THE PRINCIPLES OF mentalmerger^®

Successful individuals and organizations recognize today that international excellence can only be achieved through serious investments in their human capital.

It is not sufficient to get an over-performing multicultural team or to handle projects by only treating the so-called "hard facts", i.e. technical aspects, organization, structure and financial elements.

The "non material reality" (soft facts) such as hopes, fears, states of mind, affinity between key-players, management styles etc. are now unanimously considered as at least as important as the hard facts.

Working in multicultural surrounding means respecting other ways of doing, integrating different approaches and, inevitably, changing attitudes. But as usual, key-players do not spontaneously see why they should question their successful management habits and change their organizations.

The well known "not invented here" or "not developed here" syndrome regularly brings up good reasons not to investigate the interesting aspects of other partners approaches. Main excuses are generally arguments such as "in our country, everything is different!" and "we have everything under control!".

However, the standard way of treating the "non material reality" focuses on optimizing mutual understanding and building a common corporate or project culture by imple-menting methods having proven their efficiency, such as implementation of common procedures, joint action plans and shared commitments.

Such a standard way of treating the "non material reality" is often not effective, especially on a long-term basis. The expected return on investment is often below expectations because human being's emotions such as fears, uncertainty and distrust, are not professionally treated, or even worse, ignored. However, there are especially those "emotional viruses" such as misinterpretation, lack of confidence, interpersonal conflicts, etc. which prevent people from an open minded communication and constructively discussing.

JPB's experience demonstrates that the root cause of failure of multicultural co-operations is ... mutual distrust. It means that most of the energy will be wasted in looking for the "cultural scapegoat" (i.e. accusing "the French", "the Germans" ...) and managing (interpersonal) conflicts. The expected potential of synergy will be reduced to a minimum.

Therefore, an outstanding performance of a multicultural co-operation requires an optimized relationship between counterparts.

There will be no merger in operations in general and no constructive involvement in common projects in particular if people are not "emotionally linked" by a common goal and an optimized inter-personal relationship.

Condition sine qua non for successfully change process, shared commitments, common procedures and joint action plans is to build up a basis of real confidence among involved key-players.

JPB is calling this "federating element" the "mentalmerger^® spirit" (in French: "fusionner en esprit").

Such spirit is one of the main key factors for success of a multicultural team or partnership. Only a "mentally merged" team will be able to act as catalizator of change, and contribute to find the best technical and organizational solutions.

One of the key objectives of each international co-operation should therefore be to achieve the mentalmerger^® as quick as possible in order to work out a common understanding of how to manage common projects.