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Sheila M. Puffer, 2018

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8 Workplace Adaptation

Developing Soft Skills

This chapter emphasizes the need for immigrant technological profes-

sionals to take actions to acquire new skill sets appropriate for cultural
adaptation to the US work environment. We introduce the subject of
soft skills and explain why they are so important, particularly in the
twenty-first-century innovation workplace. Future 500, a nonprofit
organization focused on innovation and sustainability, found in their
2015 member survey that developing soft skills for tech professionals
was the number two concern of their member organizations.1 A similar
conclusion was reached by the Future Work Skills 2020 report.2 Hard
skills are “teachable abilities or skill sets that are easy to quantify,”
such as knowledge acquired from a university degree, computer pro-
gramming skills, and the ability to speak another language. In contrast,
soft skills “are subjective skills that are much harder to quantify. Also
known as ‘people skills’ or ‘interpersonal skills,’ soft skills refer to the
way you relate to and interact with other people.”3 Soft skills include
teamwork, communication, flexibility, patience, persuasion, and moti-
vation. The Future Work Skills 2020 report’s list of top ten skills that
will be essential in the 2020 workplace include three that fall into the
soft skills category: social intelligence, cross-cultural competency, and
virtual collaboration. As noted in that report, social intelligence is “the
ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and
stimulate reactions and desired interactions.” Cross-cultural compe-
tency is “the ability to operate in different cultural settings. In a truly
globally connected world, a worker’s skill set could see them posted in

1
www.future500.org
2
Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, and Marina Gorbis, Future Work Skills 2020 (Palo
Alto, CA: Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute,
2011) http://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR-1382A_UPRI_future_work_skill
s_sm.pdf.
3
Alison Doyle, “Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills,” The Balance (2016) https://www
.thebalance.com/hard-skills-vs-soft-skills-2063780.

277

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 27 Jul 2018 at 07:39:55, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120302.011
278 Workplace Adaptation: Developing Soft Skills

any number of locations – they need to be able to operate in whatever

environment they find themselves.” Virtual collaboration is “the ability
to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as
a member of a virtual team.” Employers especially value employees
equipped with effective soft skills in addition to hard skills: “While
certain hard skills are necessary for any position, employers are looking
increasingly for job applicants with particular soft skills. This is
because, while it is easy for an employer to train a new employee in a
particular hard skill (such as how to use a certain computer program), it
is much more difficult to train an employee in a soft skill (such as
patience).”4
Many technological and scientific professionals globally, although
typically possessing sophisticated hard skills in a technological area,
tend to exhibit less-developed soft skills. This is true in the United States
as well as elsewhere, and thus such skills must be developed for these
professionals through further education and workplace experiences.
This is true whether they manage overseeing interdisciplinary teams,
are startup founders requiring such teams to attract capital, or are
venture capitalists evaluating such teams. To be effective often necessi-
tates retooling or acquiring new soft skills, or at least appreciating
them. We recognize also, as did Future 500, that engineers and scien-
tists may not have had opportunities to hone such skills through
education and experience in their earlier scientific endeavors. As such,
these skills are generally gained later in the careers of such talented
professionals. In summary, technological skills can bring success in
technological roles, but may well be insufficient in team, managerial,
and leadership roles. Given the potential weaknesses in soft skills that
such otherwise talented professionals possess, it is important to empha-
size potential mechanisms for dealing with those weaknesses. Among
them are the organizations in which they work, including the culture,
and training that is often provided, as well as the mentoring and
networking activities described in Chapter 7. Our interviewees validate
these sources for improving the range and depth of soft skills. In order
to benefit, individuals need to be open and willing to change their
attitudes and behaviors and thus receive a new layer of imprinting in
their adopted environment on top of layers from prior experiences in
the former USSR.

4
Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, and Marina Gorbis, Future Work Skills 2020.

Soft skills that are effective in the US innovation economy were

typically not well developed in the former USSR, even in the managerial
sphere. Soviet managerial and leadership styles were fundamentally
transactional rather than transformational and mechanistic rather
than humanistic.5 They focused primarily on job completion rather
than on incentives and motivations that might better lead employees to
higher quality results – in essence, getting the job done rather than
getting it done well. Thus, effective leadership is a crucial skill set that
immigrants must acquire in order to be successful in that role in the
United States. With this background, this chapter’s topics will include
teamwork, managerial and leadership styles, communication, and
trust. We will present relatively brieﬂy the types of experiences inter-
viewees likely had in the former USSR, as well as challenges they likely
faced in these skill areas necessary to succeed in the United States. We
also will emphasize how their multiculturalism could enhance their
ability to succeed in their new workplaces. As noted in Chapter 1,
research has shown that multicultural work teams and multicultural
organizations can affect a person’s cross-cultural competence, which
refers to the ability to work effectively with others from different
cultural backgrounds.6
Yet immigrants still must erase the possible imprinting that could
have occurred during their time in the former USSR, particularly
among those who had worked in organizations employing the Soviet
managerial and leadership styles just mentioned. These experiences
often muted creativity and taking responsibility and thus stiﬂed any

5
Daniel J. McCarthy, Sheila M. Puffer, Oleg S. Vikhanski, and Alexander I.
Naumov, “Russian Managers in the New Europe: Need for a New Management
Style,” Organizational Dynamics Volume 34, Number 3 (2005): 231–246;
Daniel J. McCarthy, Sheila M. Puffer, Ruth C. May, Donna E. Ledgerwood, and
Wayne H. Stewart, Jr., “Overcoming Resistance to Change in Russian
Organizations: The Legacy of Transactional Leadership,” Organizational
Dynamics Volume 37, Number 3 (2008): 221–235.
6
Günter K. Stahl, Martha L. Maznevski, Andreas Voigt, and Karsten Jonsen,
“Unraveling the Effects of Cultural Diversity in Teams: A Meta-Analysis of
Research on Multicultural Work Groups,” Journal of International Business
Studies Volume 41, Number 4 (2010): 690–709; J. P. Johnson, T. Lenartowicz,
and S. Apud, “Cross-Cultural Competence in International Business: Toward a
Deﬁnition and a Model,” Journal of International Business Studies Volume 37
(2006): 525–543; A. Joshi and H. Roh, “The Role of Context in Work Team
Diversity Research: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Academy of Management Journal
Volume 52, Number 3 (2009): 599–627.

inclination toward entrepreneurship. Additionally, there was little

emphasis on genuine teamwork, and individuals typically preferred
keeping a low proﬁle and staying out of trouble. Inherent in such
circumstances was not just a basic lack of generalized trust, but also a
reliance on particularized trust among members of an individual’s net-
work. Relatedly, and of essential importance, is the topic of ethics
which, as in many transition economies including those of the former
USSR, can be very different from what would be expected in the United
States.7 All of these topics are germane to the overall area of soft skills
that implicitly deals with interpersonal relationships that, to be legit-
imate, must embody mutual trust, effective communication, and a
shared sense of ethical behavior. We begin with the topic of teamwork.

Teamwork
In some respects, the views expressed by our interviewees regarding
teamwork reflect their comments on networking in Chapter 7.
Characteristics of openness, communication, and the ability to forge
commonalities with others are inherent in both domains. As we
reviewed comments regarding teams and teamwork from the inter-
views, we noted several common themes. These included the various
roles and types of teams, the leadership and managerial styles of team
leaders, team membership, and the often necessary transition from
being an individual contributor to becoming an effective team leader.
Some interviewees commented on multicultural teams as well as on
how leaders or members from the former USSR reacted to teamwork.
Managerial and leadership style is an important element of teams, and
thus many comments will address those topics as well.
In the former USSR, team members in software and other fields were
typically unaccustomed to focusing on customer needs and instead
worked to meet specific criteria and standards. Yet developing software
for the United States and other developed countries often requires

7
Sheila M. Puffer and Daniel J. McCarthy, “Finding the Common Ground in
Russian and American Business Ethics,” California Management Review,
Volume 37, Number 2 (1995): 29–46; Daniel J. McCarthy and Sheila M. Puffer,
“Interpreting the Ethicality of Corporate Governance Decisions in Russia:
Utilizing Integrative Social Contracts Theory to Evaluate the Relevance of
Agency Theory Norms,” Academy of Management Review Volume 33, Number
1 (2008): 11–31.

including customer insights and developer creativity and ﬂexibility to

achieve successful results. Serial entrepreneur and investor Max
Skibinsky, who came from Moscow in his twenties in 1996, provided
deep insights into the experience that many technical developers from
the former USSR had that inhibited or slowed their transition to
becoming successful offshore developers for US companies: “I knew
back then how to manage a remote team like that, literally an out-
sourcing team composed of all Russians. Lots of them were coming
from the same scientific community typical for Moscow State
University, kind of that whole scientific class of Soviet Russia, and
they all tell this story like, ‘Hey, we’re from Russia and we have this
strange magic that makes our work special.’ The Russian team abso-
lutely loved top-down, Stalin-style dominated management. So, for
them, giving them creative freedom absolutely freaked them out.
They had no clue what to do with creative freedom. They were like,
‘Hey, no, give me the specs and I will judge my work on how well I
comply with your specs.’ Unfortunately, it was a culture of total
obedience and domination.
“So the second part was that it was literally that Russians had no clue
back then what services were. The USSR wasn’t really focused on
services for citizens. So that part of the culture was completely missing.
In contrast, when people were starting computer software in the US,
they took the habits of the real-world service industry and put it into
the software. That’s sort of the initial ideology of Apple, like, ‘Hey,
how can we be nice to you, how can we be convenient to you? Yes,
you’re using a computer, but how can we make this a pleasant experi-
ence for you?’ And in Russia, this whole part of the DNA was com-
pletely missing. We immediately understood that these guys needed
specs, they needed to work on something scientific. You give them an
extremely difficult technical challenge, and they can solve it and they
will be delighted. Managing them has to be done from a point of view
like, ‘Hey, we’re in the army, we have a major. Tell us what to attack
and we will attack that, and anything outside is not our responsibility.’
They didn’t have the feel of people working on a startup team, but it
wasn’t by choice. That was the only thing they knew in life, that was
their work DNA. The company that we built the software for launched
something like three or four products, primarily built by this Russian
team. I think one of my managers of the Russian team was relocated
here by that company, and it was bought by Hewlett-Packard a few

