Waseem Sayegh

Something intriguing happened to me the other day, while I was browsing the Internet I saw the huge void between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures. I was browsing cbsnews.com, an American news Website, and my eyes were glued to the streaming video of the Iranian president’s interview on “60 Minutes ,” a television newsmagazine. The interview was filled with political rhetoric, though behind all of that was the void. In the right hand corner was the CBS reporter grilling the Iranian president with his American style investigative journalism. In the left hand corner was the Iranian president starting his interview with a Persian poetic tone by saying: “It’s in the afternoon of an autumn day. We’re in the open air in a garden. And the air is pleasant. And fall, little by little, is settling in, mixing with the summer breeze.” Both the president and the reporter were a perversion of two distinct cultures that when put together only differences could be noticed. From our reading material, one can say that the interview would have had less of a sparring tone had both sides been close to agreement or one of the sides crossed over and behaved in accordance to the other side’s culture.
Can one easily change cultures? Can culture be situational where a person can switch to another culture in an instance? In this paper, we will explore these questions and more in a context of an organization and learn more about culture and when to change it.