During the two months since my last blog entry a lot has happened: I got married in Minneapolis, I arranged for a sub-letter for our New York apartment, I moved into a new apartment across the Hudson, and I took a two-week honeymoon in Italy!
All this travel kept me from blogging, but it presented more than a month of daily opportunities to communicate with 
people outside of my usual comfort zone, none more outside it than Italians. They speak a language I’ve rarely heard in person, they don’t hide their passions, and they nap in the middle of the afternoon, even at work!
This experience reinforced some of my ideas about communication and gave them a new relevance: communicating across cultures requires more than just language. Here are three insights:
A picture (or a sculpture) is worth more than words
Nowhere in the world is there better artwork than in Italy. Most art on display in Rome or Florence, unfortunately, doesn’t have much in the way of descriptive text, whether you speak Italian or English. Then again, how much descriptive text do you need?
I didn’t need a guidebook to tell me Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Cathedral communicated a mother’s divine grief over her crucified son. Climbing the duomo of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence told me (in a very physical way) how high and hard Renaissance artists and architects strived towards the spiritual.
Most communications, whether from philanthropies or nonprofits, don’t effectively use visuals, apart from how words appear on a printed page (this is true, even of my blog). But think of how much more effective philanthropies and nonprofits would be if they could find and use the right pictures to communicate messages across cultural lines. In fact, maybe we should use words only as a complement to pictures and graphics (and not the other way around).
Communicating emotions can be just as effective as using words
I wasn’t surprised to see how much Italians use their hands, arms, and facial expressions to emphasize what they’re saying. We all know this from Scorcese films and TV sit-coms. But emotion is an even bigger part of communicating with Italians (or anyone else) when you don’t speak the language.
People point at and mimic the things they’re talking about. They smile or they frown or they simply walk and gesture for you to follow. Without speaking a word, I could understand most, if not all, of what people wanted to say to me.
Everything you communicate, even if only through words, has an emotional component. So often, we’re trying to remove emotions from communications, as if we’re dispassionate observers. But, really, we need to embrace the emotions of what we’re saying. This is what grabs our audience and delivers the impact of what we want to say.
Limit assumptions about your audience; ask questions and anticipate
My wife and I stayed at a delightful bed and breakfast in a quiet local neighborhood in Florence on the borders of the Boboli Gardens. The little old lady who ran it hardly spoke a word of English. But communication wasn’t much of a problem (see 1 and 2 above). Assumptions were.
Because we’d paid online through Expedia, we never brought up the issue of the bill; we’d assumed she was like American hotel managers and knew how online reservations worked. But on the last day, when a taxi was arriving to take us to the train station, she came running out of the house pleading with us to pay.
We spent the last 20 minutes of our time in Florence showing her our receipt and struggling to preserve the camaraderie that we’d enjoyed all week. Had we been more unassuming, we would’ve anticipated her uncertainties (and her likely unfamiliarity) with online payments and mentioned the bill the afternoon before, when there was a guest present who spoke both Italian and English.
Fortunately, between the taxi driver and a call to another B&B manager, we were able to interpret our exchanges and resolve the issue.
But just because we’re charmed with, and even kind to, someone from another culture, we shouldn’t mistake this for understanding. We need to ask questions so we can anticipate communication breakdowns before they harm our relationships.
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Although these three insights aren’t earth shattering, they’re essential to communicating with people from other cultures, and when you think about it, even within our own culture. Yes, words are important. But there’s so much more to communication than words. Our work as communicators has to reach beyond words. There’s nothing like traveling as a reminder.
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A Key Fact the Current Illegal Immigration Debate Overlooks
by Paul Bachleitner on May 5, 2010
(Originally printed in Trista Harris’s blog about philanthropy: New Voices of Philanthropy)
Lost amidst the hubbub about Arizona’s recent legislation to crack down on illegal immigration, is the simple fact that most baby boomers, approximately one-third of America’s labor force, will reach the retirement age of 65 during the next two decades.
Leave aside, for a moment, the arguments about the legitimacy of being a legal citizen and human rights. Our country isn’t producing enough new workers to replace those who retire: according to the US Census Bureau there are about 77 million baby boomers and only 46 million people in generation X and generation Y.
Where will the new workers come from? It’s immigration, or else a miraculous breakthrough in robotics engineering.
In 2008, the first of the baby boomers hit the age of 62, which is significant because it’s the age that the average worker retires. Although baby boomers will likely work longer than predicted because of extended life expectancies and over-extended retirement plans, health conditions and the effects of old age will prevent many from working full-time into their 70s and force others to retire much earlier.
By 2020, if not sooner, we’ll be competing with countries in Western Europe, Japan, and elsewhere in the world to attract immigrants. If we’re unsuccessful, much could change for the worse for our economies and in our lives:
Sound farfetched?
Not at all, according to forecasts from leading political scientists and economists, such as those printed in recent books from George Friedman and Jacques Attali, and from national and state demographers, such as Minnesota State Demographer Tom Gillaspy. In fact, the above scenario might be an understatement. Some observers expect a return to the stagflation that crippled the economy in the late 70s and early 80s, but for a more extended period of time.
One effective response that political scientists, economists, and demographers all agree on is to attract more, more, and more immigrant labor.
Immigrants can provide the specialized skills we need to replace retiring engineers and researchers, executives and managers. They can fill vacant positions for doctors, nurses, and aides in health care facilities and nursing homes. They can also provide the manual labor needed to harvest the fields and operate factories.
Like it or not, within the next 10 years we’ll not only be begging immigrants, legal and possibly illegal, to stay, we’ll be begging them to live here and help us keep the country’s economy afloat.
If we keep passing laws like Arizona’s, what kind message will this send?
Could it add up to a record of hostility that causes workers we need from India, from Eastern Europe, from Latin America, and from elsewhere to ignore the call to help us prop up our economy when it begins to sag beneath the sheer number of retiring Baby Boomers a few years from now?
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