A nomadic life and career – a personal perspective

Why you should never leave a business card on the table in Japan, give the gift of a watch or clock in China and why, after a long career, Patrick Dransfield remains convinced ‘lawyers are from Mars and marketing people are from Mercury’.

In my life experience of fifty-nine years, I find that if you approach people with compassion and empathy, then (almost) all cultural barriers simply disappear. That said, my observations relating to the experience of living and working abroad for the majority of my career may be useful, even if it simply invalidates your own experience so far.

One axiom I would like to share is ‘always be curious’. I remember first experiencing ‘wanderlust’ when, at the age of six, my father, Dr Philip Brook Dransfield, read his diaries recorded when Philip was a young petty officer in the Royal Navy visiting China, Japan, Australia and the Dutch East Indies in 1945-6.

During my early childhood, my father worked for a time with the Teijin Group, a Japan-based chemical company, which led to a great deal of exposure to Japanese chemists and Japanese culture. The worlds of travel and eastern philosophies continue to fascinate me – along with my profound wish to escape the mundane through art. My ingrained curiosity and fascination with contemporary art and culture throughout the world has allowed me to forge common bonds with people wherever I am.

The first and most profound disorientation I felt was when I first joined an international law firm as a ‘non-lawyer’. And my cultural experience of almost a quarter of a century of working in close proximity to lawyers has only compounded my belief that ‘lawyers are from Mars: marketing people are from Mercury’.

A whole other article is wrapped up in that simple adage, but the one thing that differentiates the legal profession from all others is a deep-rooted sense of entitlement of lawyers from wherever they hale. Indeed, the legal profession is the only one that divides the world into ‘lawyers’ and ‘non-lawyers’. Think about it.

The only exception to this rule I have found are lawyers from China. They are so beaten up by their ever-demanding clients they don’t have either the time nor inclination to feel any entitlement at all. I think that the fact that for many years – and especially during the Cultural Revolution (1965 -1976) - there were no lawyers at all in China has some bearing on this phenomenon.

Staying with China for a moment, there are several aspects of the perception of a ‘virtuous person’ that also has a bearing on human relationships. According to deep-seated Confucius ethics (and also more recent Maoist dialectics) a virtuous person is virtuous in all ways.

The poet-laureate Philip Larkin would not be considered a great poet in China as the other aspects of his life and mind were so tawdry, for example. Being considered ‘virtuous’ has advantages as it indicates a profound level of shared trust. You are a ‘friend to the firm’ and hence can on occasion share uncomfortable truths. This sharing would be considered ‘contradictions among the people’.

But woe betide you if you transgress and become ‘an enemy of the people’! There is no coming back from that. Another thing about business meetings in China; listen out carefully for what is said at the end of a formal meeting. It may be a seemingly throw away line at the meeting’s close or said quietly in your ear as you reach the lift. That is the main message and you are advised strongly to heed it. But this can be lost on western folk who tend to focus on the theatre of the actual meeting.