A Facebook friend recommended to me Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, a book I finished on a flight to Korea last week. This is the second of Gladwell’s books I have read and I enjoyed it just as much as the first, The Tipping Point. One part of Outliers, a discussion on Asian communication, seems to offer a piece in the puzzle I am trying to solve on how to be successful in Asia.
Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”–that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously…But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. [Emphasis from Gladwell.]