I write this during my cross-country flight to San Jose, California, on my way to QuickBooks Connect. I am honored to have been asked to facilitate three sessions at #QBConnect, Intuit’s largest event ever for QuickBooks users, QuickBooks Professional Advisors, 3rd-party developers, and accounting professionals.
Prior to this flight, I was at home for less than 48 hours. Just returned from a week-long training and consulting engagement in Brasilia, Brasil (that’s not a misspelling, it is the native way of spelling the country name). This is the post-World Cup consulting referred to above. Earlier this year, Brasil was host to what many consider the most successful sporting event in history.
The QuickBooks training and consulting engagement was actually for one of the World Cup sponsor organizations (see picture inset).
Like with any trip abroad, the biggest takeaway was living the local culture and absorbing the business climate for the few days I was there. This engagement was a valuable example of the beauty and power of human communication.
The native language of Brasil is Portuguese, a language that shares roots with Spanish, although if you asked a third party, the two languages don’t sound anything alike.
At the onset, it was suggested to me to conduct the meetings in English; this is an international organization, where most of the personnel are familiar enough with English to understand me. But after a short while, it became evident that everyone was a lot more at ease when I communicated in Spanish. Yes, there were a few English terms mixed in the proceedings, but to my surprise, we were able to communicate in a mix of languages. Mostly, they speaking in Portuguese to me and I in Spanish to them, mixing in some newly learned words and terms in Portuguese of my own. Overall, besides the positive training and successful consulting results, the great takeaway was the mental and cultural exercise of communicating in different languages for a common purpose.
Saudações from Brasilia… and Greetings from San Jose!
…MARIO
