The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”
MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”
Water cooler names the drinking water dispenser in an office, and also “the kind of informal conversation among office staff that takes place at such a dispenser.” People speak of water-cooler conversations and of a television show noteworthy enough to give office staff something to talk about as water-cooler television.
Let’s do lunch. Let’s get coffee sometime. By 1985 a Los Angeles Times columnist was already joking about the first: “Let’s do lunch sometime, have your girl call my girl.”
MIT’s office for international students explains such invitations to new arrivals. An American writer on the page says that when people say “Let’s get lunch!” it “seems like they don’t really mean it.” If an American is serious, “they will propose a time and place.”
On November 16, 2022, Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter staff. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Employees who wanted to stay had to click yes on a link. “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”
After the 1977 Tenerife collision, in which a captain began his takeoff roll despite warnings from his first officer and flight engineer, NASA psychologist John Lauber coined the term at a 1979 workshop. United Airlines ran the first airline programme in 1981, and the FAA later made it mandatory.
CRM keeps the command hierarchy and changes what may cross it. Junior crew are trained to question the captain, and — in the phrase used in the training — to advocate for critical information until it is acted upon.
An American industry concluded that its aircraft were failing because information was not moving, and rebuilt its training around the flow rather than around the flying.
Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation. A four-part script for handing a patient from one American clinician to another, taught in nursing schools and used in hospitals nationwide. Borrowed from the US Navy, where it standardized reporting to a commanding officer, and adopted in medicine because unstructured handoffs were losing information at every shift change.
American spaceflight puts every flight controller on continuous voice loops, each one listening to several conversations at once and able to speak into any of them. The room is designed so that nobody has to ask. The information arrives whether or not you knew to want it.
American football stops play so that eleven people can be told the next move, and the sport built the pause into its own structure to allow it. The word crossed into American business intact — a huddle is a short unscheduled meeting whose only purpose is to get everyone holding the same picture.
American military practice produces the SITREP on a schedule — what has changed, what is known, what is expected — and pushes it up and sideways whether or not anything has happened. The report goes out on time even when the content is that nothing occurred, because a gap in the stream is itself information.
American organizations run a rhythm of them: weekly team updates, monthly reports, quarterly reviews, daily notes. The cadence is the point rather than the content. The system assumes that information will stop moving unless something scheduled makes it move.