Russian Language for Business

Cloudberry recently spoke with Joan Jaeger who lived in Eastern Europe at tumultuous 90-s.

Joan is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a double major in Russian and International Studies and a minor in Mathematics. Then she received her MBA and MA in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Michigan. She worked for Johnson & Johnson in their Consumer Products division for 10 years and spent most of those years abroad in Eastern European countries. She then made a transition to a non-profit world and now is a Vice President of Marketing, Outreach and Communications at The Cradle, an adoption agency headquartered in Evanston, IL.

How did learning Russian change your career path and outlook (if it did)?

You know it’s interesting…I learned Russian not necessarily thinking it would lead to a career. I learned Russian when I was actually studying engineering and I just wanted to learn a foreign language. And the more I learned the language, the more I got interested in literature, history, and politics until it became more than where I started and grew from there. Once I had visited Russia when I was a student for a summer and I thought, hmm, I bet I could also benefit through knowing more about Russia and I …started to learn more. So that was all in my undergraduate years.

Then I worked for a Marketing Research firm for a little bit but I knew I wanted to go back to school to get an advanced degree. I ended up getting an MBA and Master’s Degree in Russian and Eastern European studies from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in this joint degree program because my interest in Russia was on a practical side. I didn’t think I would be a good professor or an academic kind of professional. That was not really my skill set nor my interest. Instead I thought I could put my knowledge of Russia to a more practical use in the business world. And it turned out to be very practical and very much wanted. At the time when I graduated, it was literally the time when the Berlin Wall was going down, so many changes happening in Eastern Europe, many companies were looking to either establish a presence in Eastern Europe and Russia in particular or to build on the presence that they already had. So it made a tremendous difference to me personally that I had that background in Russia and I had multiple job offers at the time I was graduating with my Master’s degree.

It’s nothing I planned. It just came to me. Timing sometimes just works in your favor.

What additional opportunities do you think people who can speak a foreign language have?

Certainly, they have opportunities personally to learn much more about a place they might be visiting as a tourist or as part of their work environment because there is only so much you can learn about a place if you don’t speak their language. I lived in many countries and in most of them I didn’t speak their language. In Russia I was grateful that I did speak the language. It made so much of a difference to me personally to be able to figure out the neighborhood and be able to converse with my neighbors. And certainly even aside from the opportunities that one might have professionally, I think it’s just a good idea to get out of your perspective sometimes in a way that you only can if you actually start living in a country as one of the people versus being an outsider. It’s still really hard not to be an outsider. I always felt like a bit of an outsider in Moscow simply because it wasn’t my home town and there were always plenty of things that I simply didn’t understand. But I was certainly much better off understanding the people’s habits and cultural influences because I spoke the language. I think it’s really important.

When you live outside of the U.S. you realize how much other people in other countries stereotype Americans and I think some of the stereotypes are built on truths! Many Americans never leave their country, never leave their home town even, but it gives you a chance to be an atypical American, let’s say, and experience life more richly and bring that life to your own neighborhood in the U.S.

What would you recommend to young professionals of today?

About anything? (laughs) It’s hard to know what to recommend specifically because things change. That’s the one thing that I always tried to keep fingers on the pulse of what’s changing and especially given I’m in Marketing.

One of the key dominant things that are shaping culture, shaping preferences for consumers, and then especially if you are looking to work for a multinational company, the more you can think about how some of these preferences and tendencies and things that are shaping by habits or influencing that, if you can think outside of your own culture and about things that might unite cultures…and maybe things that start in Europe and end up in the US or start in Latin America influence different places. I think that’s really where you can add a ton of value for the corporate world by trying to draw analogies and look for trends that span the globe. There really are influences that travel far beyond just one culture. And those are the tendencies that are in different creative agencies, if you are in the advertising field or consumer packaged goods (as my background), where it’s really important for people to not only see what’s happening, but think how they can either become a part of that or get ahead of that curve so that they have a competitive advantage.

– Joan, you were lucky to learn Russian at the right time…

– Yeah, very lucky!

– What languages do you think are good to learn for business now?

In terms of languages, if I were looking at foreign languages right now I would probably learn Mandarin and would think about learning Arabic. I think these are two areas where a) there are a lot of people speaking the language and b) there is a lot of misunderstanding in the US with regard to the people and their culture.

I think that was one of my goals in learning Russian to try to see the other side of the coin. When I first started learning Russian, it was in 1980-s – do you remember that? (laughs) It was the time when Reagan was a president and he was talking about that evil empire. I just literally couldn’t imagine that Russia was evil. That was partly why I chose Russian to learn the language and to see the other perspective. So if I were doing it all over again right now, I would lean towards those languages specifically because in America there is a lot of misunderstanding from those two worlds right now, there is so much happening, and it would add a lot of value to be able to understand that perspective.