Category Archives: X-Culture Stories
Challenges of Cash Prizes
As we are launching the X-Culture Academy, a children’s version of the X-Culture competition, we had to revisit the very challenging issue of the winner’s prize. X-Culture is a competition. If it is a competition, there must be a prize. However, it is much more complicated than it may seem. Here is what we tried so…
New Locations for the X-Culture Global Symposium
As many of you know, our plans to hold the 2018 Summer X-Culture Global Symposium in Colombia have been revised. Turns out, the Department of State has an active warning against travel to Colombia. Pure politics, but most U.S. universities cannot allow that their students go to a country that the Department of State has…
Books That Changed Me
Not the books I liked or enjoyed. The books that contained real practical advice. The books that, looking back, changed how I think and how I do things. But first, on my romance with books. For about half of my life, I would not move in space without a book. This habit became a true…
Elusive Consensus in International Teams
Our team of Regional Executive Directors (RED) is trying to launch X-Culture Kids (X-Culture Academy). An annoying but a necessary task is to prepare materials REDs need when they meet with school principles and teachers to talk about X-Culture. Specifically, we need: business cards, informational pamphlets, other promotional materials. Also, we need to decide on…
Out of emails
An unexpected challenge: X-Culture ran out of email addresses. Who would have thought… X-Culture’s web hosting allows us to have up to 100 email accounts at name@X-Culture.org. When we bought the hosting years ago, we needed only one email address: Admin@X-Culture.org. We didn’t even pay attention to the 100 limit. Who cares? How many email…
X-Culture Coach Gets a Job
People often ask me why do I work so hard, days, nights, weekends and holidays. It’s all because of the stories like this one. And even more so, because every semester we end with new ideas for how to help our students even more. We’re about to roll out some new features that will…
Whiteboard Animation Challenges
Three years ago, X-Culture made a series of short whiteboard animation videos (see below). Each video tells a story and explains what X-Culture is, how it works, and how businesses or students could benefit from it. The videos have been seen tens of thousands of times and served us well. We are launching X-Culture Kids,…
Launching X-Culture Kids (or whatever the name will be)
Dear X-Culture Friends, As many of you already know, we’re about to open X-Culture to younger pre-college participants. The plan is to start with teens (ages 10-17) and later go as young as ages 9-12. Our early tests show, kids are fully capable and very interested to work with their international peers. So why not…
Constant Skype Calls Are Fun but Draining
A typical slow Wednesday morning: – Skype with a co-author from Afghanistan who works in Denmark about a study on Cultural Intelligence – Skype with a Ukrainian project partner in Ukraine about X-Culture Kids – Skype with a Peruvian company that wants to be an X-Culture Partner next semester (really cool product, tell more soon)….
Free-riding
One recurring issue most teams (not only in X-Culture) face is free-riding (aka free-loading, social loafing, shirking). Almost every team has one or more team members who do not meet the expectations of their team members. The problem is especially acute in global virtual teams (GVTs). Here is why: