Well, we're old enough to remember the power of three small words, early in the era when the Internet was becoming more readily available to just regular people like us. Those words were "You've Got Mail". America Online would say these words back when we had to use the phone line clip, if you remember, to dial into the Internet. Hearing when the computer said, "You've Got Mail" was the difference between whether the trip to the Internet itself would be exciting or pretty dull. There wasn't much else to look at. The idea of getting an email back then, Cleave, so cool. Yeah. Flash forward, 30 some years later and now the words we think about most when we think of virtual spaces, well, right now it's Zoom fatigue. Most of our lives and especially our work are lived on our screens. All of the soft, the so-called soft skills of communication and empathy and everything else we've covered in our previous course are now expected to happen from a tiny box right next to each other. We can safely say we are in a new era. Hi, my name is Daniel Stuart and I am a management consultant and a communications specialist. I have also been a cultural, environmental, and social sector leader for over 15 years. I also bring a unique cross-section of creative and business strategy to my work. I have designed and led workshops on international teams, communication and implicit bias, storytelling and leadership, and adaptive leadership and change management. Hi, my name is Cleveland Justis and I'm the Founder and Principal of the Potrero Group, a research-based strategy and management consulting firm. As an organizational leader in entrepreneurship in the environment for the past 25 years, I have worked and consulted widely with many startups, businesses, non-profits, foundations, and governmental organizations. I'm the Director of the UC Davis Executive Leadership Program. I also earned my MBA and PhD at UC Davis. Finally, I also teach a course on social entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley focusing on international students. Let's start this, our third course in this specialization with trying to connect a little bit more deeply with you through this virtual space. We're in a virtual space right now, and we're just going to go off script here for a second. We have my art in the background. This is my home, Cleave traveled what? Two hours to be here this morning. In front of us is a very messy desk. Clean that out. I feel like I designed this basically to look really polished. It does. But it's actually not published. My wife is right outside. Can we turn the camera over there. I would love to, but that's a good example. We actually have a teleprompter here, we can't really grab the camera. It's a really interesting combination. I feel like we have a lot of control over the space, but also no control whatsoever. We're stuck here. We had a bird. We had a bird interfere, we've seen probably lots of mistakes. We still got traffic. Sometimes a dog can walk here [inaudible] Who knows? It's happened. The hardest thing about virtual spaces is a control or lack of control, depending upon your perspective. Because all kinds of things happen. We're curating our interactions. What you see is that once fully in our control, but also very incomplete. You can see our body language, but you can't see it all. You cannot come up and ask us a question or have a discussion like when I normally teach in a classroom, there is that divide. We feel it too. With us already having cultural differences to overcome, this only makes it worse. Stuart's differences between us. Therefore, as a result of this course, we aim for you to be able to explain the similarities and differences that emerge in cultural, cross-cultural communication between those in-person and virtual spaces. You should also be able to recognize the efforts made across cultures to adjust for virtual work style differences to avoid misinterpretation and unnecessary exasperation of interpersonal conflict. Ultimately, you will understand and be able to put into practice extra steps necessary for multinational cross-cultural teams to succeed when working virtually across the world. We consider this another intermediate level course. This means we will examine virtual spaces deeply, not to assume, which has been popular for a while, in video conferences, but within virtual communication too. The written virtual communication. Right. Emails, texting all kinds of apps, whatsApp. Furthermore, as we did on our last course on communication, we'll use this opportunity to continue to explore unique cultural challenges that we think are likely to arise on virtual teams in particular, but will be useful for purposes in any situation. True. As a reminder, the other constant you will see through all of our courses is an encouragement to practice the approaches you will learn with your own multinational cross-cultural teams and to not only set aside time to answer the discussion questions we post, but please read and review your classmates' responses as well. As we dive deeper into specific cultural divides, you will undoubtedly enjoy hearing stories from our panelists, but also from your classmates and examples from them of how to resolve virtual team challenges that could be directly applicable to you and your situation. You will likely have some good ones to share yourself, I'm guessing. Please do. Once again, take a moment and look around you. But this time, don't look at the physical world. Look at your screen, at the window, say open on apps you recently used, ask yourself, what am I communicating about myself right now? What cultural artifacts am I using and showing and what am I receiving? What do the apps or programs I have on my phone, on my computer, or around me say about me and how I use them about my culture and the cultures I'm interacting with? Now, think about all the people on your team and all the technologies you use to work together. Think of moments where you may have been confused or even perturbed by how they used that technology or did not use it to accomplish your shared work. This is the challenge and the potential of learning to work with cross-cultural virtual spaces and teams more effectively. Let's get started. All right.
