Eastern and Western values: compatibility or competition?

Citation

Lloyd, B. and Hampton-Turner, C. (1999), "Eastern and Western values: compatibility or competition?", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.1999.02220bab.001

Eastern and Western values: compatibility or competition?

Eastern and Western values: compatibility or competition?

Bruce Lloyd Principal Lecturer in Strategy at South Bank University in discussion with Charles Hampden-Turner about his new book Mastering the Infinite Game: How East Asian Values are Transforming Business Practices, (Capstone, 1997), written jointly with Professor Fons Trompenaars

Keywords Individual behaviour, Responsibility, Social responsibility, Values

BL

Could we start by exploring the core message of your new book?

CH-T

The core theme is that most US and British culture is identified with a metaphorical playing field where someone wins and someone loses; and where the loser forfeits their stake to the winner. Hence the winners get richer and richer, while the losers get poorer and poorer. Is this very satisfactory? Should we conceive of businesses as a series of one-off games, where the fittest survive. My conviction is that it is the fittingest group that survives; these are those businesses that are best able to fit into overall clusters that operate most effectively in the long term. We are not talking about lots of separate games joined together but of one infinite game which I define as many finite games joined together -- and when you do that, winning and losing is a form of learning. You learn about what wins and what loses, with an emphasis on people and learning swiftly to adopt the winning strategy and then compete again. But you compete in order to cooperate and in order to learn and then incorporate that best learning into best practice. In the finite game the purpose is to defeat the enemy. In the infinite game the purpose is to improve the play itself. At the core we find a continuous improvement ethic and we find, particularly in South East Asia, the whole process is considered as an infinite game, where competition is just a finite episode which instructs and teaches you learn to play better, rather than being the fundamental driving force for the whole process.

BL

Is it over-simplistic to say that Western society is more individually focused, where-as there is a greater focus on the community in the Asian Pacific region. We, in the West, seem to be preoccupied with a self focus, while those with an Eastern background appear to have a stronger ''others'' or community focus.

CH-T

That is a fair summary. But the limitation of egoism is, of course, that the ego dies, and relatively soon in the overall sweep of things. Increasingly corporations are asking their senior officers: ''What is your legacy?'' ''What are you going to leave behind you that will be of permanent value to other employees and the organisation as a whole?'' In fact, is there a part of you that can became part of the company and, in effect, ''live for ever''. I call this transcendence. The infinite game is one that never ends, it goes on for ever and so it is part of all of us, part of our core competence that is passed on and so it goes on for ever. This vision is quite common among religious groups in the East who find it as part of reincarnation. The infinite game has to continue, since it will only end when everything ends. The game will continue as long as the human mind continues to develop, so the key issue is what can we learn from the short-term competitive contests that will help us be successful over the longer term.

BL

One weakness of the individualist approach is that the strong tend to exploit the weak until a revolutionary situation develops in an attempt to redress the balance.

CH-T

You cannot let the ''have-nots'' starve.

BL

And the democratic process will attempt to induce a broader element of accountability into the whole process of unaccountable individualism which should also help stability.

CH-T

One of the distinctive features between the finite and infinite game is what might be called the narrow wage bargain which focuses on a very specific reward for a very specific contribution, compared with a broader-based approach, experienced in the Far East, where the company will be involved in a wide range of worker-related provisions including health and education. This broader-based approach encourages the workforce to believe the organisation is genuinely committed to their long-term interests. But, of course, they also recognise that this investment can only be made as a result of their work-related effort.

Communitarianism or individualism

BL

But many Western corporations have had similar attitudes and policies. In the end much of the debate comes back to the role of values and whether or not it encourages long-term thinking and policies.