years after. It was a success story for all involved.” Skibinsky provides
insights into the cultural differences between Americans and those
from the former USSR that resulted in very different approaches to
software development. These differences had to be recognized and
dealt with by team leaders and managers like himself. His insights
suggested how imprinting in the USSR had shaped the Soviet team
approach to software development.
An important milestone for technical professionals is making the
transition from being a technology-oriented individual contributor to
a team leader. Cofounder and CTO of CoachUp, Gene Shkolnik, who
came from Moscow in 1992 at age seventeen, recounted: “I was in a
number of different startups where I was leading smaller teams, so I had
some opportunities to learn the necessary skills. But as far as leading
larger teams, Paul was a big help, and he was mentoring me a lot, and so
was Giorgos. At some point, I made a conscious decision that manage-
ment was what I wanted to do. I remember sitting down and having this
internal dialog with myself. At that time, while leading a pretty large
team, I still was trying to code. I understood that if I continued doing
that, I’d just be doing a mediocre job at both coding and management.
So realizing that I had to make a choice, I’ve decided to just focus on
being a good manager and a leader.” Shkolnik helped clarify the
difficult transition from being an individual contributor to becoming
a team leader, an especially difficult role in a startup.
Eugene Baron, Product Manager at ROkITT, who came from
St. Petersburg in 1990 at age twenty-one, described his successful
transition from individual contributor to team leader: “I’m very social
and I like working with people. I like managing teams, and I very much
prefer managing people rather than managing computers. And I also
enjoy working with customers, and I enjoy working with the people
who worked for me or who didn’t necessarily work for me. Basically, I
like working with people, and that’s the best part of my job.” When
asked whether there was something in his formative years that helped
him develop his interpersonal skills, he replied: “Yes. When I was in
eighth grade, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence
People.8 It was a translated, tenth carbon copy in manuscript form that

8
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Inﬂuence People (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1936). Although banned in the Soviet Union, this book was widely and
secretly read by those interested in American popular culture.

was passed around underground among friends. You know how that
worked in those days. It made a big impression on me at that age. I
think if I had read it when I was older, it might not have had such a big
effect on me.”
AbbVie Senior Scientist III Jane (Evgeniia) Seagal, originally from
Novosibirsk, Siberia, came in 2004 at age thirty-two. She had learned
to adapt her managerial and communication style to work effectively
with different personalities, and she clearly articulated sentiments
shared by a number of interviewees: “In this company, everyone
works in teams, and I really like to work in teams. I have a very great
team of people that I’m working with now. My function is supporting
every project team in the company that needs the molecules we are
making. I think, during the year, we are probably working with over a
dozen different project teams. It’s not always easy, but I think it’s fun
because you have some shared responsibilities and some shared goals.
And you have to make it happen, right? Well, I’m very direct. It’s just
very much my style. And I know that not everyone likes it. But for some
people I can be direct in different ways, and I’m learning how to soften
my approach. If something goes wrong, and if there’s an issue, people
should know about that. I also get feedback that many people like my
style because they see I’m not hiding something or trying to turn in a
little different direction by saying something softer.”
Other insights into the workings of teams were added by MIT
Professor David Gamarnik, who came from Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1990
at age twenty-one to study at New York University before going on to
earn a PhD at MIT. Now an associate professor of operations research
there in the Sloan School of Management, he had worked for eight
years at IBM as a researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center
Department of Mathematical Sciences. Gamarnik described his team
experiences at IBM: “The nice thing about IBM, about being in a
research lab there, is that relationships are built by teams and not by
individuals. So you have a team and team leaders, and you have a group
of people, and you all work together as a team.” Gamarnik compared
teams he works with at MIT with those he had worked with at IBM:
“The team experience at IBM and here at Sloan has been somewhat
different, but I think the common thing is that, in a team, it’s not just
about me. It’s about everybody, in that each member of the team brings
unique skills and knowledge. In the case of the kidney exchange
research project, because it required knowledge in ﬁelds of certain

algorithms and optimization techniques, that’s sort of my edge. That’s

something I knew a lot about and not something that other members of
the team were too familiar with. There’s a mixture of economists and
medical doctors on the team. I guess I had knowledge that my collea-
gues didn’t have, and it was useful and relevant.”
When asked about interpersonal relationships in teams, Gamarnik
explained: “By and large, my experience on teams has been quite
harmonious. But sometimes you have to become more assertive and
argue for your point of view to convince people that your view is the
right way. Once you realize that the direction being followed is not
promising, the sooner you realize it the better. You save people’s time,
including your own. So that’s when I became more assertive and said
things like, ‘Look, we should just drop this direction.’” Gamarnik
illustrates the importance to teams of domain expertise, and also
indicates that the soft skills of persuasive communication and even
argumentation can add value to a team and help bring it to a successful
outcome.
Sergei Burkov, serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of Alterra
who came in 1989 from Moscow at age twenty-one, provided a view on
teamwork at Google and noted that coming from the former USSR was
not a hindrance in that environment. When asked whether the educa-
tional system in Russia was not particularly oriented to working in
teams, he agreed: “Yes, but it worked OK. I think there were many
problems there, but Google is actually not very strong on teamwork
either. So Google is comprised of very strong professionals, and
because many of them rely on their own resources and strengths, they
do not ask for help. In some sense, asking for help at Google is not cool.
That’s one of the weaknesses of Google. If you’re asking for help, it
means that you’re not professional enough, that you don’t know your
stuff. So maybe this is an exaggeration to some degree, but it is true that
a background of Russian individuality wasn’t outrageous.”
An instructive contrast between the potential effects of Soviet and
American cultures on teams came from Yulia Witaschek, Global
(TAM) Strategic Customer Engineering Manager at Google Cloud,
who came from Moscow in 1995 at age seventeen. Although she
was employed at Google, her story is set in a very personal context:
“Culturally, there are a couple of leftovers from Soviet culture that I
have to battle with every day. I call it my positive side. The way in
Russia that you approach things is, you say, ‘No,’ three times. And

if somebody really thinks it’s worth doing, they’ll come round a

fourth time and keep asking, and then you can say, ‘yes.’ Whereas
in America, you’re supposed to be positive and think about how we
can make things happen, versus how this is not going to work. The
way Russians think is, we start from a glass half empty and work
our way to a glass half full. Americans start at a glass full and work
themselves down to a glass half empty. The end points are the same,
but how we get there is a little bit different. I’m very aware of the
fact because people have been commenting that, even though I
might have the right focus and did the right things, it can sometimes
be viewed as very negative. I don’t see it as negative. But now I’m
aware of the fact that some people think it’s negative, so I try to
catch myself.” Witaschek provided insights into the potential con-
ﬂicts that Russians and others from the former USSR might have
working in teams in the United States because of their different
cultural backgrounds and approaches to interpersonal relationships
that lie at the heart of soft skills. She made it clear that under-
standing another’s point of view is fundamental to success in that
realm.
Dmitry Fonarev, Senior Vice President of Development at SmartBear
Software who came from Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1990 at age nineteen,
noted: “So there certainly are cultural differences between many coun-
tries and cultures, and that’s why they’re called that. I’ve noticed that
interactions with folks in Russia are different than interactions with
folks in Sweden or Romania or other countries, and I’ve done business
with folks in China, India, and Vietnam as well. I guess I can appreciate
a bit more the causes or roots of some of the Russian specialties. I can
relate to them a bit better. Our team communicates well, but I’ve seen
many Russian teams who won’t speak until spoken to, especially at
ﬁrst. As a business person, I have to do what needs to be done. Russian
people are more reserved. For example, when I came aboard at
SmartBear, I had to go to meet my new teams in Florida, Stockholm,
and Tula. The reactions were rather different. I could immediately
connect and interact very freely with the folks in Florida and
Stockholm. But it took many months to establish the same level of
trust and communication with our Russian counterparts. With Russian
teams, the people are more reserved, and the boundaries between boss
and employee are more pronounced than in the Western workplace.
I’m trying to help them to be more – I don’t know – open and free with

me and less official. Western teams are typically more vocal, proactive,
and independent.”
Fonarev’s observations were similar to others, including Dennis
Bolgov, Founder and CEO of Tocobox, who came from Moscow in
1998 at age twenty-five. Regarding friendships with an Indian and an
Asian colleague, Bolgov noted: “We worked together, hung out
together, and I’ve worked with one of them since 2005. When you
work with someone for that long, he becomes a friend of yours and a
trusted person.” Bolgov provided an insight into how difficult it is
sometimes for Russians to trust others, as he expressed the length of
time it might take to develop a new friendship and trust, likely a
reflection of the difficulty they have in trusting others that we empha-
size in this chapter. Taking substantial time to develop trust may well
be a reflection of the imprinting that occurred among some intervie-
wees, but clearly among members of software development teams back
in the former USSR, as just explained by Dmitry Fonarev. He faced this
situation with his Russian teams, even though he himself had grown up
there. Perhaps a reason that he seems to display no such imprinting
could be that he emigrated at age nineteen and has been in the United
States for more than twenty-five years.
Another insight into the Soviet mindset came from entrepreneur
Alexey Eliseev, Managing Director at Maxwell Biotech Venture
Fund, who came from Moscow in 1992 at age twenty-seven. He
illustrates how imprinting can be an advantage or disadvantage
depending on one’s new environment: “Here in the Boston area, most
scientists and entrepreneurs try to take advantage of the very broad
network. It is interesting that our Russian, or Soviet, mindset some-
times works against that. Maybe it has to do with the way we were
educated, but many Russian scientists are quite individualistic, and I’m
not an exception. Many of us tend to work on our own in one research
area. That works very well in academia. It’s perfect there, because every
faculty member is unique. Many of my friends, unlike me, continued
their careers in academia, and they made great progress. This is where
the Russian mindset is helpful. In contrast, in the high-tech entrepre-
neurial environment, it may or may not be helpful. For example, the
way we founded our company was based more on established personal
relationships than on engaging in a broader network. A broad network
always has synergistic effects. You get together at an event, like a
seminar or a cocktail party, where you’re talking to several people

