An overwhelming sea of presentations

Today was an interesting day, full of presentations. We kicked off with a presentation about haggling in different cultures. The shopping scenarios were a nice addition to the presentation, as well as the story-like progression of the presentation. The conversation during the presentation was fruitful, and it got me thinking as well. For example, why don't we have a strong haggling culture here in Finland? Some really good thoughts were given in the class room. Overall, a very solid performance.

The next presentation was a one man show on the topic of multilingual workplace. The topic itself was really interesting and there was plenty of really good conversation during the presentation. I have experience from a multilingual workplace when I was working on my bachelor's thesis. At the time I was working for the department of signal processing, in the audio research group to be precise. There most of the members do not speak Finnish so the majority of the communication had to be done in English. This really didn't matter since the atmosphere in the group was extremely welcoming and everybody got along really well. Since my supervisor was Finnish, I still got to speak my native language to some degree as well. One thing that I noticed when I was writing my thesis was that some of the vocabulary was surprisingly difficult to translate. There was a lot of specialized terms which didn't have any established Finnish translations.

The third presentation was presented by our group. We discussed about individualism and collectivism in negotiations and business culture. The presentation went decently well and we got the main points across. Even though we presented some of the characteristics of individualism and collectivism, it should be noted that the personality also affects the way you consider other people, not just the degree of individualism in a particular culture. This was something we probably didn't emphasize enough. The conversations in the smaller groups went in my opinion really well. In the group I was in, there was some really good opinions about how one should prepare for a negotiation if you know which culture the opposing side represents. Thanks to everyone for the active and lively conversation!

After a short break we got an exciting presentation on game theory and negotiations. I believe that I speak for all of us, when I say that the game the group organized was the highlight of the day. It was extremely good fun. It was interesting to see what sort of tactics different people employed during the game. I didn't have any tactic since I really didn't want the chocolate, so I decided to split in each round. In the second round I actually told my partner that I'm going to split and that he can make any decision he wants. It was evident after the game that the best tactic would have been to discuss with everyone in the same table and choose one person who would always get the steal. That way one person from that table would get the maximum amount of points and therefore would be in the (most likely joint) first place.

Finally we concluded the day with a presentation about cultural differences in negotiation. The presentation was well organized and the conversation was interesting. There were a lot of points to think for future negotiations. Next time we're going to have negotiations via Skype. It's going to be interesting to see how the fact that the negotiators aren't in the same physical location will affect negotiation tactics and such.

Shameless product placement.

P.S. This is the first time I've written such a long blog post during this course. Now I think it's definitely time for a beer. Cheers!