CH-T

Clearly communitarianism lasts as long as the community, The Mitsui Corporation is 600 years old, but individualism only lasts as long as the individual. We have both just come back from a memorial service and so we are, perhaps, even more aware of the finite nature of life than usual. If you take the Japanese film by Kurosawa (Ikiru "To Live") about a bureaucrat who is diagnosed as having cancer. He is already dead in spirit as far as work is concerned, but he decides to use his remaining span of six or seven months to build a children's playground and he discovers -- using his Japanese way of thinking -- that to annihilate the self is the best method of getting your own way. If you sit opposite your boss in a Japanese corporation and totally abase yourself until you get what you want, you will wind up with almost anything you want. All that is necessary is total self abasement. Knowing that he is dying anyway, the central character in the film totally abases himself and the playground gets built. In other words, if you can genuinely show that your motives are for the greater good, and not just for your own benefit, the decisions will naturally flow in your favour. The film ends by showing Wanatabe, the bureaucrat, playing on the swings in the completed playground but in the morning he is frozen to death. But he ended up by living for a purpose beyond himself. (It is something that we all seek after, but that search is not always easily seen to be reflected in our behaviour.) As far as I am concerned everyone, everywhere, is involved in the infinite game but we all have different paths. In the West people are brilliant, flamboyant individuals and through that their memory lives on. In Japan one totally abases oneself and sacrifices one's personality in order to further the common good. We all seek immortalility in the best way we can, we simply go about it in a different way. Some cultures focus on the individual role in the expectation that this, ultimately, furthers the interests of the community, while others focus on developing the interests of the community as the way to further the interests of the individual. All nations, in all places, at all times, have the need either to reconcile the needs of the individual with the needs of the group, or the needs of the group with that of the individual. The two are intimately inter-twined and different societies and cultures go about this process in different ways.

BL

But one weakness of communitarianism as it appears to have shown itself in Japan in recent years is the extent to which much of it appears to have degenerated into an incestuousness that breeds nepotism and corruption, partly because it lost connection with the values that were originally driving it.

CH-T

It is not necessarily corrupt. Any cosy relationship can become an alliance against a third party.

BL

They have lost their values that were originally driving them for the long term and they ended up by focusing more on the short term?

CH-T

No. I would say in Japan, East Asia, Singapore they have focused on the relationships that they already have, and they put those relationships ahead of those with outsiders. Hence human rights tend to suffer. This is a very interesting, and sensitive, issue. In the beginning, in the democratic West, you could only vote if you held property. But, inevitably, the pressure for a universal franchise grew and grew. At that time the question <P>was asked, how do you justify extending the franchise to people who did not have property; to which the answer was that they have property in themselves. The idea that people come with labels like human rights is a peculiar development of democratic theory in Western society. In the East the whole question of human rights is approached from a completely different direction, that of harmony. "Rights" does not translate into Mandarin.

Rights and responsibilities

BL

Can they translate the concept of responsibility?

CH-T

Yes. Very much so.

BL

That is a very interesting and important issue. The East appears to focus on the concept of responsibilities, assuming that the whole issue of rights is integrated into, and subservient to, the question of responsibilities. While the West focuses on rights and appears to ignore, or at least separate the issues of rights from, the issues of responsibilities.

CH-T

In the East you start with the human relationship as a powerful network of responsibilities to the wider community. If A gives generously to B, then B will want to return that generosity to A, as a responsibility, even an obligation. A does not have a right to demand that returned generosity, because that would prevent it from being given generously. There is not a psychology of rights, rather it is based on duties or responsibilities. What you get is an escalating reciprocity of generosity. If I do you a favour, then I know you will do your best to do one back to me, although, of course, I do not demand or even expect it.

BL

That process used to be part of our culture too. Until we had to introduce lawyers to control the process. But the reason why the system broke down was that it was based on the assumption that you were doing business with your friends, or at least with people who were deeply committed to the underlying assumptions of the system, to the point you could trust them. Lawyers were introduced to help manage the new insider/outsider interface where that basis of trust had started to break down.

CH-T

Lawyers are dedicated to the concept of universalism; that is, everyone is treated the same before the law over issues like human rights. That is an ideal, it is not always achieved.

BL

But in the legalisation of society we have to be careful that we are not driven by the vested interests of lawyers; especially as there is such an overlap, in certain societies, with politicians, who are also lawyers, and together they produce more and more laws; and they appear to be convinced that the law is the most effective, if not the only, way to solve problems. This is a potential minefield for any society.

CH-T

Indeed. Very much so. I am against all one dimensional forms of thinking and I do not believe it is necessarily correct to say that all developed societies become more and more universalistic, and less and less particularistic, which was, and still is, part of some people's view of the modernisation. I believe universalism and particularlism go, and grow, together. If you want really good lawyers, they have to be more and more concerned with exceptions.

BL

But doesn't that just end up by making the law more and more complicated to the point that it becomes unintelligible to even the intelligent lay person. And so there is more and more work for lawyers.

CH-T

That is a risk.

Universalism v. particularism

BL

How is the growing emphasis on globalisation attempting to reconcile these two pressures and cultures?

CH-T

Globalisation is a very good example of what we have been talking about -- reconciling universalism and particularism. The globalised society is a million miles wide but only a few inches deep. The whole world is becoming superficially similar -- the hamburgerisation of habits -- but underneath there are still significant differences. There are two versions of globalism: one is that we all become the same -- Americanisation. This is driven primarily by the US control of the global media, but it is based on the fact that US society is, in fact, made up of people from almost every part of the world so they are, in fact, a homogenised global society in miniature. But there is another approach which sees globalisation as accepting different values that are sufficiently complementary that they can co-exist together within the global society. My book is really about the extent to which different values essentially complement one another; they are not inevitably in conflict. You can always look for the differences or for the similarities but, in the end, there can only be progress if everyone considers what is exceptional and what is unique.

BL

So they are not incompatible approaches?

CH-T

No. That is the whole point. They are not only not incompatible, they are essentially complementary. That is why I use the figure of eight, the infinity loop, to represent the overall concept. In the end it is the exception that proves the rule, but that really means that the rule is tested by the exception and it is steadily improved. There are some universal rules but organisations always need to spend time developing these rules to meet the needs of a changing world. The exception of today becomes the benchmark of tomorrow. The particular then becomes the universal.

BL

It can be argued that you now have major global corporations coming from both directions, East and West, facing the same traumatic challenges of managing large organisations in a rapidly changing world. Are the cultural roots at either end going to make the management process facing these organisations easier for one group or the other to respond successfully to these challenges?

CH-T

It is a very common problem. Every culture, whether it is Swiss or Swedish, will have its own values, and its procedures to organise the world consciously, or unconsciously, built on its own values. Instead of having equality of opportunity for every individual within the country, I would have equality of opportunity for the different cultures of the world. For example, this approach would let the Malaysians organise their workforce in a Malaysian style, and let the Singaporians do it their way and so on. What multinationals have every right to do is measure the consequences, so that they can compare the results. As long as the results are positive you are then putting the various cultures of the world in some kind of league table and you are then discovering things to learn. But the answer is likely to conclude that Malaysian values are right for Malaysia and so on. Every global corporation is concerned with making money for its shareholders and part of that process is to measure and compare the results they achieve in different parts of the world. It would be very unwise to insist that things in Malaysia are done in exactly the same way in East Asia as they are in the USA. I recently experienced these cultural idiosyncrasies on a visit to a factory in Penang where the female CEO had her birthday -- it was quite remarkable the way the the staff responded. I could not imagine a similar reaction in the West. But, in the end, the multinational is simply concerned with whether or not these cultural differences have a positive, or negative, effect on the results. Perhaps it is not surprising, but working within the local culture tends to be beneficial, but that is not always the case and some cultures do need to change if they want to compete effectively within the global environment. But I do sincerely believe that wealth should be created in a way that is compatible with indigenous values.

BL

In the UK and USA we are moving towards a more multicultural value system domestically. This process is presenting some special challenges, but it could provide a competitive advantage over the longer term.

CH-T

Every culture ought to do what it wants to do, as well as what is possible for it to do.

BL

As long as those cultures do not find their loyalties too powerfully identified with their narrow cultural group at the expense of the wider society.

CH-T

This is always the danger. This is what happened, or happens, with the Mafia. There is no value system that will protect you entirely from that risk. Communitarian cultures, such as Japan and Singapore, all have pathologies that are traceable to an excess of communitarianism. On the other hand US and British cultures have pathologies based on an excess of individualism. The exclusion of other cultures can be justified, at least superficially, by both the individualistic or communitarian culture. Every culture has its own way of pathologising its dominant values. But your dominant value, be it individualism or communitianism, universialism or particularism, inner directed or outer directed, is finally consummated when you move to the opposite. The vindication of the individual is when they have served the community. You end up in the same position.