and some ideas come up. If you’re interested, you follow up with one,
and then with another one, and all of you circulate around. This is what
Boston is good for. In contrast, in Russia, you often see that serious
business interactions emerge within very small groups of people that
have a long history of personal friendship or family relationships. It is
surprising how many ‘father-and-son’ type high-tech startups founded
by Russian expats you can see in the United States. Maybe this is
because we grew up in an environment that lacked institutions for an
entrepreneurial community and the inspiring environment such as you
see in Boston.”
Having seen various perspectives on managing teams and working in
teams, we now proceed to a discussion of multicultural teams based on
insights from two interviewees. One shared how he came to appreciate
the importance of working in teams, especially multicultural teams,
whether in leadership or member roles. Anton Manuilov, Senior
Scientist II at AbbVie, who came in 1992 at age fourteen from
St. Petersburg, said: “I’m very open to suggestions, and every day I’m
still learning new things. So if I have someone on a team who happens
to know something that I don’t or has a better suggestion for doing
things, I usually take those suggestions seriously and try them out.
People seem to be very nice, at least where I work. In my industry,
most people are not from the United States. It just happened that way.
Actually, my friend and close colleague is an American. He was born
here, got his education here, and was trained here. Once he looked
around and said, ‘You know, out of these ten people, I’m the only one
who is an American.’ I answered: ‘Yeah, but that is not stopping us
from getting where we need to go.’ Myself, not being born here,
although I did get my education here, I enjoy working with people
from other countries, other cultures. Not because I’m forced to, but I
just enjoy listening to stories. People go home to India, China,
Romania, and other countries, and they have something very exciting
to tell when they get back. I really enjoy that.” Manuilov adds extra
insight into the potential value of multicultural teams, an important
lesson since many teams in the Boston-Cambridge and Silicon Valley
innovation hubs are made up primarily of people who were not born in
the United States.
Another interviewee who discussed multicultural teams and mana-
ging individuals from different cultural backgrounds is Sten Tamkivi,
Cofounder and CEO of Teleport, who came from Estonia initially in

1994 at age sixteen and who had been the first General Manager of the
Estonian startup, Skype: “When I first left the office in Tallinn, there
were about 400 people. I think there were about 30 percent ethnic
Russians who had grown up speaking Estonian as well, or who had
learned Estonian. Basically, the rule at Skype was that in all our com-
munications we always speak the language that works for everyone
involved, and what we write down is in English. On a day-to-day level,
I see no difference in managing a team with individuals of different
cultural backgrounds. We had twenty-seven nationalities. But I don’t
think that managerial differences would necessarily be run on the basis
of nationality.”
Tamkivi provides background on the multicultural teams at Skype,
which could reflect what happens in other companies with multicul-
tural teams. The prevalence of many non–American-born professionals
in the companies and teams in Silicon Valley and Boston-Cambridge
requires an effective method of communication among those diverse
nationalities. English will often be required for general communica-
tions, but allowing other languages among smaller groups could ensure
effective communication in such circumstances. We noted in Chapter 1
that research has shown that multiculturalism can be an asset within
teams since it can encompass diverse backgrounds and points of view.
We believe that immigrants like our interviewees can enrich discussions
and decisions given the different perspectives they might bring to the
companies and teams in which they work. In this sense, the results of
earlier imprinting can well have positive outcomes for tech profes-
sionals like our interviewees, as well as for the companies where they
work.

Managerial and Leadership Styles

We begin this section with an interviewee who discusses managerial
and leadership styles and also considers geographically dispersed teams
in different countries in the context of his startup headquartered in
Berkeley, California. Alexei Dunayev, Cofounder and CEO of
TranscribeMe, came in 2007 at age twenty-six from New Zealand,
where he had moved with his family at age fourteen from Kiev,
Ukraine. After specializing in entrepreneurship and marketing in his
MBA program at Stanford, he got together with his cofounder, also
born in Ukraine, who had come to San Francisco at age four.

TranscribeMe specializes in voice recognition software in multiple

languages. Dunayev recounted: “We now have close to forty-ﬁve peo-
ple at TranscribeMe, and the immediate team I work with every day has
about ten people. We have two more ofﬁces, one in New Zealand and
one in Belarus. We do our software development in Belarus and our
R&D operations in New Zealand. Having employees in different
countries and on different continents is great since it provides for
almost continuous worksites for the company. We won a few competi-
tions and got some major support from companies like Microsoft
through our New Zealand connection. Also, New Zealand is a great
place to form research and development teams since there is lots of
great science going on. Probably less in terms of programmers and
developers, but that’s why we have Belarus because the guys there
implement the R&D that the New Zealand team comes up with.”
When asked about managing and motivating people in remote loca-
tions with different cultural backgrounds, Dunayev replied: “In my
mind, that’s a function and responsibility of the management team. The
job of the management team is to make sure everybody in the company
has the resources they need, as well as clear direction, and is given the
ability to execute. So the management team actively supports every-
body else in making sure that they can deliver. And this is very critical in
startups because you typically don’t have a lot of room for error. And
I’m quite independent and driven, and I think that attracts like-minded
people. Whether that’s a leadership style, I’m not sure, but I think that’s
also quite important for getting the team to jell, because then everyone
has to share this approach. They really have to want to make things
happen. And I believe it’s a leadership and culture style that works quite
well.” Dunayev’s insights are based on his personal experiences in
different countries, and he has developed an effective approach to
working with dispersed teams.
Michail Shipitsin had a somewhat similar experience, although his
multicultural teams were not geographically dispersed. Shipitsin came
from Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1997 at age twenty-two. He is Senior
Associate Director of R&D and Project Leader at Metamark Genetics.
In describing his style, he noted: “I got some management experience
fairly early, initially managing a single person, and then eventually a
group of people, and ultimately a large group of people. So I went
through some pretty interesting development during those transitions. I
had no formal management training but my style just sort of evolved.

As is usual in science here in the US, there was very diverse ethnicity,
with only two or three who were actually native-born Americans. The
rest were from Israel, Russia, China, and Bangladesh, a very mixed
group culturally. And although it can be challenging if they’re coming
straight from their home countries, most of my group had already gone
through some sort of filters like graduate schools or masters programs.
So since they’ve been here for a while, it wasn’t so difficult.”
Explaining his managerial style, Shipitsin continued: “Most people
respond to the carrot and stick, right? So you need to look for an
individual’s characteristics and try to anticipate their wishes and
demands, and what they would like and what they wouldn’t like. I’ve
found that it’s not so different between people of different ethnic back-
grounds, at least after they pass through the filters of graduate school
like I mentioned. I guess they had become a bit more, well, standar-
dized. I tried to always be very professional in that regard, I think
because of my family background. My mother had managed a large
number of people in a large legal department in the Soviet Union, and
her message was always that you have to be professional.” Reflecting
back, he added: “Well, I would never really use ‘the stick,’ but it was
more that I would show my displeasure if I thought they were working
too slowly or not doing enough or not doing the right things. Also, I do
praise people at times, but not too much.” We might add that his
restrained use of praise might be seen as stemming from his own
cultural imprinting of having been raised in the former USSR, where
praise was typically not used as prevalently in educational and work
environments as in the United States.
Ilya Yaroslavsky, Manager of Advanced Product Development at
IPG Photonics, had a style similar to Michail Shipitsin in his approach
to treating all employees the same, whether Russian-speaking or not.
IPG Photonics, founded by the highly successful Russian-immigrant
entrepreneur, Igor Gapontsev, manufactures sophisticated laser equip-
ment for medical and other applications. Yaroslavsky, who came in
1998 at age thirty, from Elista, Russia, noted: “As a manager, it’s
important to match people’s work with their talent. I try to be very
open with all my employees and not withhold any information that
does not need to remain confidential. I treat Russian-speaking employ-
ees different from others only in a cultural reference I might make with
them, but never in the professional aspects of our work.” He added:
“I think it’s important to understand the context. I had been with a

