Amazon – When Global Meets Local – How Expatriates can Succeed in Myanmar
Published by Interculture Myanmar on 10 June, 2019
How Expats and Locals can work together for success in Myanmar
Published by Interculture Myanmar on 15 June, 2019
AUTHOR: ANDREW KING, Mizzima Weekly, 14th March, 2019
http://mizzima.com/article/how-expats-and-locals-can-work-together-success
A guide for expats in Myanmar: When Global Meets Local
Published by Interculture Myanmar on 15 June, 2019
AUTHOR: SAN LIN TUN, Myanmar Times, 18 MAR 2019
Photo – San Lin Tun
The book has created a buzz in the expat and literary community in Yangon even before its launching, so when Hana Bui finally launched her book “When Global Meets Local” last week curious crowd gathered at Pansuria in downtown Yangon to see what it was all about.
The author, wearing a formal Myanmar outfit – a short sleeve blouse and a sarong – played a good hostess, hobnobbing with the guests and obligingly signed copies.
As the country has increasingly opened its doors to foreigners after over half a century of isolation, it’s just natural for the locals and the visitors to go into some kind of culture shock, or some kind of misunderstandings as they began interacting with each other.
The visitors rely on the international standards while the locals try so hard to understand and meet their standards within their own ways and limitations.
guide-2.jpg
Photo – San Lin Tun
Hana pointed out that the key is to try to understand each other’s differences, which will lead to the easing of tension that would lead to the benefit for both parties.
The author is an expat living in Yangon for the past six years. She even has a Myanmar name, which she pronounced in Vietnamese drawl. During her stay in the country, she has recognized the hard crack expat-local relationship in every communicative field or business field.
She is an intercultural trainer and an author. She has worked in human resources services in Myanmar. She did an MA degree on Globalization and Communication at University of Leicester, England.
Hana observed that both the locals and the foreigners feel frustrated or petulant, trying to overcome deadlock situations. One side breaks the agreement easily without thinking of the results; the other side puts more pressure on the other side, making matters more complex and complicated. It seems that there is no convergence point.
Hana has tried to understand the traits of locals, and expats and found ways to bridge the gap of understanding between expats and locals to be more feasible in their relationship and communication.
‘Anadeh is the consideration of others not wanting to hurt others’ feelings or not wanting to offend or embarrass.’ – Hana Bui
In her book, “When Global Meets Local” she has pointed out the facts which are instrumental in working with locals and expressing and addressing as expats, with support of case studies in the respective fields.
She understands that these are cultural issues but not cross-cultural leadership. For her survey, she met over 100 expats in Myanmar and 50 local professionals who answered her questionnaire.
During the launching of her book, Hana shared with the audience her experience in living in Yangon and in working with the locals. She read out an extract from the Chapter 5 of her book, with the title: “To Succeed in the workplace – Communicating When Yes is No”.
People often say “Yes,” because they are hesitant to say “No” here. If you ask, “Do you like this option?” Instead of saying “No,” they may answer “ I am still thinking” or “ Maybe” or “I am not sure.”
In some cases like asking for clarification, some feel reluctant to ask back to explain them again. Instead, they hide their bewilderment behind the shell of Anadeh.
guide-3.jpg
Photo – San Lin Tun
Hana found that and defined the meaning of Anadeh in this way:
Anadeh is why such things happen.Anadeh is the consideration of others not wanting to hurt other/s feelings or not wanting to offend or embarrass or disappoint others, which includes saving faces.
The methods she describes in her book are useful to the expats, informative and practical. Hana emphasized building trust between two parties would ensure better relationship and communication.
Once she asked more than fifty local HR heads and professionals “What should an expat do to work more effectively in Myanmar” the answer is repeated again and again “Respect the locals”.
San Lin Tun is a freelance Myanmar-English writer of essays, poetry, short story and novel.
When Global Meets Local – How Expatriates can Succeed in Myanmar
Published by Interculture Myanmar on 15 June, 2019
AUTHOR: ANDREW P. JOHNSON | 02 APR 2019 | VOL 7 ISSUE 14
Is there one book all foreigners should read when first coming to Myanmar? Yes, there is. A book signing was held on March 10, 2019, at Pansuriya Art Gallery, for Hana Bui’s new book When Global Meets Local – How Expatriates can Success in Myanmar.
Myanmar Business Today’s senior editor had the opportunity to sit and talk with Hana Bui about her new book and why all expats should give it a read.
