Entre Les Murs

Lessons in European Business

My evening class, French for professionals, can often be a fairly staid business, correcting homework and working through the textbook together. It started out that way yesterday evening. We had reached a section on human resources, when something in the third question set our teacher off. She launched into a diatribe about the Alliance Francais management that lasted a good twenty minutes. It seems they've acquired a new director who is making changes. There was something terribly French about this young woman criticizing her employers at length to a captive audience of the company's customers, cloaked in the national self-righteous indignation.

Another lesson in local business culture came in a role-playing exercise we did later in the class. The subject was the offer of employment, the contents of which are prescribed in France. The exercise was to conduct an interview with a prospective sales person who is to be engaged to cover the fictional company's Asian market. I was paired with a Spanish woman, where she was the new hire and I was the HR person. She wanted us to reduce her commission in exchange for a higher base salary and regular paid trips back to France. I was offering a generous commission but expected her to pay for her own personal travel. The negotiation became a little heated (to the amusement of the rest of the class) because she thought I was being unreasonable for refusing the security and regular trips home; and I could not believe that someone applying for a sales job would be so plainly uninterested in actually doing the job of selling.

I and a classmate, DT, found a pub after class. DT (a tall, handsome Brit, with a keen mind and razor wit, who occasionally views this page) moved here a couple of years ago, and his now ten-year-old son became completely bilingual in a year, something I find a little frustrating as my own progress after almost six months seems to me nearly undetectable. Nice to have a drinking buddy again, though.

posted 3.3.06