October 5, 2021, was a noteworthy day in the journey of SP Jain’s Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) students of the September 2021 intake as they had their first guest session with Kaustuv Roy (Managing Director of Business Solutions). Mr Roy has 30 years of rich experience in the real estate industry. He has worked in the USA, Philippines, and India and travelled across the world for business.

The session with Mr Roy was conducted virtually. World Cultures Professor, Piya Mukherjee, had invited him on behalf of the School to share his understandings and experiences of how culture impacts businesses in today’s fast-growing dynamic world.

Mr Roy focused on the three dimensions where culture influences businesses, namely: ‘Time’, ‘Communication’, and ‘Decision Making’. To enhance the understanding of students, he used slide presentations that highlighted countries and regions on the world map.

In the concept of ‘Time’, Mr Roy distinguished the countries based on ‘important’ and ‘relaxed’. He classified Japan as extremely time conscious and Latin American countries as relaxed. The next dimension discussed was ‘Communication’ wherein the classification was made based on ‘Transparent’ or ‘Opaque’. Australia was given as an example of a highly transparent country for communication and, on the other end of the spectrum, most of the Asian countries were classified as opaque for their emphasis on non-verbal communication. ‘Decision Making’ was the third dimension on which Mr Roy concentrated and he classified the countries as ‘Democratic’ or ‘Authoritarian’. He identified most of the European countries to be ‘Democratic’ whereas East Asian and Middle Eastern regions were classified as ‘Authoritarian’.

Post the session, Taneesha Chaturvedi, a BBA student, said, “The use of real-world examples really helped to solidify concepts taught in class.” Mr Roy not only discussed the impact of culture on businesses but also gave his own experiences that made the learning enriching and well-aligned with the nature of the topic in discussion. Another BBA student, Naman Mehta, said, “The session was quite world culture-centric, and I was impressed by how his insights matched our in-class learnings.”

The key takeaway from the session for students was to contemplate how to find their ideal way of managing clients in their future business encounters while keeping their diverse cultures in mind. As Mr Roy shared, “There is no fixed way to follow; you have to fine-tune it according to your client.” The session helped students to concretise their in-class learnings of world cultures and understand the practical business applications while listening to an experienced professional in the industry.

- This article has been written by Siva Priya Ganti (BBA September 2021 intake)