“The book is the first of its kind to meet the needs for expats working and living in Myanmar,” said Hana. “It’s the cultural differences that are the biggest difficulties for foreigners working in Myanmar.”
Hana pointed to a quote from The Economist on the back cover of her book. “A survey of senior executives from 68 countries indicates that 90 percent see ‘cross-cultural leadership’ as the biggest management challenge of this century. Up to 40 percent of managers sent on overseas assignments terminate early. The cost to employers of each early return is between USD 250,000-1,250,000.”
This data certainly show the value of a book like Hana’s, and might very well help protect the investment a company makes when they send managers overseas to Myanmar. However, when looking over the book for myself, it seems clear that many types of foreigners would be interested in reading this book, including teachers, NGO employees, and even tourists that come for a peak at this exotic land.
I asked Hana about her background, and she said she is originally from Vietnam, but holds an MA degree on Globalization and Communications from the University of Leicester, UK. She has been in communications and human resources for years and has a strong interest in global-local interrelations. She’s been living in Myanmar for the past six years, and views herself as a cultural bridge between Myanmar and the world.
I then asked what brought her to Myanmar in the first place, and she explained how in 2012, she saw great potential for growth in Myanmar and wanted to be apart of that. Over the next five years she said she began to see a need for a book like this. She said, “With the encouragement from Werner Eggert, a German journalist from Interlink Academy, I set out to put into writing the wisdom I’ve accumulated.”
I asked how long it took her to research the subject and write the manuscript. She said, “It took a full year. I carried out a survey of over 100 expats — who have lived here for over a year — and 50 local professionals. I also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with local professionals and expats for their comments on challenges and viewpoints.”
Getting the viewpoint from local professionals is important so expats can begin to see things from a local person’s point of view, and to understand what locals think of foreigners.
The book is written so that it is very easy to understand, and covers common problems expats face when working with locals, things like: communicating, relationships, micromanaging, and training. There are also summaries throughout the book showing practical solutions that expats can utilize to be successful.
When I showed the book to Min Thu Aung, Myanmar Business Today’s translator, he said, “Wow, this is a great book, I think it will be good for foreigners and locals.”
An electronic version of the book can be purchased on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/When-Global-Meets-Local-Expatriates-ebook/dp/B07M…