company that had a very open culture, but we were acquired by a

company with a very closed and top-down management culture. So
when I came here to IPG, it was really a breath of fresh air. The whole
atmosphere here is very open and very conducive to innovation and
development of new things. That’s what this company is about.”
Another interviewee who exhibited a flexible managerial style is
Iryna Everson (born Yurchak), Procurement Manager at Pattern
Energy Group. She came from Kiev, Ukraine, in 2008 at age twenty-
six: “I try to find a personalized approach to each person and kind of
change my style accordingly. Some people just need reasoning, like why
it’s so important for them to deliver on time. With those, I just tell them,
‘Hey, here are the implications. If you don’t deliver, this other person
cannot start their work and then we delay the whole project.’ If I just
explain this to them, more or less the consequences, they understand.
Most people actually are like that. It’s like if you give them the reason-
ing why it’s important for them to deliver, they will try to do the right
thing. So it’s not as easy to motivate a person like this, one who tells you
they have conflicts with their deliverables. Still, I have to work these
things out, and it can sometimes be complicated by the fact that
individuals come from different countries with different cultures.”
Shamil Sunyaev, Professor of Bioinformatics and Medicine at
Harvard Medical School, came from Moscow in 2002 at age thirty-
one. He explained well the difficulties some technical professionals
have in clarifying their managerial style, even for themselves: “I don’t
think I have any leadership or managerial style. I don’t know. I
attended a three-day management course that was supposed to help if
you start your own lab, but a lot sounded trivial. I did think there was a
human element, so you treat people like they’re humans, and you talk
to them and think about what they want. It reminded me of nineteenth-
century psychology that you should classify people and understand
that people are different. For example, some are more of a talker and
others are more of a listener. But I never really thought about my style
or anything like that. Maybe I’m wrong because some of my people
complain that my time management is not very good, but many things
are not well organized in science. So maybe I should think more about
that, but I’m basically trying not to have a style, which may not be right.
Maybe I should think more about it.” When asked if he felt he was
inclined to be indirect, he responded: “Yes, like, you know, California
style, where people might say, ‘Or maybe it would still work if you

would do something differently.’ It may be my personality, but I’m not

sure. It’s not something I’m normally questioning.” Sunyaev seemed
comfortable not having clarified a leadership or managerial style for
himself, noting that in science many things are not well-organized from
a managerial perspective. He was also clear in his understanding that
being indirect was often used by managers in the United States, which
would be different from the more direct style typical of the USSR.
One interviewee explained how his managerial style had developed
through reflection in different organizational environments, including
his current role managing people in varied countries and cultures. Ilya
Kabanov, Global Director of Application Security and Compliance at
Schneider Electric, a multinational with more than 140,000 employees,
came from Moscow in 2014 at age thirty-seven. He received a PhD in
technology and operations research at the Moscow State Institute of
Electronics and Mathematics and subsequently earned an MBA at the
MIT Sloan School of Management. Kabanov has vast experience in
other large companies in Russia, as well as in a successful startup. He
made the transition not only from being an IT individual contributor,
but also from succeeding in more domestically oriented organizations
in Russia to his executive role in a large multinational corporation.
Much of his success was achieved by thoughtfully adapting his manage-
rial style to the environment of whatever organization in which he was
a manager.
Kabanov noted: “I was constantly learning how to build a career,
what knowledge I should get, what skills to acquire, and what new
habits I would have to get to succeed. It all involved understanding each
environment first before making any decisions. Learn, ask, learn, ask. I
did this at a Russian telecommunications company and then in trans-
portation and logistics companies. Here at Schneider, I spend more
time on learning because of the scale of the company, its complexity
and globality. I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked in different companies, and
I’ve been exposed to a variety of organizational cultures and manage-
rial styles. Reflecting on what I saw, I was able to develop my style, how
I like to read and interpret people. And it’s not hierarchical. I believe in
knowledge sharing and collaboration. You somehow have to perform
effectively in a particular managerial structure. And you should help
the company and your team to succeed. In the company where I work
now, in a global environment, there are different time zones and
languages and different places that create a lot of complexity, because

I have to work with Australia, India, China, the US, well, the world.”
Kabanov consciously analyzed his evolving managerial style and noted
the importance of the organizational environment and culture in being
effective in that environment. That view bears a resemblance to what
Sunyaev also seemed to be saying about the less formal style that could
be effective in his scientific environment.
A senior executive with experience at various prestigious financial
institutions, including Citibank and Goldman Sachs, came from Russia
in the late 1990s while in her twenties; she spoke of the learning curve
in becoming a manager: “Managing was very difficult for me, the same
way it is for every new manager. You know, handling the responsibil-
ities while you’re trying to manage other people. But I was fortunate
and had a very supportive environment and excellent people. I guess my
style is that, in general, I get along well with most people, and I usually
don’t have conflicts. I kind of find ways to communicate honestly with
everybody and set expectations, and work hard in general. I don’t
know if it has anything to do with my Russian background, but I
don’t like meetings involving many people. I like one-on-one, so you
know, my style is that I need to get the information to them, and I
would prefer to just send emails so they’re clear on what they need to
know and share information that way. I would do this regularly
because I managed a large portfolio of relationships. I found meetings
wasteful. I did get good results because my portfolio was large and
diverse, and I had to get my people to cooperate.
“So, in addition to managing my people directly, I needed to coop-
erate with many teams in the whole region. So I would go to Austin,
Dallas, Denver, and Seattle. I needed to establish relationships and get a
loan and position a product, like a line of credit that my group was
managing with those teams. They really thought I did an absolutely
outstanding job. I think I’ve had a very successful experience.”
Regarding decision-making, she added: “I found that it’s very hard
for me to build consensus. Here, you know every time whose decision it
is, and you give feedback or advice, but you don’t make somebody
else’s decisions. You know which decisions are yours.” Like many
interviewees, this executive has shown the ability to evolve her leader-
ship and managerial styles to ones that were appropriate for her
environment.
A number of interviewees described their style as being results-driven
in that they focused on results, although they may have varied

somewhat in their approaches to achieving goals. For instance, one

executive who came from Moscow in 1994 as a teenager is a director at
a leading global asset management ﬁrm after having served as a vice
president there. Her work involves leading a global team of investment
professionals in developing new products as well as investment metrics
for risk management. She explained: “For example, if we need to
implement a certain system, there would be many people working
with me who do not report directly to me, but I would need to give
direction to make sure that things come together. In fact, in my job as a
risk manager, the only way I can be impactful is not if I come up with
something smart, but something smart that I am able to convince
people that they should be using it. Otherwise, there is no result. In
convincing and persuading, I think it’s just being really well-prepared
for what you’re trying to change. You have to be sure you have all the
facts, and you’ve done the analysis, and you’ve thought about various
positions that others might take and counterarguments they might
present. So I guess I’m always trying new approaches and not giving
up, but hopefully also not being pushy but being friendly and helping
people arrive at certain conclusions that you want them to arrive at, by
asking questions and kind of guiding them toward that.” In doing so,
she displayed the characteristics of leadership needed to reach group
goals while achieving the results for the overall organization.
Maxim Matuzov, originally from Murmansk, Russia, came in 2009
at age twenty-one and managed a team at Apple focused on Internet
search development. He explained the need for deadlines and adjust-
ments along the way: “Well, if there’s a project, there’s also a deadline
and things that need to be done. I guess that if it’s not being done, we
know we need to make some adjustments to our schedule, maybe. My
team can always come to me saying, ‘We have this problem, and we
need to ﬁx it. Or I have too much on my plate right now, and I might
need some help.’ My door is always open for them. But also I’m always
meeting with other departments like UX [user experience] design,
marketing, analytics, reporting, and so on. I haven’t gotten any nega-
tive feedback so far, so I guess it’s working. But I can’t really say that
there’s been something special about my style. I’m only probably just
copying lots of good managers that I’ve considered good managers
from reading books, and about good management practices. Plus, we
have here in this environment Steve Jobs being almost like a semi-god
for us.

“I know I need development, and my biggest negative thing is per-

fectionism, even though it can be positive, too. What I mean is attention
to detail, like with the iPhone. And that takes pushing yourself. I do a
lot of weightlifting, and I’ll go to a competition in August and I’ll
probably be at the semi-professional level. For my coach, I give him
my all. I guess it’s just about pushing yourself because there are things
to do, and you need to prioritize them. If you work well with people, if
you communicate well, and if you’re willing to learn, those are prob-
ably the most important skills nowadays.” In describing the difficult
job of a team manager, Matusov showed a strong inclination to meet
results, as well as a need to be open to his team members, accompanied
by his willingness to learn. He showed openness to acquiring and
utilizing soft skills that are so important for technical professionals as
they move into leadership and managerial roles.
We conclude this section on a results-driven managerial and leader-
ship style with observations by Michael Barenboym, President of
Baren-Boym Company. He came from Moscow in 1990 at age
twenty-four and, for two decades, has been president of his own
medical and industrial design firm after having spent several years in
engineering and managerial positions in other biomedical device
companies. His company employs several physicists in the Boston-
Cambridge area as well as nearly thirty specialists located in Russia,
Ukraine, and Belarus who are mechanical engineers, many of whom
have PhDs and use their knowledge to analyze mathematical pro-
blems. There is also a group of industrial designers there, and the
employees in those locations work from their homes. Barenboym
explained: “You don’t need to have an office. You need to have
smart people around you and organized projects. And we do a good
job at this, working almost twenty-four hours a day because of the
differences in time zones,” sounding a theme similar to Sten Tamkivi,
noted earlier in this chapter.
Barenboym continued: “Thank God for the Internet. It’s a matter of
participating in different groups, different activities, learning about
what other people are doing, seeing who is talented in what areas.
That’s how it came about, and it’s been happening over a long time.
It doesn’t just happen overnight. I’m not really just a manager, I’m a
mechanical engineer, so they can’t do something I don’t know about or
lie to me. I know exactly what I want, exactly what they need to do, and
I coordinate their efforts. A lot of times, people want to do things that I

don’t want them to do, but I allow them to do it to keep them happy.
Sometimes I explain things well to them, but I still feel they want to
explore this because engineers and designers are artistic people.
Sometimes you have to let them do it the way they feel and the way
they see things. At the same time that I tell them, ‘You can do it your
own way,’ I also say, ‘You’re going to do it my way as well.’ So they do
it two or three different ways, and we select the one that I like most.’ I
consider them not as my employees but rather my colleagues. And I just
respect them. And so my style includes a system that I developed. I
measure success by being able to finish what we start. We have lots of
repeat business, so that’s a real indication that we’re doing a great job.”
In addition to his explanation of his leadership and managerial style,
Barenboym also provides a segue to the next section on managing
teams remotely, since the vast majority of his employees were located
in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Several other interviewees also discussed managing globally dis-
persed teams, as well as allowing team members some latitude in
their approaches to software development. For instance, Facebook
Team Lead, Sergey Markov, who came from St. Petersburg in 2007
at age twenty-eight, commented: “When managing, in many cases, I
want to do something one way and people want to do it a different way.
Actually, it was a learning experience that sometimes it’s difficult to get
people to agree with you, even if you’re right. So sometimes you need to
let people go and do it their way, maybe fail, but still do it their way,
and not force something on people that they don’t want to do. It’s just
that not everyone thinks the same way as you do. That’s one of the
things that I learned back at Microsoft.”
A somewhat different perspective on managing employees remo-
tely was provided by Dmitry Skavish who came in 1999 at age
twenty-nine. A serial entrepreneur, Skavish is CEO of Animatron, a
Cambridge animation startup he founded in 2011. He described how
managing virtual locations has sometimes not been especially pro-
ductive: “On managing virtual work, it’s actually been challenging at
different points in time over the last three years. We have two major
offices, one in Cambridge and one in Ukraine. So we actually have
people there, and the rest of our team works in this location. And we
found that most of the people here are not really cut out to work
from home. At least we have seen problems, psychological problems
and others, that I usually have with people who are working alone.

