Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With relief work in Asia/Africa in and after graduate school, Thang’s earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he has been certified with a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: China

  • Fit for Future

    Some live behind their times. Others ahead of them. Tesla was definitely of the latter. Wireless was his thing. Lincoln was another forward-thinker, enabler and en-actor  of abolition. Our next hero is poised to deliver us from oil dependency. That day will come, as surely as the sun rises in the East and set in…

  • Your story

    During the 60’s, when computers were too limited for personal use, Andy Warhol had already predicted that in the future (which is NOW) each of us would have 15 minutes of fame (just like his signature Campbell soup ). Naturally, he couldn’t have predicted the rise of social media  which upend traditional broadcast media, turning it…

  • Alternate Dream

    American Dream has undergone a makeover of late (maybe because the Chinese economy itself was heading for a cliff, so it needed to apply a break on lending). Whatever the underlying reason, America middle class is contracting not because of shrinking population , but mostly because of declining income and consumption. In short, the good old time…

  • On being an influencer

    Like it or not, we all are either on the receiving or giving end of Influence. But few understand what constitute sphere of influence. A study on the subject, by Cialdini , lists below elements: – Like (ability). This is self-explanatory. When you like someone or are liked by someone, nothing can go wrong. This explains the “a…

  • Moon Cake

    You can’t possibly finish one all by yourself. In fact, when I was a kid, I remembered it got cut up not into four but eight pieces, like we would with a Costco pizza. Slices of sweet moon cake, in all varieties. Big confectionary  revenue every year in China and Vietnam. Although it’s a Children…

  • From Co-worker to Co-llaborator

    Some workplace didn’t even get to that phase. People just share a parking lot, a refrigerator and maybe a Christmas Party. Meanwhile, you can collaborate with  people miles apart, in different languages and time zones. Welcome to the new work place. MNC’s have gone through this phase. From relocation to repatriation. Employees got shifted around, to…

  • Repo and Retro

    We don’t want the former, and wish to collect the latter. In our age of mass production, supplysiders push consumption to the  point of writing up bad loans, hence Repo. Then, and this happened to me once, products came out of the assembly line all look alike: I once mistakenly opened an identical rental car…

  • Start from the start

    Science has just made a great leap. Congratulations. They have discovered the equivalent of DNA of the universe. Named it Higgs, after the scientist. This lifts the burden off our shoulders: we are not faceless random masses. If there are DNA’s, there are designs and destination (you might not like it if it’s not to your preferences).…

  • Shore this!

    It’s not good enough with automation. They need to combine that with outsourcing, off-shoring, in-shoring and now, near-shoring.  The idea is to line up the  Filippino call-center workers at mid-night (to go to work, not in line for next-day Black Friday sales) to make a go at scripted greetings like “Have I done everything to your satisfaction”.…

  • Joy of randomness

    We move between chaos and control. For those who experience Saigon traffic, the dance takes it to another level: randomness. A tour bus made its final stop in front of a hotel. Tourists stepped down, immediately, with cameras (little did they know, traffic like this is all too common). Rain and randomness. Control and chaos, coexist. That’s just one aspect…