Experience

For 29 years, I lived in Austria, a country I had never left but for very short vacations to neighboring countries. In Austria, almost everybody I had known was Austrian, spoke German and had a similar set of values. At the age of 29, I decided to move to the United States to take on the position of Finance Manager at an Austrian company in New York. Coming to the United States was a cultural change, but I didn’t realize until later that despite the different language and cultures, Europe and the United States are similar in many ways. That realization came when I was asked to work in Japan for three months. My position in the United States as the Finance Manager brought me there to help with the coordination of accounting systems used by subsidiaries in various countries.

Leaving the airplane after a very long flight, I immediately noticed one thing вЂ" everything was different: the language, the street and store signs, the food, and the vastly different habits and customs. The culture was not comparable to anything I had experienced before. Uncomfortable in my new surrounding it quickly became evident that I had to overcome some initial insecurity and adapt very quickly to this foreign culture. I was charged with the task of analyzing the current accounting and controlling system and improve the communication between subsidiaries. The corporate language was English, but to my surprise I learned that only a few people actually spoke sufficient English. A translator was assigned to me for most of my stay and it took me a long time to understand all the ins and outs of that office. Initially, I could not help myself to compare and pass judgments on pretty much everything. It took me a while to learn and appreciate cultures from a more macro point of view rather than get pinned down in semantics. However, after some time I got accustomed to habits such as bowing my head when introducing myself and learned that my name is Dietmar-San.

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