By Victor Moussalli, American University of Beirut
I am a business student from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. During this spring semester, I enrolled in a new cross-cultural management course being offered at my university, and I was delighted to have the chance to partake in it.
This course has furthered my belief that we should have an open-minded attitude and never let our thoughts become universal facts, especially when it comes to cross-cultural interactions. To illustrate, there is more than one way of looking at something (many views/perspectives), and we should try to learn from each of those perspectives as we encounter them, especially when we interact with people from different cultures.
Everyone you ever meet has something you don’t know, thus people from different cultural backgrounds are opportunities to unlearn long-held beliefs that you might have mistaken as facts. This highly interactive course is the perfect occasion to do so, as classes are held virtually among four institutions (in Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, and the United States of America), along with the cross-cultural business forum on Facebook for learning about cross-cultural topics around the world through the sharing of ideas from participants.
This course has further brought the issue of cultural relativism to my attention. It made it more important for me to try as much as possible to see life, not only through my own perspective, but through as many different perspectives as I can.