They always think that they’re missing something, or they’re prob-

ably not in the loop, or something like that. And it requires much
more effort to keep them in the team. Basically, I would like to keep
people in the offices here, but at least they can choose. I try to
manage by keeping them close by in the office. If that’s not possible,
then we talk every day. Here, we do Google Hangouts with people
and use lots of tools to communicate and keep track of things like
project tasks. In addition to individual Hangouts with people, once a
week we have Hangouts with the whole team. We believe this group
Hangout gives access to the leader and everyone on the team has a
voice. We talk about what’s going on.” Skavish’s views reflect a
managerial style based in personal, face-to-face relationships at
least domestically, but includes other techniques he and his company
developed to accommodate exceptions to his own preferences and
that demonstrate flexibility in his leadership and managerial style.
We conclude this section on managing remotely with an account of
the management style of a highly successful entrepreneur whose
cofounded company, Octane Software, was sold to E.piphany for
more than $3 billion. Kira Makagon, who came with her family at
age thirteen in 1977, from Odessa, Ukraine, is Executive Vice President
of Innovation at RingCentral, a Silicon Valley–based company that
provides cloud business communications and collaboration solutions.
The company was founded by two friends from the former USSR
whom Makagon decided to join in growing their already successful
company. Makagon leads product strategy, product management,
R&D, engineering, operations, and marketing/business systems ser-
ving more than 300,000 customers in 2015. Makagon oversees large
teams in Russia, Ukraine, and China, in addition to the Silicon Valley
office. In discussing the remote organizations, she noted: “They’re all
engineering organizations, developers, managers, or technology lea-
ders in one way or another, and they’re all our employees. In managing
them, I have really good people who work directly for me, and that
really is the answer. I don’t directly manage people in Russia, for
instance. I go there and spend a week at a time, getting into a lot of
details with local management. I’m not on the phone with these remote
organizations. I’m on the phone with the heads or the general managers
of the office. But the guys who work for me, and they’re all guys, are
really good at managing remotely. The projects are all joint projects, so
there are weekly calls and weekly meetings so that it’s really

functioning like one organization. The idea is for people remotely not
to feel like they’re part of a different company. It’s important that they
know it’s all one company, and that takes a lot of communication.
“This is a very much results-driven organization, so the method has
ﬂexibility in that managers have control over different cultures and
different styles. Everyone is synched up to their goals and marching to
the same set of priorities, goals and objectives, and time schedules. You
can establish a culture to prevent things from falling through the
cracks. I think that people, when they’re proud, are proud of the
results. But you still have to keep people on their toes. It’s just human
nature for people to slow down after a good result. You’ve got to have a
fair balance about acknowledging people’s work and results and yet
continue to be very demanding. You’ve just got to keep people chal-
lenged, and I think that’s true at any level.” Makagon’s style has
allowed her to leverage her executive and strategic expertise through-
out a large, dispersed organization, and she has clearly thought through
the entire process of doing so.

Communication Style
As was true of teamwork, communication, both verbal and nonverbal,
is another critical soft skill that could be another area for development
by our immigrant interviewees in their new environments. Language
would likely be a barrier for many in their early days, but perhaps even
more difﬁcult to address would be the style of communication that is
fundamentally different from that in the former USSR. Many intervie-
wees found communication to be confusing and challenging, and it
often required cultural adaptation. Regarding verbal communication,
many noted that the direct style communication that they grew up with
in the former USSR seemed at odds with the more indirect style more
commonly used in the United States. So, too, was nonverbal commu-
nication, particularly the American readiness to smile, although some
came to appreciate smiling as a display of conﬁdence and comfort.

Verbal Communication
The most dramatic difference in verbal communication is the direct-
ness of style in the former Soviet Union in contrast to a more oblique
manner on the part of Americans. Insights into this difference are

offered by a number of interviewees, beginning with Anya Kogan,

User Experience Designer Lead and Manager for Ad Words Display
at Google, who came in 1990 at age eight from St. Petersburg. She
spoke of her experiences at Google: “I’ve worked with a number of
Russian engineers, and generally I feel like the Russians that I’ve seen
have assimilated pretty well. I could envision issues like the way I’ve
seen Russian people argue, ‘This is the way it is.’ And then another
Russian would say, ‘No. This is the way it is.’ Whereas in America,
or the way I myself would argue is, ‘OK, you know, I really think
that maybe that is how it works. But how have you seen it work?
Let’s ﬁgure out why we have different perspectives and let’s ﬁnd a
compromise.’ I think it’s a bit more open. I would advise somebody
in that situation not to take it personally. I don’t think that Russians
are trying to attack character. It’s just the way they communicate
things. So don’t be afraid to argue. You might need to do it in a
slightly more aggressive way than you’re used to.” Kogan, in many
respects, was providing advice that would likely be very similar to
that of David Gamarnik, quoted earlier in this chapter, who found
that he had to become more assertive in his arguments, even when
other team members were not from the former USSR.
Kogan added more insight: “So, I mean discussion and communication
are an integral part of teamwork. They’re not really separable. I haven’t
really had issues with the people I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with a
couple of Russian engineers recently here at Google, and we get along
pretty well, and they’re usually open to ideas and they have ideas.”
Eugene Baron, Product Manager at ROkITT, who came from St.
Petersburg in 1990 at age twenty-one, elaborated: “There are more
similarities than differences in people from different cultures. So I’m just
going to talk about the differences. The differences are that Russians are
much more personal and much more emotional, and you know, they are
very, very honest. They will tell you right away if there is a problem, and
they’re usually not going to cover it up. If you need people to tell you
everything is good, don’t worry, the Russian team will tell you instead,
‘This is wrong and this is bad, and we need to change that.’ And you
know, they appreciate frankness. That also helps formal communication.
Having drinks together also helps a lot. But you know what? I’m more
American in this way. I behave like an American. I’m not as direct as
Russians are.” Baron had already learned much about American-style
communication during his time in the US technology world.

Other interviewees expressed a preference for the directness found in

the former USSR and did not see the value in changing their personal
communication style. For instance, Ksenia Samokhvalova, Senior User
Experience Specialist at MathWorks who came to the Boston area in
2003 at age twenty-three, was well aware that her direct communica-
tion style stood out in her US workplace: “As a Russian, I don’t have a
good tolerance for ‘bull.’ I also feel like I’m too blunt sometimes.”
However, she noted that her ﬁrst manager in the United States, an
American man, encouraged her to use her bluntness to point out
problems, and she has found it useful for that purpose. Andrey
Doronichev, Senior Product Manager at Google who came from
Moscow in 2012 at age thirty, also recognized the impact of his direct
communication style and learned to adapt it to be more accepted by his
coworkers: “I am much more ruthless than many other people. I am
more direct and pushy in a way. People would say about me: ‘His
communication style is way too aggressive. I cannot work with this
guy.’ Now that they are used to me, they say: ‘Oh, you know Andrey.
He’s pushy. He’ll be pushing, but that’s what we need here.’ I’ve
managed to calm my temper to the extent where it’s manageable,
where people can kind of work with it. But I didn’t fundamentally
change.” Eugene Boguslavsky, Release Engineer at Facebook who
came from Minsk, Belarus, in 1989 at age ﬁfteen, explained why he
preferred a direct and frank approach to communication: “I like it very
well because how else do you know how you’re doing? I think that the
worst that could probably happen to you if you don’t get any feedback
is surprises. If you’re not performing to your level or people have a hard
time working with you, you don’t want it to be a surprise. You want to
know that right away so that you can adjust, or maybe realize that’s not
the right place for you. If people don’t appreciate what you’re doing,
it’s better to know it earlier than later. So I usually give 100 percent
honest feedback to everybody.”
In a similar vein, Boris Berdnikov, Staff Software Engineer at Google
who came from St. Petersburg in 1995 at age nineteen, expressed his
disdain for the “sandwich method” of feedback found in US work-
places, whereby a criticism or recommendation for improvement is
inserted between two positive statements: “I don’t like the ‘sandwich
method.’ The direct Russian way is a much better way to establish
understanding and communication because it’s more authentic,
because the message is much clearer. I don’t mean the way where,

