17 February 2014

Why are Israeli people so hard to work with?

This is a cautionary and educational tale, told by Oren Shamir and re-posted here with his kind permission. Enjoy.

I'm an Israeli. My grandmother was American and my mother grew up in Brooklyn. I've worked for (and with) a few American companies. The following story might highlight some of the cultural differences, the way I see them.

Imagine you're an executive in a big American company that makes home appliances. Your market research team suggests that people may want to have straight bananas, since Americans love to slice bananas up and put them in a sandwich or a cereal bowl, and straight bananas are easier to slice.
You decide to try and solve this problem using both of your R&D teams. One is located in the US and the other in Israel. You call the two team leaders and tell them what you need - a machine that bends bananas backwards to straighten them up.

The American team leader says they will get right on it. The next morning he posts a job opening on Linkedin, looking for a banana expert. He hires a guy from CalTech who knows everything there is to know about the molecular structure of bananas. He also hires two more engineers and an industrial designer. Initially.

After around 24-30 months of hard work, you have a sleek, shiny new machine that bends bananas backwards and produces perfect, straight as an arrow bananas 100% of the time, with any kind of banana that currently exists. It costs about 300 dollars and needs as much power as a small refrigerator.

At the same time, the Israeli team leader listens to you for about 3 minutes then interrupts to say that this is a really stupid idea. He doesn't know anybody who slices bananas. Israelis just eat them. Although we usually do peel them first. He suggests you might want to build a machine that peels bananas.
After a long, frustrating meeting you give up. But on his way home, the Israeli team leader thinks about what you asked him to do, and while he still thinks it's a stupid idea, he likes the challenge. The next morning he calls a couple of friends from the Kibbutz who grow bananas and then he lets you know that his team will have a machine ready within a week.

After exactly 11 days the machine is indeed ready and a demonstration is scheduled. The machine is made out of spare parts of Uzi guns and costs 13$ to build. It also functions as an emergency torch. It looks like a scaled down model of a tractor accident. It also produces perfect, straight as an arrow bananas... in about 62.5% of the cases. 37% of the bananas are either broken, squashed or toasted beyond recognition. About half a percent of the bananas mysteriously disappear.

When you note these shortcomings to the Israeli team they look at you with complete puzzlement. The machine, they would tell you, does exactly what you asked for and the PRD never stated it has to do it to ALL the bananas you throw at it. Some bananas are obviously defective. Besides, it was a stupid idea to begin with.

So this is how we are:

  • We're really good at improvising
  • We think we're smarter than most
  • We help each other out
  • We prefer to cut corners, and get to the chase
  • We say exactly what we think (but we're not always happy with criticism)
  • We LOVE to argue. We argue with our commanders in the army, with our professors in the university and with our bosses at work. We have a "healthy" disrespect for authority
  • We love challenges and dislike wasted talent
  • We like to tell stories

16 comments:

SnoopyTheGoon said...

My submission for next week
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/02/16/inheriting-the-earth/

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Thanks, gratefully accepted, I didn't really have time enough lately...

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Well I would have to plead guilty of dealing with problems like the Israeli team more than the US team and I am a Canadian MOT. But yes Israelis are famously opinionated and blunt and it hasn't served them entirely badly.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

What can I say: I was dealing with customers of Israeli companies abroad for too many years to mention, including catching lots of flak because of our behavior. But yes, the customers who get used to that manner (or the lack of it) usually get ahead of the competition.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

And you don't spend hours wasted in meetings.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Well, in some bigger companies I wouldn't' care to mention, meetings are too long here too.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

He was right, it was a stupid idea.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Er... I am afraid I lost you with this comment, unless it was meant for another post.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

We all know the famous saying (dating back to about 1967) from Israel: "Miracles we can do; the impossible takes a bit longer" with the unstated coda, "who wants to do the impossible?".

SnoopyTheGoon said...

The Israeli who said straightening bananas was a stupid idea. He was right. Reminds me of people who want to change a language when no individual can do that effectively. Only a community of the language's speakers and writers can. Yeah, I guess it's not very apt. My bad.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

True.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Sorry, it's me who was too slow-witted to remember that part of the text.

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Hmm, that sounds a lot like the motto of the Naval Construction Battalions, the famous Sea Bees of World War II:

"The difficult we do at once,
the impossible takes a little longer!"

SnoopyTheGoon said...

I guess it is just a matter of getting use to Israeli rudeness and developing a thick skin.

It seems, based on this example, the best method is to let the Israeli team develop the first model and then let the American team refine it until it works 100%, more or less.


Snoopy, do Israelis argue like the Italians shouting at the top of their voices with big, open expressive hand gestures, sort of like Opera without the music?


In 1977, my Dad, my brother and myself went on a three week vacation in Ireland. We got my Mom some gifts to remember this trip, one of them being a beautiful neck scrafe. It was not until we gave it to her that we noticed that there was a small tag attached to it saying, "made in Israel"!

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Yep ;-)

SnoopyTheGoon said...

"do Israelis argue like the Italians shouting at the top of their voices with big, open expressive hand gestures, sort of like Opera without the music?"

Absolutely. This is why going to Italy was for me like staying at home, but with better food ;-)