Johannes sends a mail
JOHANNES VAN DEN BOSCH RECEIVES AN E-MAIL – A Case Analysis
From reading the case, ‘Johannes Van Den Bosch Receives an e-mail’, I understand the importance of cross cultural communication, its perception, attribution and challenges involved within. Johannes Van Den Bosch, a Dutch man working for the BigFour firm, when faced with the difficulty of encountering an upset customer for not having met the deadline of approved deliverables decides to write an e-mail to his Mexican counter-part, Pablo Menendez. While at first, he dumps all of his frustration and indignation in his draft mail, he decides to take a ‘cool-off’ recess to regain neutrality. After a short while, he rewrites his mail by ‘sticking to the facts’. In his mail, he clearly states his position and commands accountability in a very ‘direct’ tone. His intention in sending the e-mail is to strictly get down to business. There is a very formal intonation throughout the mail. His idea in writing the mail is to emphasise how important the job at stake was, and also how urgently it was to be done. He wanted to know what had caused the unresponsiveness of the latter in updating the status of the project deliverable. Towards the end, he also mentions that he wants his counter-part to provide him a weekly status henceforth and also tell him immediately upon facing of problems.
The case does not mention the response to elaborate upon effect of writing the email, by sticking to the facts. However, the reasons for Johannes to having stuck to the facts can be speculated and attributed to the following factors:
1. Johannes and Pablo come from different cultural backgrounds although they work for the same company. In Johannes country, which is Netherlands, it is perfectly normal to be ‘to the point’. Hofstede’s experiments on intercultural differences in IBM employees helped him develop a metric for measuring factors that were attributed to these differences. On comparing Netherlands and Mexico, we get the
From reading the case, ‘Johannes Van Den Bosch Receives an e-mail’, I understand the importance of cross cultural communication, its perception, attribution and challenges involved within. Johannes Van Den Bosch, a Dutch man working for the BigFour firm, when faced with the difficulty of encountering an upset customer for not having met the deadline of approved deliverables decides to write an e-mail to his Mexican counter-part, Pablo Menendez. While at first, he dumps all of his frustration and indignation in his draft mail, he decides to take a ‘cool-off’ recess to regain neutrality. After a short while, he rewrites his mail by ‘sticking to the facts’. In his mail, he clearly states his position and commands accountability in a very ‘direct’ tone. His intention in sending the e-mail is to strictly get down to business. There is a very formal intonation throughout the mail. His idea in writing the mail is to emphasise how important the job at stake was, and also how urgently it was to be done. He wanted to know what had caused the unresponsiveness of the latter in updating the status of the project deliverable. Towards the end, he also mentions that he wants his counter-part to provide him a weekly status henceforth and also tell him immediately upon facing of problems.
The case does not mention the response to elaborate upon effect of writing the email, by sticking to the facts. However, the reasons for Johannes to having stuck to the facts can be speculated and attributed to the following factors:
1. Johannes and Pablo come from different cultural backgrounds although they work for the same company. In Johannes country, which is Netherlands, it is perfectly normal to be ‘to the point’. Hofstede’s experiments on intercultural differences in IBM employees helped him develop a metric for measuring factors that were attributed to these differences. On comparing Netherlands and Mexico, we get the