like the Russian saying goes, ‘I’m the boss and you’re the fool.’ That’s
the extreme of it. Yet I feel like it’s much better overall. Not in the
disrespectful extreme, but the directness. That’s the Russian in me
speaking. So this is hard for me, and it may be part of the cultural
divide.” Despite his frankness, Berdnikov clearly recognized that going
to the extreme, as in the Russian saying, would be unproductive.
The direct and unvarnished style more typical of those from the
former USSR at times led to difficulties with team members, peers,
and subordinates in the United States, and, according to several inter-
viewees, that direct and blunt style was similar to what they had also
experienced in Israel. Sergey Gribov, Partner at Flint Capital who came
from St. Petersburg in 1997 at age twenty-eight, didn’t mince his
words: “In the US, people are very polite and nice. In Russia we’re
not, and in Israel it’s the same way. If an Israeli thinks you are full of
‘bull,’ he would just tell you.” And Stas Khirman, investor, serial
entrepreneur, and Managing Partner at TEC Ventures, who came
from Kiev in 1997 at age thirty-one, noted other cultural differences
in personal interaction that he had observed: “Americans substantially
are more considerate of another person’s space and another person’s
feelings than Russians and Israelis.”
A significant exception to the use of direct and straightforward
communication in the former USSR was with superiors. In that hier-
archical, top-down management system, subordinates typically would
avoid delivering bad news or pointing out problems for fear of negative
reprisals, including being blamed or even punished. Thus, people from
the former USSR often needed to learn to do so in their US workplaces,
where such input was expected and encouraged. Nerses Ohanyan,
Director of Growth Analytics at Viki who came from Yerevan,
Armenia, in 1998 at age fourteen, explained the challenges of learning
to speak directly and honestly to superiors and taking responsibility:
“With somebody whose stereotypical cultural expectations are that
you can’t really talk to your superiors or don’t talk directly, you can
set the expectations and teach them in practice and people will adjust.
People that I never thought would adjust have adjusted. But, I also
think it’s important for you as a company to say, ‘This is how we want
to do things,’ and two things happen: one, people can be trained to
communicate differently, and two, within every culture there is a subset
of people who already speak that way. So, if you can expect that, you
can filter for that as you bring new people on.” Ohanyan’s comments

are helpful in viewing how organizations might help employees make

adjustments to their communication styles.
On the other hand, Michael Barenboym, whose clients have included
many CEOs and senior executives, understood the importance of
speaking frankly when communicating with people in high-level posi-
tions: “What I’ve seen a lot of times when people get hired and are
doing business paid on a contractual basis, they start really being
dependent on the people who are paying them. I don’t do this, and I
always say that I’d rather not do this project if you are not reasonable
and if you just want me to do it the way you see things. And that’s why I
don’t hide my opinions from people who are higher than me on a
professional level. I’m not afraid of anybody or anything; my style of
dealing in business is very open. So I always say whatever I think is
right, in my opinion. But I always say that it’s my subjective opinion.
There’s no such thing as right or wrong, it’s just a matter of opinions for
different people. So, for me, I really like dealing with American com-
panies because I can really teach a lot of people a few things. You
always compete with other groups, and cost is not always the decisive
factor. It’s your credentials, how you present yourself, how charming
you are and how you are able to make people believe in you. And
psychology is the biggest thing; it’s the only thing that drives this
world.” Both Ohanyan and Barenboym seemed to have overcome
any lingering reluctance at managing by speaking directly and clearly
to senior executives, in contrast to the typical aversion to doing so in
the former USSR.
In contrast to preceding interviewees who preferred maintaining
their directness and sometimes bluntness in communication, others
modiﬁed or softened their styles. Iryna Everson explained her style of
direct communication, which appeared to be not as harsh as that of
some others: “I’m usually not very good at giving hints to people. And I
prefer when people speak directly to me, too, because it’s easier for me
to understand. But I wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, I want you to send this email
this way.’ I would say, ‘Oh, it would be nice if you would write this
email like this,’ for example. So, it’s deﬁnitely polite, but more clear and
easy to understand without any opportunities for doubt.” Everson also
appreciated different cultural attitudes toward feedback: “In Ukraine,
people would think of feedback as something like criticizing, usually,
whereas here, people think feedback is a gift, for example, to help you
be better.” Her last comment provides a useful comparison between

how feedback might be looked at differently by people in the United

States and Ukraine.
Another interviewee who attempted to modify her communication
style is Olga Bazhenova, E-Commerce Product Manager at Staples,
who came from Moscow in 1999 at age sixteen. She explained her
direct style of communication and its impact on others she worked with
and how she adapted her style over the years: “Russians tend to be very
direct. A senior executive had once told me, half jokingly, ‘Every time
you talk to me, regardless of what you say, I feel like you are scolding
me.’ You just sort of take it and nod and smile politely. But really, I felt
there was nothing I could do about that. But over the years, I’ve toned it
down.” Bazhenova also was bemused by feedback she received as a
project manager, with some people appreciating her direct style while
others did not: ‘During one of my yearly reviews, one person wrote that
I was too direct and needed to soften it up, while another person said I
needed to be more direct and say more clearly what I needed. So I
learned to adjust my approach to those specific people.”
Another interviewee described how he learned to say negative things
without giving offense: “Especially in a large company, there is a more
refined way that people communicate failures. For instance, that’s
where I learned that I could still refine my English in terms of how
one can say negative things without offending someone. So I learned to
say things like: ‘I can understand how you see it this way, but have you
ever considered this?’ Or, ‘Why don’t we try to do something differ-
ently?’” He felt, however, that polite communication could be taken
too far: “There are a good number of people that should and could be
more considerate toward others’ sensitivities, within reason, but at
times I think people tend to smother the meaning by political
correctness.”
A number of interviewees spoke about the importance of adapting
one’s communication style to the work context, in terms of both national
cultures and individual preferences. Dmitry Kovalev, Consulting Systems
Engineer at Cisco who came from Moscow in 2008 at age twenty-four,
expressed a nuanced view of communication, noting individual prefer-
ences within cultures as well as the need for adapting to specific situations:
“Communication style might be dependent on the culture, but it’s much
more dependent on the particular person. Communication is really key,
and sometimes it’s good when you’re over-communicating, and it can be
good when you’re under-communicating. Every person has to find their

balance. It’s also speciﬁc to the amount of the communication needed by

each particular team. That’s something that you learn over time. It might
be a problem of conflicts sometimes, when you don’t say something and
you kind of assume that you’ve said it but the other person didn’t hear it,
and he’s acting differently than he would if he had gotten this informa-
tion.” Sergey Kononov, Senior Delivery Manager at EPAM Systems who
came from Kharkov, Ukraine, in 2011 at age twenty-eight, explained that
he adapts his communication style depending on whether he is working
onsite in Cambridge or remotely with teams in Russia: “With teams in
Russia, when you are sharp or stern with them, if you’ve proven your
leadership and talent, they understand you have a right to be sharp and
you have enough knowledge to guide them. In the US, I have to be much
smoother and softer.”
One interviewee provided a rather detailed view of how difficult
communication can be for any manager in a large and dispersed orga-
nization. For Kira Makagon, the solution was in embedding an open
communication style into the company’s culture. Makagon, who as
Executive Vice President of RingCentral oversees a large workforce in
Silicon Valley as well as remote teams in Russia, Ukraine, and China,
explained how she has created an organizational culture based on open
communication: “I think you can establish a culture around open
communication. People who work for me know that if something is
not working, then it’s better to give me an early warning sign than later
saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it wasn’t going to work out,’ type of
explanation. And that’s the culture that I have in the organization
regardless of what level people are at, because things don’t work out
necessarily the way we think they will all the time. There are disasters,
you know, there are minor problems, there are major problems. I don’t
want to know about every minor problem, but I do want to know
about anything major as soon as it becomes known. I don’t expect to
solve it, I expect them to solve it, but I know about it and that’s the
culture at every level, hopefully.”
Still in the realm of verbal communication, two other interviewees
provided a clear contrast between communication in the United States
and the former USSR. Sasha Proshina, Senior Manager at Sanofi
Genzyme who came from Tomsk, Siberia, in 2002 at age twenty-two,
provided her observations on how Americans relate to one another in
contrast to Russians: “What I like about America is that American
people show much more gentleness and politeness. Russians don’t have

that, at least in my family. There is no politeness. They just barrage

each other all the time. And if Russians like something, they wouldn’t
tell you. I’m talking about poor to middle working class people. It’s just
this vicious cycle of gossiping, criticizing, gossiping, criticizing. After
living here in the US for so long, it’s like a bitter rude awakening for me
when I go back to Russia.” Proshina emphasized the adjustment to the
American style of communicating as well as the challenge of dealing
with the contrast when visiting her homeland.
Andrey Klen, Cofounder and COO of Petcube who was born in
Egvekinot, Russia, and came from Ukraine in 2014 at age twenty-six,
provided a similar view, but focused on the American style: “Overall,
Americans are much nicer in terms of communication and manners,
like etiquette, smiling at you, and all that stuff. They are polite on their
personal communication level. Formally, everything is done much
nicer. And everybody tends to stick to their word, like when it comes
to some arrangements and when it comes to promises. Personally, I
think that Americans tend to keep a lot of promises and say, ‘We can do
a bunch of things together.’ But sometimes they don’t quite follow
through on their promises. But when you have a firm arrangement, it
is going to work. That’s a first impression for me.” Like Proshina, he
noted that it takes time to adjust to a new cultural style. This is likely
due to being imprinted with a markedly different style in earlier years,
as were so many interviewees whose observations were included in this
chapter.
We end this section on verbal communication with a couple of
comments on the importance of humor in communication. Humor is
one of the most difficult things to interpret in a different culture because
people within a culture are imprinted with a shared experience that
may be implicit in a joke or humorous remark. As such, it is difficult for
those from different cultures to appreciate or interpret humor from
another culture. Davit Baghdasaryan, Senior Security Engineer at
Twilio, who came from Yerevan, Armenia, in 2008 at age twenty-
four explained his experience: “Humor is different in Armenia.
Humor in the USSR is different than here in the US. And humor is a
very important part of communication, right? So if you make jokes that
others don’t understand, at least in my world that’s probably going to
be a show-stopper if you want a better relationship with that person.
And it’s vice versa, if you don’t understand that humor.” In the USSR,
humor was an especially important means of communication, a means

of social bonding, and often served as a safety valve, as a way to ridicule

the communist regime among trusted friends. Dmitry Kerov, Vice
President of Software Engineering at Northern Light, who came from
St. Petersburg in 2009 at age thirty-seven, explained that sarcasm and
humor helped people cope in the USSR: “We were very limited in the
things we could do, and the whole environment was kind of ridiculous,
so the only thing you could do was laugh at what was going on. Even in
Brezhnev’s time, there were a lot of political anecdotes or jokes.”