You can also find the book in local shops around Yangon:
Bagan Book House (No. 100, 37th Street)
Ar. Yone Thit Bookshop (No. 365, Bogyoke Aung San Road – between 30th and 31st Street)
Pansuriya Restaurant (100 Bogalay Zay Street, Botataung Township)
Yar Pyae (No. 264, Pansodan Street, Upper block)
Thalun Book Store (Bogyoke Aung San Road and 45th Street)
Myanmar Summary:
ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားေတြ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံကုိ မလာ ခင္ ဖတ္သင့္သည့္ စာအုပ္တစ္အုပ္ေလမ်ား ရွိေလမလား။ ရွိပါသည္။
Hana Bui
စာအုပ္အသစ္ When Global Meets Local-How Expatriates can Succeed in Myanmar
ကုိ မတ္လ ၁ဝ ရက္ေန႔က Pansuriya Art Gallery
တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။
MBT
အႀကီးတန္းအယ္ဒီတာသည္ Hana Bui
ႏွင့္ေတြ႕ဆုံစကားေျပာခြင့္ရကာ ျမန္မာ ျပည္ေရာက္ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားမ်ား ဘာေၾကာင့္ ဖတ္သင့္သည္ကုိ ဆုိသည္ႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ေမးျမန္းျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
”ဒီစာအုပ္က ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာေနထုိင္ အလုပ္ လုပ္ေနတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားေတြ လုိအပ္ခ်က္ နဲ႔ကုိက္ညီတဲ့ စာအုပ္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္”ဟု ¤င္းက ဆုိသည္။
”ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ အလုပ္လုပ္ေနတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံ ျခားသားေတြအတြက္ အႀကီးမားဆုံးအခက္ အခဲကေတာ့ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈမတူညီျခင္းပဲျဖစ္ ပါတယ္”
Hana Bui
က သူ႔စာအုပ္ေနာက္ဖုံးေရွ႕ The Economist
မွာစာေၾကာင္းကုိ ၫႊန္ျပ ပါသည္။ ”ႏုိင္ငံေပါင္း ၆၈ ႏုိင္ငံမွ အႀကီးအ ကဲမ်ားကုိ ေမးျမန္းစစ္တမ္းေကာက္ထားရာ တြင္ ¤င္းတုိ႔၏ ၉ဝ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းက ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ မတူဘဲ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈေပးရျခင္းသည္ ယခု ရာစုႏွစ္၏အႀကီးမားဆုံးေသာ စီမံခန္႔ခဲြမႈ ဆုိင္ရာ စိန္ေခၚမႈတစ္ခုျဖစ္သည္ဟု ျမင္ၾက သည္။ ျပည္ပသုိ႔ သြားေရာက္တာဝန္ထမ္း ေဆာင္ရန္ တာဝန္ေပးခံရေသာ မန္ေနဂ်ာ စုစုေပါင္း၏ ၄ဝ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းမွာ ေစာစီးစြာ တာဝန္မွ ႐ုပ္သိမ္းခံရသည္။ ေစာစီးစြာျပန္ လာရျခင္းအတြက္ အလုပ္ရွင္မ်ားကုန္က်ရ သည့္ ကုန္က်မႈမွာ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ႏွစ္သိန္းငါးေသာင္းမွ ဆယ့္ႏွစ္သိန္းငါး ေသာင္းအထိရွိသည္။”
ဤအခ်က္အလက္မွာ Hana
၏စာအုပ္ကဲ့ သုိ႔ေသာ္ စာအုပ္မ်ား၏တန္ဖုိးကုိ ျပသေနၿပီး ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ မန္ေနဂ်ာမ်ားေစလႊတ္သည့္ အခါတြင္ ကုမၸဏီမ်ားျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ ႏွံမႈမ်ားကုိ ကာကြယ္ရန္အတြက္ မ်ားစြာ အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္ေစပါလိမ့္မည္။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ ကြၽန္ေတာ္ကုိယ္တုိင္ စာအုပ္ကုိဖတ္ၾကည့္ သည့္အခါတြင္ေတာ့ ဆရာမ်ား၊ NGO
ဝန္ထမ္းမ်ား၊ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ဝင္ေရာက္ေသာ ကမၻာ့လည့္ခရီးသည္မ်ား အပါအဝင္ႏုိင္ငံ ျခားသားေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားပင္ ဤစာအုပ္ ကုိဖတ္ရန္ စိတ္ဝင္စားၾကလိမ့္မည္ဟု ျမင္မိ ပါသည္။
