The Economic Costs of Not Being Able to Say "No"

Let's start out with a bit of stereotyping: Asian culture is a culture that frowns upon outright, declared refusals.  Because people are taught, in schools, in homes, and social occasions, to focus on maintaining harmonious, non-intrusive, and non-confrontational relationships, people have tendency to say "maybe," "I will think about it," or even "yes" and they play along with the situation uncomfortably just to avoid awkward situations in which they have to openly reject the what they interpret as well-meaning offers made by others.

At a level in which both the person making the offer and the person responding are on the same page, this sort of indirect rejections work fine enough.  Both can read the nuances in speech and expressions to mutually come to the conclusion that despite all the enthusiastic polite talks and seemingly affirmative answers, the proposal will not be accepted at the end.  But this arrangement quickly breaks down when one side has every incentive to get a real "yes" as an answer for personal or business purposes, or worse yet, one side has no idea how the "reading nuances" bit actually works.

While for casual situations, such lack of mutual understanding on indirect rejections may get away with just a bit of personal displeasure (along the lines of "why can't this stupid idiot understand that I want nothing to do with what he is saying!" type grumblings), if business interests are involved, misinterpretations or lack of interpretations may very much lead to large cumulative costs in financial figures that at the end leaves third-party observers scratching their heads in pure annoyance, without really knowing firsthand the context of someone put on the spot to give a fake "yes."

On this particular aspect of Asian culture, the Filipinos share quite a bit with their brethren with origins in East Asia.  When they feel that they have some obligation to say "yes" when confronted directly on a decision, the vast majority will be hesitant a bit but say "yes."  And after the confrontation is over, they will try to mitigate the situation by indirectly saying "no" as signals that their previous "yes" given in direct confrontation is forced and not to be taken seriously.  These signals can range from giving "emergency excuses" to say "no" at last minute to unannounced absence/ceasing of all future contacts.

How does this tie to costs in the monetary sense?  Lets give a specific business example the author has now come across too many times.  A person makes an order for a product, to be paid after receiving.  She later changes her mind about buying the product for some reason.  But around the same time, she receives a phone call/email notifying that the product is all packed and will be delivered by tomorrow.  She realizes that since it is she who made the order to begin with, she has some sort of obligation to buy the product, and she would feel quite badly about all the packing/shipping if she did not.

Yet, she knows that she really would not pay for the item even if it arrives at her house.  As a Filipino, she is unlikely to contact the company to cancel her order, as that would incur inharmonious direct confrontation to say "no."  Instead, to communicate the "no" indirectly, she will allow the delivery to proceed as planned, and either intentionally not be at home tomorrow or tell the delivery guy that she does not have enough money to pay and he "may try" delivering again at a later date.  Unfortunately, the delivery guy has no incentive to read the "no" nuance because doing successful delivery is his job.

So time after time, the delivery guy will try again, attempting to find the elusive customer at home or waiting for the day that the customer will finally have the money to pay, when that day, from the customer's perspective, will actually never arrive.  Maybe after a few rounds of cat-and-mouse game, the customer will finally become dismayed enough to directly reject the delivery guy's further attempts, but by that time, too much money, in the form of the delivery guy's time and gasoline that could be used to deliver other products to other willing customers, have been lost.

To prevent this sort of costly not-being-to-say-no situations, there really is only one solution: to minimize the need of direct confrontation to begin with.  Present the offer without directly asking for a decision on the spot.  Ask the willing to reply back with the affirmative, and all others who did not respond can be safety assumed to be a "no."  For just a bit of extra waiting time for the response, a lot of money, and a lot of misunderstandings on what is a real "yes" and what is not can be quickly avoided.  It is actually a wonder why this method is not used more often in both personal and corporate environments in Asian culture.