Facts You Should Know between Western Value: “To Do” and Thai Value: “To Be”
If you come from an “Anglo” culture like the USA, the UK, Australia, or Canada, “Doing” is a very powerful characteristic of your culture, and it is important for everybody to be constantly productive, planning, executing, and evaluating all the time. Conventional wisdom in your culture is that doing is what creates success – and if you don’t do enough,you‘ll never succeed. Everybody in your culture knows that. It’s the “truth” about the way life is.For example, look at how important it is In your culture when you meet somebody for the first time, to find out what they “do” so you can figure out who they are and whether they are worthy of your respect. Even in your language not only is “how do you do?” a formal greeting, (with “how are you doing?” as the informal version), “what do you do for a living?” is one of the most common icebreakers in any conversation you have with strangers. To illustrate that point, imagine you are meeting three people for the first time. You find out that one is a senior executive at an oil company; the other is a forklift operator at a manufacturing plant; the third is unemployed. Which one is most worthy of your respect? As a matter of fact, just being “unemployed” can feel humiliating for somebody in your “doing” culture, because after all, the deep perception is that if you’re doing nothing, you are nothing. In Monday morning conversations with your friends, don’t you always ask “what did you do over the weekend?” When you call your friends or family on the phone, isn’t one of the questions you ask “what are you/have you been doing?” Even in school, one of your early assignments was probably to write a 1000 word essay on what you did on your summer holiday. Westerners tend to look at time as either a precious resource to be managed or an enemy to be conquered – and “doing,” being future-oriented, helps you measure your “progress” so you can move on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. This focus on doing is almost like an endless game of “Beat the Clock” – a marathon you’ll never win. But at least doing something proves you’re contributing to your society and not being a burden to anybody. At work, you focus on work, investing your energy in organizing, planning, doing, and documenting what you’ve done so you can leave a trail of proof behind you to demonstrate your worth. Not only that, many organizations have taken it one step further and adopted formal policies for organizing, planning, and documenting – calling it “continuous quality improvement” or “standard operating procedures.” The how of doing is important to document, so that people will “save time” by not having to figure things out for themselves over and over again. Since work time is for work and “getting things done,” socializing or taking time for personal phone calls or emails is not only frowned upon, in some companies it’s a reason for discipline. After all, in a Western culture, the employer is paying for his employee’s “time” and the whole purpose of work is to accomplish something. The orientation to doing can be so strong within your culture that you aren’t able to even see the possibility of living any other way. But there are many cultures that do not share your point of view, and Thailand is one of them. If you expect there to beconflicts or misunderstandings about “Doing vs.Being,” you will never be disappointed!
The Thai Value: “To Be”
In Thailand, “Being” is a powerful characteristic of our culture, and we value inaction and acceptance of the way things are more than we value being busy for its own sake. After all, everything is subject to the law of Karma or fate and we are powerless to control, change, or stop the wheel. So we focus on controlling or changing ourselves from the inside, instead. We don’t determine a person’s worth by what they “do” – we evaluate them based on how they are “being” and who they “are” (including who their family is, who their employer is, and what their status is in the hierarchy).The Thai culture is less hectic and more relaxed, because we are driven less by the desire to get something done than we are to just participate in life the way it shows up and live each day as it comes. Another way of saying it is that sometimes the journey is more important to us than the destination – sometimes working to achieve a goal is more important than actually achieving it – because through the journey, through the work itself, we grow and expand internally as we adjust ourselves to the circumstances that present themselves. We look at time as boundary less and eternal, almost as if just “Being” expands time so we can be more fully present in each moment of now. There is no guilt or shame attached to “doing nothing” – after all, life always presents us something new to do in its own time and at its own pace. And our focus is on being at peace with that. We have a hard time distinguishing “work time” from “play time” and will bring a sense of play into the workplace that some Westerners might find difficult to deal with. We’ll chat, laugh, joke, gossip, and generally enjoy the camaraderie of our co-workers while we’re at work because what’s most important to us is not “how” the work gets done but the end product. Our pride is not in the result, but in the process we go through to achieve it. An example comes to mind, told to me by a Northern European manager of a machine shop that employed Thai workers in his international engineering company. The Thai machinists would sit barefoot in a circle on the machine shop floor, laughing, gossiping and joking as they passed around the tools and collaborated about how to make a particular part. A new supervisor (also European) saw the barefoot Thai men sitting on the floor, and sternly pointed at the workbench, indicating THAT was the proper way and the proper place to work with the tools – and pointed out that not wearing safety shoes was a violation of the standard operating procedures. When he returned a few hours later, it was to find the Thai workers wearing their safety shoes, yet sitting in a circle on the workbench itself, laughing, joking and collaborating as before – and producing beautifully machined parts.
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