X-Culture:What it Takes

Guest Blogger: Tyler Doughty, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

Having completed the X-Culture project assignment, stress levels around the world I’m sure have gone down. The X-Culture project proved to be a valuable assignment that was successful in teaching us students how to work together in a team with people around the world. Even for someone like myself, who has no real intentions of working internationally in any aspects, it was still a nice experience to have working in a team with deadlines and expectations knowing that other people are counting on you to do the assigned tasks provided to you.

My X-Culture team, with students hailing from all over the world including the United States, Columbia, Thailand, and China, was able to take advantage of group member’s knowledge of their home countries in order to have the a step up in the research aspects when doing this project. We chose to take an American company, Starbucks, a company from my home country, and move them into Columbia, a home country of another one of my group members. With our background knowledge of the company and the host country itself, we were able to have a greater insight of the different aspects of what difficulties or challenges that would be presented while moving internationally.

At the end of the project, I believe that the structure of this project is unique from anything that we as students in America have ever been tasked with before. The experiences and the lessons learned from this X-Culture assignment is a great first step to learning what it takes to work with people of different cultures and backgrounds.