Reconciling differences

BL

In the end you are trying to get the best of both worlds.

CH-T

Everyone needs to get the best of both worlds; where cultural differences are the levers they use to produce results. The US hero will be the courageous individual who saves the community; while the East tends to see that it is the faithful commitment to the community that then provides the support for the individual.

BL

Do you feel that one approach is more likely to be effective over the longer term? Or is there a reasonably even playing field between the two?

CH-T

If you have to choose between the two, you are onto a hiding to nothing. If you consider the two approaches within an adversarial context you end with a plague on both your houses. In the end it is a matter of whether you sacrifice an individual life for the benefit of collectivity, or vice versa.

_{Learning the lessons}

BL

Are we learning these messages within the context of our twentieth century experience? And what are the respective strengths of the fundamental values that are behind the motivations of individuals within either group?

CH-T

The strongest value of all is when you actually do manage to reconcile individualism and communitarianism. We should not have to choose between them. That is why I use a figure of eight to illustrate the infinite game that circles continuously between the individual who helps the community, and the community that sustains the individual. The two approaches are reconcilable. We move up and down a continuum between rules and exceptions, between the individual and the community. These are continuous circles or figures of eight; arguing about where the circle starts, or finishes, is a waste of time, as well as being meaningless. And the figure of eight can progress through its similarity with a double helix. It is quite consistent to see that people are becoming both more and more individualistic at the same time as seeing that they are becoming more and more concerned with other people. And that relationship can be a mutually beneficial one. Individualism and communitarianism, properly understood, will develop together, rules and exceptions, properly understood, will develop together; the inner directed and the outer directed, properly understood, will develop together. Being esteemed by other people is the motivation for achievement so the two develop together.

BL

Given the amount of change that is taking place, are you confident that the effectiveness of our learning is keeping up with the amount of change that is taking place, in such a way that we will, in the end, define the change as progress. Are we learning these lessons of the past fast enough?

CH-T

In places like Singapore you see a society that is shifting all its resources into the education and knowledge intensive industries. The writing is on the wall for those societies who do not recognise the importance of this trend.

BL

Is it a very materialistic-driven package of values?

CH-T

It does not really matter what the motives are, as long as they recognise the interdependence between learning and developing knowledge intensive products and our own physical and spiritual wellbeing.

BL

But I still feel that there is considerable scope for fundamental conflicts between those people who are driven by a package of values based on materialism and those people whose underlying motivation is essentially reflecting a much lower priority for materialism.

CH-T

This is a problem that is concerning all the Western economies -- and others too. The idea that economics is all about material things in my possession and acquisitiveness and selfishness is a Western hang up. I do not honestly think this dichotomy exists within the Economic Development Board of Singapore; they see a much more integrated community involvement. At the same time, what people really value is essentially their private affair. But when acting publicly they must realise that knowledge intensity and material welfare are interdependent.

BL

But does it matter that we seem to be turning ourselves into a lottery society? A recent analysis of the richest 100 of the younger generation in the UK was dominated by inherited wealth, pop musicians and lottery winners. What does this say for our materialistically motivated society?

CH-T

There is a very good book The Winner Takes All Society and I agree entirely that if it is all about who wins and who loses, and if we get our thrills by identifying with the lottery process and its winners, then it is not easy to be optimistic. If the end result is that it is just a game to keep the proletariat happy then, I think, it is pathetic. But I do take comfort from the fact that the most successful nations do appear to be those with a high level of commitment to education.

BL

There is certainly no doubt in my mind that ideas in your book are essential to understanding where our global society is likely to be going in the years ahead.

CH-T

But it does appear that there is a certain glee in the West over the recent troubles being experienced in the East Asia, which does appear to result in a reduced interest in studies that are based on attempting to learn from the experiences of that part of the world which has, unfortunately, reduced interest in the approach I am taking.

BL

But your ideas will, in fact, be a good test for the Asian economies. We can all do well in good times but, when there is a crisis, that is the real test. We should all be watching developments in East Asia with even more interest thanks to the insights and understanding provided by your book.

CH-T

We can only wait and see how things work out. And, of course try to learn as much as we can from what is going on.

BL

Absolutely. And your book can provide some invaluable assistance in that progress. Thank you.