Execs may miss nuances if they speak only English

How do you say "Cosmopolitan" in Germany? In China? In Bulgaria?

Last month, George Green, chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, flew to Sofia to launch the Bulgarian edition of Hearst Corp.'s famous women's magazine. The celebratory dinner and reception were conducted in English. "The editors and business people (in Bulgaria) all speak English," he says. "It is the language of commerce and industry today."

Green says he doesn't need to speak anything other than English as he travels the world to meet with publishing partners, with the exceptions of Japan and China, where translators are used. "I won't let anyone who works for me have a conversation in a language other than English when I'm around," the veteran publishing executive says, adding, "If you're in the publishing world, especially the written world, you better understand English."

That may not work in some industries, however. Certainly, English has become the common language at many multinationals. Documents and e-mails are written in English, and English often is spoken at board meetings, even at Asian and European companies.

But failing to speak the native language of a parent company could hamper a manager's advancement and even his or her ability to do a current job well. And whether at companies based in the United States or overseas, executives can miss out on informal conversations or risk being misinterpreted, literally, if they don't speak the local language.

Speaking and understanding the local language "gives you more insight, you can avoid misunderstandings," says Jean Young, a California native who speaks fluent German and works for Morgan Stanley's institutional investors group. "It also helps you achieve a deeper level of respect."

Young works with regulators and financial institutions in Germany and regularly conducts business in German. But when she travels to Morgan Stanley offices in Madrid, Milan and Paris, she says she sometimes doesn't understand when her co-workers break into Spanish, French or Italian. Young knows a little French and is now studying Spanish. "I would love to be able to join in," she says.

Not only are more U.S. companies now owned by overseas parents -- including DaimlerChrysler AG, Bertelsmann, Diageo PLC and Anglo- Dutch Unilever PLC, to name a few -- but international mergers and acquisitions often mean companies are owned by a succession of overseas corporate parents, each with a different native tongue.

Last week, Germany's Siemens AG bought USFilter, a Palm Desert, Calif., water-treatment business that has been owned since 1999 by France's Vivendi SA. (Vivendi spun off some of its operations, including USFilter, as a free-standing company, Veolia Environnement SA.)

When Vivendi bought the business, some U.S. executives moved to Paris and worked at learning French, says James Force, vice president of communications at USFilter. He believes something similar will happen now under Siemens, with U.S. managers looking to learn some German. "I think it's great if you have some American business people who are fluent or partially fluent in other languages, particularly the language of the parent," he says. "The Europeans are far ahead of us."

At Munich-based Siemens, country managers must learn the local language of their posts: The head of Siemens's China business, Ernst Behrens, speaks fluent Mandarin, for example. All managers must speak either German or English -- but Siemens has a corporate rule about internal meetings: If one or more individuals doesn't speak German, the others are obliged to speak English. (There are exceptions: In France, meetings may take place in French even if one or more attendees doesn't speak French, a Siemens spokesman says.)

Heinrich von Pierer, Siemens chairman and chief executive, says U.S. executives need to be open to learning about other cultures. "I think our American friends have to be willing to come to Germany when they are younger, to learn and to understand the culture in the same way we do it with everyone else around the world."

Robert M. Kimmett, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and Siemens board member, says he reached a deeper understanding of the company because he could communicate fluently in German with executives and other board members. "Language proficiency gives a (non-German) board member a better grasp of what is going on inside a company," he says, "not just the facts and figures but also texture and nuance."

China and Japan pose even greater language obstacles; they are partially cultural. The languages are hard for Westerners to learn, so many U.S. executives rely on translators and body language. That can widen the communication gap.

At the Zurich-based electrical-engineering company ABB Ltd., Peter Leupp, a Swiss native, oversees 7,000 employees in China and speaks workable Mandarin. He says Chinese employees are reluctant to say "no" to superiors, making it difficult to do business.

Because he isn't fluent in the Chinese languages, Leupp says he often relies on body language -- and sometimes misreads it. "I have conversations with Chinese employees, and after 15 minutes I say to them, 'What do you want to tell me?' " he says. "They don't want to take risks by saying something that they think I might not want to hear."

ABB made English its official language 16 years ago, when Switzerland's Brown Boveri and Sweden's Asea merged. ABB's then-CEO, Percy Barnevik, hoped speaking English would bridge the gap between the conservative, hierarchical Swiss, who called each other by their last names, and the laid-back, egalitarian Swedes. English is a unifying force at the company, Leupp says. "We at ABB like to joke that we have one common language, which is bad English."

As English becomes more universal, both foreign and U.S. companies are placing more emphasis on developing employees with specific management skills and industry knowledge, rather than language facility. Jeanne Branthover, a managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search, says she recently placed an American who spoke only English at a Spanish financial institution whose top managers were all Spanish speaking. The company cared primarily about the candidate's sales ability, not his language ability, she says. Still, Branthover notes: "Language is always going to give somebody an edge, as long as they have the other requirements."

At both Philips Electronics NV, the Dutch consumer giant, and General Electric Co., of Fairfield, Conn., English is the official language and executives aren't required to speak the local language to run a country operation. But both companies have increasingly appointed multilingual country managers. Susan Peters, GE's vice president of executive development, says language skills are an "advantage," and the company closely tracks its multilingual managers.

But speaking only English is "not a showstopper," Peters says. "You can in fact be a global business leader and be an American, too," she says.

Five years ago, Japan's Nissan Motor Co. adopted English as its common language after France's Renault SA acquired a 44.3 percent stake in Nissan to save it from bankruptcy. But Renault executive Thierry Viadieu decided to learn Japanese, instead of relying on translators, when he relocated to Tokyo from Paris. An interpreter "would have been a screen between my colleagues and me," Viadieu says. He conducts meetings in a mixture of Japanese and English but says he hasn't mastered the Japanese sense of humor. "I've stopped translating jokes because nobody laughs," he says.

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