Transcending Cultures Susanne Mordike
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Transcending Cultures Susanne Mordike Many years back, the British novelist C.P. Snow talked of the world of two cultures: sciences and arts. He enumerated the problems one faces in trying to develop a common appreciation, an understanding that transcends the domain one is in. As a materials engineer working to develop industrial applications of laser technology, encountering this problem of two cultures is almost a daily event. However, the cultures are different from that of Snow's, and are also more than two. As a professor at a German technical university, I work closely with industry. I am a woman, but work in an environment where there are so few of us. I also work with industries in different countries: from my native Germany to Korea, France, and the United States.
I find that men in industry work differently than I do. I strive for cooperation and compromises. I am reluctant to enter into long-winded debates because I structure problems differently from the way men do and I might be found out! When I see a new problem I look for information—as everyone does—but tend to draw heavily on experience while developing a mental picture of a solution. The solution is intuitive and is yet to be validated. But I find that men invariably start with the physical laws and list several possible solutions. This happens at least initially until they encounter problems in their applications. The approximations then come in and they opt for solutions that may not be the best, theoretically speaking. Through each approach, we end up where we should
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have been in the first place. If my original intuition lacked formal rigor, their structured solutions were incompatible with the real environment. In an industrial environment this can be time consuming and ignores the knowledge that has not been documented but has grown out of experience. I therefore prepare to be a willing listener and to cooperate, if only to accelerate the process of problem solving. How do you build an understanding where intuitions are not given the same weight as formal solutions? Familiarity of different approaches to problem solving may help along with the confidence that every problem does not have to be blown up into a war between genders. But this is not always possible as I discovered while working in two industries in Germany. When a major automobile manufacturer decided to introduce laser treating of their camshafts, I was chosen to lead the technology transfer team. Although at one of the first presentations on laser technology I was asked by a senior manager whether I knew how to spell laser and what it meant, an open
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