Cross-Cultural Training for Japanese Pharmaceutical Researchers

This article gives an in-depth analysis of a cross-cultural training course that I ran for Japanese researchers at the Aichi, Japan branch of Xantusia (the company's name has been changed to protect its identity), a major American pharmaceutical company. The company's history and reasons for implementing a cross-cultural training course, the educational principles behind the course, the demographic information of those who enrolled, and a week-by-week description of the course follow, and provide an example that can inform other programs like it in both corporate and non-corporate settings. Four lessons learned from the author's experience include: (1) the need for a "bottoms-up approach," starting with material (textual, audiovisual, etc.) which presents realistic, stimulating depictions of cross-cultural interactions; (2) cross-cultural training should, ideally, continue (periodically) over the course of a professional's entire career; (3) cross-cultural training programs should have some "laboratory" facility where teachers can experiment with new materials and activities; and (4) basic differences between Asian and Western culture have a major potential impact on international communication, and people should know what these differences are in order to become more effective cross-cultural communicators

Aesthetics · Business · Cross-cultural · Identity (music · Medical education · Order (exchange · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Training (meteorology · Anthropology · Biotechnology and Related Fields · Medicine · Psychology · Marketing

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