Good news! The negative press from the trucking situation in Indonesia has been successfully mitigated. Upper management now recognizes that E227 Global Solutions has long talked about being green, but has not made any major efforts toward reducing the company’s carbon footprint on a global scale. With operations in the U.S. and abroad, E227 Global Solutions has seen generally successful localized initiatives to reduce energy consumption, reduce or eliminate chemical by-products, and minimize office waste.
Management at E227 Global Solutions is now challenging the entire company to adopt “green” strategies and reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 25% in the next year. Recognizing that great ideas come from all levels of the company, E227GS is challenging you, its employees, to generate ideas for going green and achieving, and possibly exceeding, the goal of reducing our carbon footprint.
Guidelines
For the week 8 assignment, you will submit a formal proposal to your division manager Anne Brown, recommending a strategy the company could adopt to go green. In week 6 you will submit an outline of the entire proposal, as well as the introduction of the proposal itself.
Remember, the goal of the proposal is to recommend a sustainable green strategy the company can adopt to reduce the carbon footprint by 25%. The primary audience is your division manager, Anne Brown; however, your proposal will probably be read by anyone in upper management.
As part of the planning stage, you will research 3-4 green strategies and decide on a specific strategy (e.g., reducing printer waste such as paper and ink; phasing in an energy efficient fleet of vehicles; installing solar panels or wind turbines to power the office building, etc.). Or you can research a general area such as physical facilities, recycling, transportation, etc. Just make sure the solution is broad enough so that you’ll be able to talk in depth about the one recommended strategy.
For your research, you need to find a variety of sources (at least six). Some sources may be found through the DeVry library, while others could be found through internet research. To use library resources, go to the Student Resources tab (under Course Home), click Library, and familiarize yourself with the menu in the upper left hand corner. Explore various sources, including the online librarian. A good place to become familiar with this topic is Green Business Practices for Dummies (2009) by Lisa Swallow, which is available through DeVry’s online library, as well as additional online sources listed in the Webliography. Make all sources are credible. To avoid plagiarism, all borrowed material must be cited correctly using APA guidelines.
The recommended range for the proposal is 1250-1750 words, and it should include the following parts:
Front Matter
Title page
Transmittal Correspondence
Report Proper
Introduction (each of the four sections listed below will be second-level headings under Introduction)
Background of the Problem: Provide an overview of problem/situation and its importance. This is a critical section. It should describe the problem currently and reasons why the proposal is being written.
Statement of Purpose: The statement of purpose is essentially the same as a thesis statement for an essay or paper. It only needs to be a sentence or two long.
Sources and Methods: To establish credibility, discuss the types of research material selected to support the proposed solution and how the material will be used in the proposal. NOTE: You don’t make a list of sources like you would for a References page.
Report Organization: Provide an overview of the various sections of the report so the reader is aware of the direction and organization of the report to follow.
Discussion (each of the three sections listed below will be second-level headings under Discussion)
Solution and Benefits: Identify your solution and discuss its benefits. Include a visual.
Cost: This section should include individual costs to the organization, but may also include any cost savings that may be realized. Include a table to help readers visualize what is presented in this section.
Conclusion and Recommendation: Review the issues that led to the proposed solution and clearly state the recommendation you want the reader to implement.
Conclude the report with a brief statement that expresses a positive sentiment or statement.
End Matter
References (at least six credible sources in APA format)
Appendices (if applicable)
The formal proposal will be completed over a three week period, starting in Week 6 and ending in Week 8. Week 6 establishes the outline and introduction for the final proposal, so it is important to have a clear vision for what you want your proposal to accomplish. Start researching green strategies early in the session.
Review the Week 6 and Week 8 grading rubrics to determine which parts are due in those weeks. Contact your professor for clarification of details.
APA will be used for in-text and end-of-text citations ONLY.  Do not use APA as the layout format for your formal proposal.  Review the sample formal report layout on pages 426-439 to get an idea of how to design the layout of your proposal.
Cultural context influences legal and ethical behavior, which in turn can affect communication. For example, the meaning of business contracts can vary from culture to culture. While a manager from a U.S. company would tend to view a signed contract as the end of the negotiating process, with all the details resolved, his or her counterpart in many Asian cultures might view the signed contract as an agreement to do business—and only then begin to negotiate the details of the deal.28
Honesty and respect are cornerstones of ethical communication, regardless of culture.
As you conduct business around the world, you’ll find that both legal systems and ethical standards differ from culture to culture. Making ethical choices across cultures can seem complicated, but you can keep your messages ethical by applying four basic principles:29
• Actively seek mutual ground. To allow the clearest possible exchange of information, both parties must be flexible and avoid insisting that an interaction take place strictly in terms of one culture or another.
• Send and receive messages without judgment. To allow information to flow freely, both parties must recognize that values vary from culture to culture, and they must trust each other.
