Baron was working for Michelin in Clermont Ferrand, France, as part of a global team whose other members were located mainly in the United Kingdom. Baron recalls:
My British colleagues were not reading many of my e-mails, especially the most important ones. It was starting to annoy me. I liked my British colleagues a lot, and when we were face-to-face we had a great connection. But I had multiple indications that, when I sent e-mails to my team, they simply didn’t read them. And I knew the British were big e-mail writers themselves, so I didn’t think it could be cultural.
For example, Baron recalls carefully crafting a persuasive e-mail written to propose a number of key changes to company processes. The structure of his message looked something like this:
Paragraph 1: introduced the topic.
Paragraph 2: built up his argument, appealing to his teammates’ sense of logic and developing the general principle.
Paragraph 3: addressed the most obvious potential concerns with Baron’s argument.
Paragraph 4: explained Baron’s conclusion and asked for his teammates’ support.
Well educated in one of the most principles-first cultures in the world, Baron instinctively followed the dialectic method so carefully taught in the French school system. Notice how his second, third, and fourth paragraphs neatly present the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis Baron developed after much pondering of his topic. On reflection, however, it’s pretty obvious why Baron’s British colleagues did not read this e-mail. Raised on the applications-first principle of Get to the point quickly and stick to it, they got through paragraph one and, seeing no clear point up front, moved the e-mail message to their ‘read at some undefined date in the future’ file.
If Kara Williams and Stéphane Baron had a better understanding of the applications-first and principles-first cultural tendencies, they would each have had the chance to be a good deal more persuasive.
If Williams had realized she was presenting to an audience of principles-first Germans, perhaps she would have begun by presenting the parameters of her study and explaining why she chose this specific study method. She might then have introduced specific data to show her reasoning before presenting conclusions and recommendations. She wouldn’t have needed to spend thirty minutes building her argument; five solid minutes describing her method before jumping to her results would probably have created a lot of buy-in. In addition, if Williams had recognized the crucial role of the antithesis—the counterargument—in the deductive process, she might have welcomed the challenges from her audience as a sign of interest instead of a lack of respect.
Similarly, if Baron had realized he was writing for a group raised on applications-first approaches, perhaps he would have started his e-mail with a few bullet points summarizing his proposal and explaining what he needed from the group. He might then have continued with a bit of background data, presented briskly with the recognition that ‘shorter is sweeter’ for people with an applications-first orientation.
Baron subsequently learned this lesson. ‘One British colleague told me that, if my e-mail doesn’t fit on the screen of an iPhone, it risks not getting read,’ Baron laughs. ‘That’s the test I use now before I send out my e-mail.’