Perhaps the most important thing a student of an international MBA program can learn is how to effectively communicate in a multi-cultural environment. As a result, Tsinghua IMBA students benefited greatly from MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Neal Hartman’s November 16th guest lecture about cross-cultural communication. Professor Hartman, whose teaching focuses on managerial communication, shared very interesting and insightful information and created an atmosphere that was very effective in having students share their own personal experiences in communicating in cross-cultural situations. 

The lecture began with Professor Hartman giving the students a short quiz that asked questions about various cultures, including “If you went to a restaurant in the UK and ordered ‘Bubble and Squeak,’ what would you expect to get?” This set the tone for the rest of the lecture, where Professor Hartman discussed topics such as the amount of physical space people in different cultures usually leave between themselves and the person that they are speaking with. The students most actively participated when Professor Hartman had them split into groups of six to discuss some myths about their respective cultures and come up with advice for a foreigner who wishes to succeed in doing business in their home country.

All of the students walked away feeling that they picked up some valuable insights that will allow them to succeed even more in such a diverse setting such as an IMBA program.

“Even after doing business on an international level for many years, I still feel like I learned a lot from the lecture,” said Rocky Sun, a first year IMBA student from China. “I’m glad we had a chance to get another very valuable perspective on cross-cultural communication that we can apply not only in school but in any multi-cultural environment.”