Effective communication plays an integral role in ensuring that the point being put across has reached the intended audience. The process calls for a proper understanding of the audience to make the necessary assumption. In the case study considered herein, Sam made assumptions that failed him terribly.
Sam was misguided by the generous act of bowing by the Japanese executives before and after his presentation. Generally, bowing depicts courtesy, salutation or respect. Nonetheless, Sam was convinced that the team was in dire need of his company’s supplies, hence, the deal would be closed easily. Bucher (2015) indicates that the influence of culture on the daily activities of human beings is profound. Hence, the Japanese are used to the culture of bowing and did not notice anything new when they met and handed over their business cards to Sam with both hands and a slight bow. Nevertheless, Sam was unaware of this, thus, he believed that he would easily lure the executives into accepting supplies from their company. Moreover, despite Sam’s decline of the offer to go drink with the executives, they bowed making him believe that the deal was closed.
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During Sam’s presentation, it was clear that the Japanese executives were nodding. Importantly, nonverbal communication should provide people with an opportunity to interact with their audience and also for meta-communication purposes (Mandal, 2014). In this case, it can be argued that Sam’s audience was probably nodding as a sign of understanding the flow of information from the presentation. However, Sam misinterpreted this and thought that it implied that the audience was willing to accept his business deal, something that was very far from the truth. In the end, Sam believed that his talk was successful as far as his objectives were concerned, but that was not the case.
Therefore, communication plays a significant role in the success of activities carried out by human beings. The speaker has to understand the audience through nonverbal gestures. According to Sam’s case, he failed in his presentation since he misunderstood the act of nodding and bowing by the Japanese executives as the closing if the business deal, yet it is in their culture to act this way.
References
Bucher, R. D. (2015). Diversity Consciousness: opening our minds to people, cultures, and opportunities (4th Ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.
Mandal, F. B. (2014). Nonverbal communication in humans. Journal of human behavior in the social environment, 24(4), 417-421.