Nonverbal Communication
This concluding part of the section notes the importance of nonverbal
communication, so fundamental to every culture and often more difﬁ-
cult to interpret than verbal communication. We focus on the practice
of smiling as the form of nonverbal communication described by
numerous interviewees and their different interpretations of that ges-
ture in the United States and the former USSR. Some interpreted in a
positive way the propensity of Americans to smile frequently with
strangers and new acquaintances in addition to family members and
close friends, while others saw it negatively. One interviewee initially
saw the American custom as being less than sincere: “The biggest issue
was expression of emotions. For instance, Americans usually smile, but
it means nothing. It’s just normal. But Russians’ neutral position is not
focused on emotions. If you are smiling, it means something. You’re
happy, you’re going to see somebody, like it means something, but in
America, it doesn’t mean anything, and it was the ﬁrst issue for me to
understand what people mean.”
A contrasting view was expressed by Maxim Matuzov, Search
Program Manager at Apple. Originally from Murmansk, Russia, he
came in 2009 at age twenty-one: “So when I say emotional, I mean like
someone who shows the emotions on their face, I guess because in
Russia we are kind of always serious and don’t show anything. Here, it
is much easier to tell things from a person’s expression. You know, you
have a very laid back environment here, and I don’t see any point of
being super strict, super serious, super smiley or something. There’s no
point. It’s an easy going environment. It’s a laid back environment.
People like you, people you know treat you well. You don’t expect any
danger from people, right.” Matuzov was one of the few who attrib-
uted the difference in the propensity to smile to the environment.

Eugene Trosman, Applications Engineer at Analog Devices who came

from Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1989 at age twenty-four, also commented
on the more casual atmosphere the United States: “I think people are
more relaxed and more confident here in the US. Although I don’t think
I smile too much. I never got into the habit of smiling too much. To be
honest, the first few years when I came over, and I see people always
smiling I thought, well, is it a real smile or is it a made-up smile? How
do you know? I couldn’t figure it out. And I still sometimes can’t figure
it out. Russians don’t do that, obviously. I think it’s a typical American
thing. But, yeah, you take the subway in Moscow and among all these
people, nobody smiles at all, everybody’s tense, everybody’s kind of
uneasy. Uneasy isn’t the right word: I think their expression is tense, it’s
not relaxed.” A similar perspective was provided by Maria Samarina,
Managing Partner and Cofounder of Yosh Technology who came from
Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 2013 at age twenty-seven: “People are more
relaxed here and have more money to live and, actually, your cultural
difference is that there is not a lot of complaining, like in my country. If
we have problems there, we say it directly. Here, when you ask, ‘How
are you?’ you probably don’t know how people are really feeling. In
Russia when you ask, ‘how are you?’ people will answer you back with
honest answers. If you have a problem here, you just do not speak
about it, or you look at the problem from a nice point of view, which I
really love. But it’s not easy for me to adjust.” While noting that smiling
was a cultural difference, Samarina explained that it was not easy for
her to acclimate to that nonverbal cue in American culture even though
she preferred that approach.
A stronger positive view of the American interpersonal environment
was provided by serial entrepreneur and investor Evgeny Medvednikov,
who was originally from Arkhangelsk, Russia and came in 2014 at age
thirty-four. Having been in the United States only a few months, he
remarked: “People are friendlier here. And they are very happy to con-
nect you with other people, to connect you with partners or investors.
And they do it just for free. But, for example, many Russian people know
somebody you are looking for, and they may want to get some money
from you for this knowledge for an introduction. And it’s a serious
difference, because Russians still don’t understand that you must help
somebody first and then expect a return on these investments. First you
help and then expect help. But if you sell a service to somebody, it’s not a
good idea.” Medvednikov provided the contrast as well as the probable

reason for the difference in approach of Americans and people from the
former USSR. And, in an insightful comment about the difference and
the reasons for it, Kira Makagon said: “Russians don’t smile a whole lot,
so you’ve got to break through, you know, break that ice. And it’s not
that they’re that intense. I think it’s a culture of introverts, or the
behavior is that of an introvert. So you’ve got to make it a bit more
personal, whereas I don’t think you actually have to necessarily make it
more personal in the US. I think people here just are naturally more
relaxed.” Her comments emphasize the difference in cultures and inher-
ently the culture of guarded behavior in the former USSR, as opposed to
the more open society of the United States.
Getting over the habit of not smiling as well as being less introverted
was an important step for Sasha Proshina, Senior Manager at Sanofi
Genzyme who was originally from Tomsk, Siberia, and came in 2002 at
age twenty-two. She learned about smiling from a popular American
book mentioned earlier in this chapter by Eugene Baron: “When I was
thirteen years old, I was very shy and I hated it, so I read a book by Dale
Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People,9 and so I was one
of the very few Russians who smiled. I used his lessons a lot and that
really helped me to actually make a lot of friends. And when I came to
the US, Americans were shocked that I smiled because, you know,
Russians never really smile. They have kind of very stern faces.”
Proshina perhaps unwittingly learned to adapt her nonverbal commu-
nication to the American style while still a teenager in the USSR, and it
eventually led to a positive turn in her life.
A concluding view of that cultural difference is provided by
Alexandra Johnson, who grew up in Vladivostok, Russia, came to the
United States in 1990 in her twenties, and who travels frequently to the
former USSR: “I discovered that when you go to Moscow, people don’t
smile, and everything you say will be first a negative, then you have to
prove that it’s a positive, and then you can say it. So that was one thing I
noticed; culturally it’s still very, very different. At the same time, seeing
the geopolitical situation happening now, maybe people have a reason
for that. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder when visiting people,
because I did teach them to smile and be energetic and whatever, but

9
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Inﬂuence People. As noted earlier in this
chapter by interviewee Eugene Baron, the book was highly popular in the former
USSR. Smiling was one of the book’s recommendations.

maybe they’re sitting there thinking, ‘Sasha is from California and there
people have to do all those things to operate.’ I don’t know, it’s
complicated.” Johnson’s reﬂections provide insights into the difﬁculties
that immigrants from the former USSR face when returning to their
homeland, possibly because they might have adjusted so well to their
adopted environment in the United States.

Trust
We now provide background on the nature of trust in the former USSR
since that concept is fundamental to putting soft skills into context.
Without mutual trust, it can be extremely difficult to build the relation-
ships necessary for leaders and managers to effectively utilize soft skills
with their employees and vice versa. Trust is also fundamental to
success in other business practices since it is critical to external relation-
ships, such as those with investors and customers. Although other
formal institutional arrangements are usually in place both internally
and externally, the presence of trust adds an important dimension to
successful relationships in virtually all areas of business. Two types of
trust have been identified: generalized and particularized. High levels of
generalized trust among the population overall are typically found in
societies with strong legitimate formal institutions including govern-
ments, judicial systems, and enforceable contracts. Research has shown
that such institutions serve as safeguards against improper actions and
in turn facilitate a broad level of general trust within organizations as
well as society in general.10 Generalized trust can produce a more open
culture that is accepting of formal and even informal relationships
among institutions and between individuals and institutions. In con-
trast, countries and organizational environments with weak legitimate
institutions produce the opposite results, inhibiting trusting relation-
ships beyond one’s close network or circle of family, friends, and
confidants, creating an environment characterized by particularized
trust. The latter is common in many developing and transition econo-
mies including those of the former USSR.11 The institutional environ-
ment that citizens experience often creates fear and causes people to be
10
Angela Ayios, Trust and Western-Russian Business Relationships (London:
Ashgate, 2004).
11
Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and
Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

closed, protective, skeptical, and even suspicious of people outside their

close networks.
Andrey Kunov, President of the Silicon Valley Innovation Center
who came initially in 1994 at age twenty-two from Zhezkazgan,
Kazakhstan, clarified the lack of generalized trust he experienced
back in the former USSR, which stood in stark contrast to the abun-
dance that he found in Silicon Valley: “Sometimes you trust people you
probably shouldn’t trust in the first place, so you’re bound to make
some mistakes. Yeah, that’s where a lot of my failures came from.
Sometimes people can exploit your trust or they can manipulate you.
Now, when I look back, I feel like I’ve been manipulated in my life on a
recurring basis, I should say. I’m not blaming anybody. It’s actually my
mistake that I was extending my trust to people who I shouldn’t have in
the first place. For instance, back in Russia, I was so trusting that my
mother told me I was too trusting, and she was right. That’s why I
would have failed miserably in business in Russia. So I didn’t even try to
have a business there because the way business was organized there was
just so alien to my inner nature. That’s probably one of the reasons why
I left Russia. Maybe somehow deep inside I was looking for a place
where I would not feel so insecure with my trust of other people.
“When I came here, especially in California, I never wanted to leave
because there are a lot of people like me who are doing business. I
discovered that I am not alone here; there are tons of people like me.
And, amazingly, some of them still manage to succeed in building their
business. You don’t have to be a cutthroat type of a person in order to
be successful here. The environment here is much more accepting. The
business culture is so accepting here even though there is huge competi-
tion. All of those things somehow manage to be combined in Silicon
Valley specifically. There are a lot of people who are very trusting, and I
love that about this place. I think it’s kind of like a self-selection
mechanism that is working in Silicon Valley, where there is a micro-
climate here that supports a lot of trust. I love the fact that we can
contact a lot of companies that don’t know much about us, but they
trust us. We’re a tiny company, but interestingly enough, there are huge
companies like Microsoft and Intel, and yet they meet with us like
equals, which is amazing. And they trust you at your word.” Kunov
provides a vivid contrast of the difference between particularized trust
as found in the former USSR with its low generalized trust, compared to
the environment of high generalized trust he found so welcoming in the