• Send messages that are honest. To ensure that information is true, both parties must see things as they are—not as they would like them to be. Both parties must be fully aware of their personal and cultural biases.
• Show respect for cultural differences. To protect the basic human rights of both parties, each must understand and acknowledge the other’s needs and preserve each other’s dignity by communicating without deception.
SOCIAL DIFFERENCES
The nature of social behavior varies among cultures, sometimes dramatically. Some behavioral rules are formal and specifically articulated (table manners are a good example), whereas others are informal and learned over time (such as the comfortable distance to stand from a colleague during a discussion). The combination of formal and informal rules influences the overall behavior of most people in a society most of the time. In addition to the factors already discussed, social norms can vary from culture to culture in the following areas:
Formal rules of etiquette are explicit and well defined, but informal rules are learned through observation and imitation.
• Attitudes toward work and success. In the United States, for instance, a widespread view is that material comfort earned by individual effort is a sign of superiority and that people who work hard are better than those who don’t.
Respect and rank are reflected differently from culture to culture in the way people are addressed and in their working environment.
• Roles and status. Culture influences the roles people play, including who communicates with whom, what they communicate, and in what way. For example, in some countries women still don’t play a prominent role in business, so women executives who visit these countries may find they’re not taken seriously as businesspeople.30 Culture also dictates how people show respect and signify rank. For example, people in the United States show respect by addressing top managers as “Mr. Roberts” or “Ms. Gutierrez.” However, people in China are addressed according to their official titles, such as “President” or “Manager.”31
• Use of manners. What is polite in one culture may be considered rude in another. For instance, asking a colleague “How was your weekend?” is a common way of making small talk in the United States, but the question sounds intrusive to people in cultures in which business and private lives are seen as separate spheres.
The rules of polite behavior vary from country to country.
• Concepts of time. People in low-context cultures see time as a way to plan the business day efficiently, often focusing on only one task during each scheduled period and viewing time as a limited resource. However, executives from high-context cultures often see time as more flexible. Meeting a deadline is less important than building a business relationship.32
Attitudes toward time, such as strict adherence to meeting schedules, can vary throughout the world.

• Future orientation. Successful companies tend to have a strong future orientation, planning for and investing in the future, but national cultures around the world vary widely in this viewp01oint. Some societies encourage a long-term outlook that emphasizes planning and investing—making sacrifices in the short term for the promise of better outcomes in the future. Others are oriented more toward the present, even to the point of viewing the future as hopelessly remote and not worth planning for.33
• Openness and inclusiveness. At the national level as well as within smaller groups, cultures vary on how open they are to accepting people from other cultures and people who don’t necessarily fit the prevailing norms within the culture. An unwillingness to accommodate others can range from outright exclusion to subtle pressures to conform to majority expectations.
Cultures around the world exhibit varying degrees of openness toward both outsiders and people whose personal identities don’t align with prevailing social norms.
NONVERBAL DIFFERENCES
As discussed in Chapter 2, nonverbal communication can be a helpful guide to determining the meaning of a message—but this situation holds true only if the sender and receiver assign the same meaning to nonverbal signals. For instance, the simplest hand gestures have different meanings in different cultures. A gesture that communicates good luck in Brazil is the equivalent of giving someone “the finger” in Colombia.34 Don’t assume that the gestures you grew up with will translate to another culture; doing so could lead to embarrassing mistakes.
The meaning of nonverbal signals can vary widely from culture to culture, so you can’t rely on assumptions.
REAL-TIME UPDATES LEARN MORE BY VIEWING THIS INFOGRAPHIC
Seven common hand gestures that will stir up trouble in other cultures
Find out what gestures that have positive meanings in the United States can have intensively negative meanings in other cultures. Go to http://real-timeupdates.com/bct12 and click on Learn More. If you are using MyBCommLab, you can access Real-Time Updates within each chapter or under Student Study Tools.
When you have the opportunity to interact with people in another culture, the best advice is to study the culture in advance and then observe the way people behave in the following areas:
• Greetings. Do people shake hands, bow, or kiss lightly (on one side of the face or both)? Do people shake hands only when first introduced and every time they say hello or goodbye?
• Personal space. When people are conversing, do they stand closer together or farther away than you are accustomed to?
• Touching. Do people touch each other on the arm to emphasize a point or slap each other on the back to show congratulations? Or do they refrain from touching altogether?
• Facial expressions. Do people shake their heads to indicate “no” and nod them to indicate “yes”? This is what people are accustomed to in the United States, but it is not universal.
• Eye contact. Do people make frequent eye contact or avoid it? Frequent eye contact is often taken as a sign of honesty and openness in the United States, but in other cultures it can be a sign of aggressiveness or disrespect.
• Posture. Do people slouch and relax in the office and in public, or do they sit up and stand up straight?
• Formality. In general, does the culture seem more or less formal than yours?
Following the lead of people who grew up in the culture is not only a great way to learn but a good way to show respect as well.