International Meeting Hypothetical

Week 2 Discussion- International Meeting Hypothetical

Considerations should be taken account into the meeting

1. Ensure the Business Invitation Letter follows different format in different country with correct spelling, name and title. Make it understandable for different cultures and different organization. Also, be careful with numbers and dates as this will be extremely important for every member of the meeting and try to hinder the process of comprehension.
2. Make sure there is a selected adequate space to accommodate the number of guests, speakers and vendors. Make the plan about the accommodation demand and meals provided demand. There are considerations about the cultures about the meals.
3. Set up a hospitality room and provide the food from several countries. For example, Chinese food, American food and Mexican food, also Japanese food to make sure guests can grab some food during the meal time.
4. Transportation is an important factor to be considered as well. We should focus on the trip from airport to the meeting space and from the meeting space to the airport. Pay attention to the flight information and make sure we pick every guest from airport and drop them to the airport when event is over. 
5. The dress stuff should be considered as well. In order to avoid the unsuitable embarrassments. We prefer to ask our guests all suit up and the color will be black and white as if we ask them all wear in casual business, there will be inconvenient for some of people from different cultures.
6. For this international meeting, we should set a ‘ company language’ and surely we’ll choose English as nowadays, English definitely is the most popular and practical language in the world. For the guests who don’t know English, we can provide the interpreter service and they will be available in event rooms. Also, we encourage the guests have their own multi-lingual staff to handle their own issues.  Because, an good interpreter has linguistic, culture and technical fluency, and should be chosen with a great care, and must be fluent in the language of the field in which he/she translates. The interpreter we provided probably just fluent in the two target language, but not that familiar with the culture of the guest country.
7. The agenda of the meeting should also be considered into multiple cultures. For example, for most of the American, they don’t need time for taking snap after lunch, but for most of the Asian people , they get used to taking a snap for about 20 minutes after lunch. So we should arrange about 30 minutes for guests who want to take a nap and arrange other activities for other guests.
8. Supplies should be provided. Wherever people go, they forget things. Offer a huge amount of pens, pencils and paper is always a good idea. Pay attention to the culture difference between different cultures. American will prefer pencil and papers and Chinese prefer notebooks and ball pen as will as Japanese.

Intercultural insights that the American delegation should have

Understanding a culture opens the door to understanding how people see and make sense of their world. ( Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace, Fifth Edition, Iris Varner and Linda Beamer) American guests should foster the awareness of thinking and knowing. Try to ask questions so that Americans can learn how to communicate with people from different cultures without barriers. For example, there is a distinguish between western and eastern people’s thought about ‘How do people reason?’ Western Logic use a cause and effect pattern of thinking. While the Asian logic will use a pattern of logic that contrasts elements.( Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace, Fifth Edition, Iris Varner and Linda Beamer)