သူ႔အေၾကာင္းကုိ ေမးၾကည့္သည့္အခါတြင္ Hana
င္းမွာ ဗီယက္နမ္ဇာတိျဖစ္ၿပီး UK
ရွိ University of Leicester rS Glo-balization and Communications
မွ ဘာသာရပ္ျဖစ္ MA
ဘဲြ႕ရရွိထားသည္ဟု ေျပာသည္။ ျပည္ပဆက္ဆံေရးႏွင့္ လူသား အရင္းအျမစ္နယ္ပယ္တြင္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ က်င္လည္ေနၿပီး ကမၻာ့အဆင့္-ေဒသအဆင့္ အျပန္အလွန္ဆက္ဆံမႈတြင္ မ်ားစြာစိတ္ဝင္ စားသည္ဟုဆုိသည္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ေျခာက္ ႏွစ္ၾကာ ေနထုိင္ေနၿပီး မိမိကုိယ္ကုိယ္ ျမန္မာ ႏုိင္ငံႏွင့္ကမၻာကုိဆက္စပ္ေပးေသာ ယဥ္ေက်း မႈတံတားအျဖစ္ျမင္သည္။
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံသုိ႔ ဘယ္လုိေရာက္လာသလဲလုိ႔ ေမးသည့္အခါတြင္ ၂ဝ၁၂ ခုႏွစ္က ျမန္မာ ႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ဖံြ႕ၿဖိဳးမႈအလားအလာမ်ားကုိ ေတြ႕ ျမင္ခဲ့ၿပီး တစ္ဖက္တစ္လမ္းမွ ပါဝင္လုိခဲ့ ေၾကာင္းရွင္းျပသည္။ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ ငါးႏွစ္အတြင္း က ယခုလုိစာအုပ္မ်ဳိး ေပၚထြက္လာရန္ လုိ အပ္သည္ကုိ သေဘာေပါက္လာခဲ့သည္။
”ႈ Interlink Academy
က ဂ်ာမန္လူမ်ဳိး ဂ်ာနယ္လစ္ Werner Eggert
ရဲ႕အားေပးမႈ ႏွင့္အတူ ကြၽန္မသိထားတဲ့အသိေတြကုိ စၿပီး ခ်ေရးျဖစ္တယ္”
စာအုပ္ပါအေၾကာင္းအရာႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ ၍ သုေတသနျပဳလုပ္ျခင္း၊ စာမႈၾကမ္းေရးျခင္း လုပ္ရာတြင္ အခ်ိန္မည္မွ် ယူခဲ့ရသနည္းဟု ေမးသည့္အခါတြင္ ¤င္းက” တစ္ႏွစ္တင္း တင္း ၾကာခဲ့တယ္၊ ဒီမွာေနတာ တစ္ႏွစ္ ေက်ာ္ၾကာၿပီျဖစ္တဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံျခားသား အေယာက္ တစ္ရာေက်ာ္ကုိ ေမးျမန္းခဲ့တယ္။ ေဒသခံ ပေရာ္ဖက္ရွင္နယ္ အေယာက္ ၅ဝ ေက်ာ္ ကုိလည္း ေမးျမန္းခဲ့တယ္။ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ ပညာရွင္ေတြနဲ႔လည္း သူတုိ႔ စိန္ေခၚမႈေတြ အျမင္ေတြနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး အင္တာဗ်ဴး အႀကိမ္ေရ ၃ဝ ေလာက္လုပ္ခဲ့တယ္”ဟု ေျပာ ပါသည္။
ေဒသခံ ပေရာ္ဖက္ရွင္နယ္မ်ား၏ အျမင္ မ်ားကုိရရွိရန္မွာ အေရးႀကီးပါသည္။ အဘယ္ေၾကာင့္ဆုိေသာ္ ထုိအျမင္မ်ားမွ တဆင့္ ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားအေနျဖင့္ ေဒသခံမ်ား ၏ အျမင္ကုိ သိရွိခြင့္ရရွိမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏုိင္ငံ ျခားသားမ်ားအေပၚ ေဒသခံမ်ား၏ အျမင္ ကုိလည္းသိရွိနားလည္ႏုိင္မည္ျဖစ္သည္။
စာအုပ္ကုိ ဖတ္လုိ႔လြယ္ကူေအာင္ေရးသား ထားၿပီး စာအုပ္ထဲမွာလည္း ေျပာဆုိဆက္ သြယ္ျခင္း၊ ေပါင္းသင္းဆက္ဆံျခင္း၊ အေသး စားစီမံခန္႔ခဲြျခင္း၊ ေလ့က်င့္သင္ၾကားေပးျခင္း ကဲ့သုိ႔ေသာ ေဒသခံမ်ားႏွင့္လက္တဲြလုပ္ ေဆာင္ရာတြင္ ႀကံဳရေလ့ရွိသည့္ ျပႆနာ မ်ားကုိ ထည့္သြင္းေရးသားထားပါသည္။
ထုိစာအုပ္ကုိ MBT ၏ ဘာသာျပန္ဆရာ မင္းသူေအာင္အား ျပၾကည့္ရာတြင္ ”သိပ္ ေကာင္းတဲ့စာအုပ္ပဲ၊ ႏုိင္ငံျခားသားေတြ အတြက္ေရာ ေဒသခံေတြ အတြက္ေရာ ေကာင္းမယ္လုိ႔ထင္တယ္”ဟု ေျပာပါသည္။
အဆုိပါစာအုပ္ကုိ အေမဇုန္ https://www amazon.com/When-Global-Meets-Local -Expatriates-ebook/dp/B07MXV2W7
တြင္ ရယူႏုိင္ပါသည္။ ရန္ကုန္ရွိ ပုဂံစာအုပ္တုိက္၊ အာ႐ုံသစ္စာ အုပ္ဆုိင္၊ Pansuriya
စားေသာက္ဆုိင္၊ ရာျပည့္စာအုပ္ဆုိင္၊ သာလြန္ စာအုပ္ဆုိင္ တုိ႔၌ဝယ္ယူရရွိႏုိင္ပါသည္။
“When Global Meets Local – How Expatriates can Succeed in Myanmar” in Japon Plus and Yangon Express
Published by Interculture Myanmar on 27 September, 2019
Yangon Press, August 2019
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