of the 20th Century by taking the best of each western society.  In order to do so, they sent their experts all over Europe and USA to collect information, to listen and to learn from other countries. In only a single century, Japan became one of the most powerful countries of the world.

Have we learned from Japanese history? How many of our politicians have spent time in Japan, United States or in China ? 

 

One man can change our collective future thanks to the path he created

Let’s talk again about Japan, one of the most complex market for westerners. During trainings for French managers that I organized in Japan, we used to call managers from French companies located in Japan, so they could demonstrate the CEO’s role in the company's success or failure in Japan.

Companies with a new manager every 3 years will not be able to establish themselves in this country. The CEO will then be seen as an ambassador. His main role will be to represent the company, but he will not be able to establish a trusting relationship with his Japanese counterparts. If the CEO is replaced it means that the company does not invest money in the country. Thus, Japan is not considered as a strategic place for the company.

The story of Stephane Ginoux, President and CEO of Eurocopter Japan ( 2011 ) shows on the contrary that men involvement in the country’s culture and language, contributes a lot to the development of the company. Stephane Ginoux has been working in Japan since 1993. He joined Eurocopter in 1996, a company implanted in Japan since 1992. For more than 16 years, Stephane Ginoux managed this company in Japan. In 2009, 13 years after Stephane Ginoux has arrived, Eurocopter’s value was worth 57% of the Japanese market shares in civil and parapublic sectors, with a fleet of 360 helicopters. Stephane Ginoux embodies the French manager model that married the Japanese culture. His personal and professional life is in Japan. Just like the Japanese managers, he is devoted to his company, his customers and his partners. Eurocopter does truly contain quality products, but without Stephane Ginoux’s impact, the company would probably never have reached this high level into one of the most difficult markets in the world. A Man that accepts to question his own culture, his habits, his working methods, might change the fate of a company.

 

Getting prepared for tomorrow’s world

In the 1980’s, French SME-SMI sighted Europe as the new economic space. Today, this horizon has become globalized. Without necessarily being implanted abroad, French companies have to deal with more and more projects with partners from other countries. The recruiting requirements are then gradually adapted so they can match with the essential skills to success on multicultural and transnational projects :

• Capacity of integration in another culture
• Adaptation to a new and not mastered environment
• Ability to manage crisis situations
• Open-mindedness
• Flexibility and acceptance of change

In the future, the easiest thing to do for the European companies will be to hire executive managers in Europe that showed their ability to question themselves and are prepared to live the unpredictable.

 

Are we ready for the adventure?

When we start a new project, here is the type of question that we need to ask ourselves: Are we really ready to complete this project?
We face this situation on every steps of our lives:

• When we get married or decide to have kids.
• When we start a new professional project.
• When we have to leave to another country to work and live.
• When we are responsible for people we send somewhere for a specific mission, whether it is in the army, within the company or in education.

There is always a misstep, an event, an encounter, or unpredicted situations. Chaos comes in our initial plans and nothing works as it was scheduled. Physicists know that energy causes disorder, and that’s why changes are possible. Without those changes, there would have been no possible evolution towards life.

The uncertainty principle is settled in our physical laws. Werner Karl Heisenberg theorized it in 1927; he stipulated that the universe is neither predictable nor deterministic.

We could and should prepare ourselves, try to anticipate problems we will face while building our future solutions. But let’s face reality: Nothing will occur exactly the way we planned it. Preparing ourselves to leave is like learning to dance with uncertainty.

Pascal Faucon - Why should we go abroad ? 

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