Jan's Blog 2025

Alright lads, it is time for our final goodbye. And with it comes the ultimate comparison of all the 6 dimensions across the globe (or just across my nationalities and Japan). So allow me to quickly recap who is Hofstede and what his work revolves around. Mr. Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist, who did a legendary study in IBM setting to understand the differences across cultures and model nations. He is the creator of 6-D cultural model of nations, which aims to describe the differences in nations in a qantitative manner.  This chart [1] down below will serve us as a foundation to this post, so study it thoroughly...   1. Power Distance  "Power Distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally." [2]   The PDI deals with the attitude towards the inequality among individuals within the society. It also marks the approach to...

 Hello G'Day everyone! The time has come to say a big thank you and goodbye to our legendary Mr. Geert Hofstede as we will be discussing today the last dimension on the list Indulgence vs Restraint. Generally speaking this index describes the relation towards "doing what your impulses want you to do"[1], friendship importance and understanding of life. So an indulgent culture will be characterized by: feeling good following the impulses (all sorts of'em - from shopping to sexual ones), high value of friendship (the more friends the better) and a notion that everything in life is in our control; fate does not dictate our path.  Let's leave the mic to our guest and allow him to outline the restraint culture:  "In a restrained culture, the feeling is that life is hard, and duty, not freedom, is the normal state of being."  [1]  Thank you Mr. Hofstede. Moving on to our favorite country comparison...  [2] [From the left: Canada, Japan, Poland]   Ah yes...

Hello G'Day everyone, Today we will be discussing the shopping culture in Japan and obviously we will compare it to Poland (sorry Canada, I did avoid shopping as much as I could when I lived there). Alrighty, let's do the outline and comparison in bullet points so it's just easier to read.   Customer service - is the customer really always right?   We all know all too well that the customer service (CS) in Japan is just exceptional, from the way the workers are greeting you, through how they treat and help you to even walking you outside the restaurant just to wish you a safe travel home. When the last thing happened to me, I was just awe struck. I dare even say that I felt a bit out of place at the moment. But that's the way it is here. If I were to describe the Japanese CS, I would use only two words:  Hospitable and Respectable . The Japanese staff is known for their politeness, absolute unwavering attention to their clients and they will go out of their way just to ...