United States. And it is clear, even if unspoken in his statement, that

strong, legitimate institutions are the foundation of generalized trust in
the United States.
Another interviewee who displayed a trusting demeanor was Roman
Kostochka, Cofounder and CEO of Coursmos. He is originally from
Tolyatti, Russia, and came to the United States in 2013 at age thirty-
seven: “I don’t know, but I always trust people, although sometimes it’s
not good for me. But if you trust people, they open up to you, and I like
these relationships. Whatever places I’ve been around the world, I’ve
always met very nice people, and if something goes wrong, I just move
on, because that’s life.”
Not all interviewees found their new country as welcoming as Kunov
or Kostochka, who evidently did not feel the need to shed imprinting
about trust from the former USSR. As Kunov explained, he was already
an anomaly in that environment and found comfort being himself in the
United States. Others, however, experienced difficulties adjusting
because of the imprinting they received in the restrictive institutional
environment of their earlier years and that could still inhibit their
ability to trust people beyond a close network. One such interviewee
illustrates the difficulty of embracing generalized trust, as well as being
limited in his ability to receive that level of trust beyond his close
network. Serial entrepreneur and investor, Stas Khirman, who was
originally from Kiev, Ukraine, and who came in 1994 at age twenty-
eight, provides clear insight into the complexities of trust: “Again,
because I was born in the USSR under the eyes of the KGB, and it’s
not a joke, you have to carefully consider what you are saying and to
whom. I feel that way every day. On a personal level, it took me many
years to trust another person. I don’t have many very close friends, but
those I do have, I have had for five years, ten years, twenty years. It
takes a substantial amount of time for me to trust a person to the level I
consider necessary for friendship. So about trust: I cannot tell you
about the United States generally, because I’ve only lived in Silicon
Valley. Here, it’s taken to the extreme with trust and common interests
going together. But common interests are long term, throughout your
life. It means that someone like me coming from outside doesn’t have a
credit history, you know no one and no one knows you. And it’s hard.
Also I have passed through this. Maybe I was successful in my transi-
tion from Israel to here, but I lacked a support network, and this can be
hard for people. So that’s why we founded TEC Club, AmBAR, and

SVOD to help with this situation. And we call these human networks,
support networks.” Khirman’s story seems representative of people
who spent much of their earlier years in the former USSR before its
breakup. As such, he was likely imprinted deeply with the environment
of distrust that existed there. Interviewees who had fewer years in that
environment might have been less deeply imprinted, but their own
experiences as well as their parents’ and even grandparents’ stories,
almost certainly affected their attitudes toward trust. Yet Khirman
managed to help others adjust in important ways that were not avail-
able to him as he reached for and achieved his successes.
In a story similar to that of Stas Khirman, Michail Pankratov,
President and CEO of MMP Medical Associates, who came from
Russia in 1974 at age twenty-six, recounted: “It took me twenty-five
years on the academic side and twenty years on the business side to
develop relationships so that people really trust me. You see what I’m
saying? I was always honest, and I never deceived them, and never got
involved in anything shady.” His story, like that of Khirman’s, illus-
trates how difficult it can be for immigrants to gain the trust of associ-
ates and others, even though the United States is usually categorized as
a country exhibiting high generalized trust. Both men had to work for
years and even decades to persuade others that they were worthy of
trust, another indication of the potential difficulties faced by our inter-
viewees as they attempted to integrate into the US innovation economy.
Timur Shtatland, Development Scientist II at New England Biolabs
who came from Kiev, Ukraine, in 1988 at age twenty, echoed: “I was
always distrustful of the Soviet Union. I basically hated the Soviets from
my formative years.” His terse recollection was deeply felt, and his
distrust of Soviet institutions reflects the cause of many difficulties that
citizens from that country have had in coming to grips with exhibiting
and even accepting trust because of the hostile institutional environ-
ment of the former USSR that imprinted them so negatively.
Perhaps the most telling story of the difficulties of overcoming such a
background was recounted by Daniel Barenboym, Chairman and CEO
of Collective Learning, who came from St. Petersburg in 1990 at age
fifteen. Reflecting back on earlier years, he said: “There’s always been
the feeling that someone’s about to lie to you or cheat you, or do
something wrong and harm you in some sort of way. We’ve gotten
away from that feeling, but the DNA in us in reference to that is still
there.” In contrasting his subsequent experiences in the United States

with his Russian experiences, he said: “So, a lot of times, when you call
American companies, they will give you the benefit of the doubt to give
you the chance to prove that you are good. But the process might be
very long and extensive, and it might take a long time to convince them.
But they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. With Russians, if you try to
approach them and they don’t know you, they will instantly assume
that you are there to somehow screw them, that you’re there to lie to
them, to get their money. And they won’t give you the benefit of the
doubt. However, if you manage to pass that situation, the closing cycle
is much faster. Once the Russians trust you, they trust you, and there is
an instant rapport. With the Americans, it’s not always as easy.
Whereas Russians are more like, ‘I feel good about it,’ Americans are
more like, ‘This better work for me.’ So just different priorities, I
guess.” Barenboym provides lucid insights into the comparison of
gaining trust between Americans and Russians, illustrating both posi-
tive and negative aspects of each. It may take Russians longer to
establish trust, but once accomplished, they are more likely to continue
that relationship, whereas Americans need to know that the relation-
ship will continue to work positively for them. The contrast reflects the
difference noted by many interviewees between the more emotional
style of relationships on the part of Russians to a more pragmatic one
for Americans.
An interviewee who explained the difference between Russians and
Americans regarding trust was serial entrepreneur Sergei Burkov, who
founded Alterra and came to the United States from Moscow in 1989 at
age twenty-one: “On the difference in trust between Russia and the US,
for Russians, by default, people are bad. You just don’t trust people.
You trust your childhood friends or your sister’s friends, or those with
whom you studied together. So, somebody you know, yes, you can
trust them, if you know somebody very well. But here in the US, where
you might have three people, one from Google, one from Facebook,
and one from IBM, who join together to start a company, that would be
kind of unusual for Russia.” In explaining further how he might
accomplish due diligence in order to verify trust, he noted: “Here in
Silicon Valley there are reputations. There are people who you could
ask for references, people who were with other people in the past –
there is a network. So if you want to join forces with somebody, it’s
very easy to ask people who worked with him in the past, what they
think of him. And sometimes they would say, ‘No, don’t do it.’ And

sometimes they say, ‘Yes, he’s good.’ But again, you kind of trust, you
assume that they are good, that they are honest.” In contrast to the
more typical approach of those from the former USSR, Burkov began
with an acceptance of generalized trust rather than depending only on
particularized trust.
We now turn to Nerses Ohanyan, Director of Growth Analytics at
Viki, who came from Yerevan, Armenia, in 1998 at age fourteen. His
perspective has poignant consistency with our opening comments on
trust. He clearly articulated the importance of trust in managing remote
teams: “Trust is always the number one key when you have remote
teams. In fact, it’s the number one thing in business and in running a
company. But it’s especially important when you’re in a remote situa-
tion. There’s nothing more valuable than knowing you can trust a
person across the ocean.”
Another interviewee who noted the importance of building trust and
who learned to do so while working with Western multinational man-
agers back in Russia in the 1990s is serial entrepreneur, Dimitri Popov.
He was originally from Zelenograd, Russia, and came in 2014 at age
forty: “I was trying to be very open about how I made decisions. For
instance, even with decisions that everybody expected me to take and
nobody actually cared, I would issue a very short paper – written, with
my signature on it – and would share it with colleagues. I would say,
‘I think this is the right way to do it, and if you don’t have any
objections, I will do it and later you will have this paper, and if I am
mistaken, you will remember that I was that guy who actually recom-
mended it. But if I was right, I will expect the credit for that as well, the
credit just to say, ‘Dimitri, you were right.’ That’s it. That’s all I
wanted. And it kind of worked. It kind of worked because it contrasted
with the regular practice of Russian managers who would kind of try to
avoid responsibility. In short, commitment, written commitment.”
Popov’s comments and his method of building trust are consistent
with a well-accepted deﬁnition, the essence of which is that trust
involves a person having conﬁdence in what to expect in dealings
with another person.
The experience of Ilya Kabanov, Head of IT Compliance at Schneider
Electric who came from Moscow in 2014 at age thirty-seven, illustrates
the fundamental role of trust in business: “Essentially everybody in the
world wants to run a business with a company they can trust. It’s very
natural for a person. You want to buy things from a company you trust,

you want to buy products you can trust, and you want to make a deal
with a person you can trust. Then you have to think about the vehicles of
trust and the instruments of trust. Let’s compare the US or European
countries, which have mature and enforceable legal instruments, with
developing countries that lack those instruments. In business transac-
tions, suppose we have two persons in different countries who want to
do business together. And they’re trying to assess the instruments of trust
that they have. In the US you’d say, ‘Okay, I have a contract, I have a
court, I have all the instruments to create trust using the standard off the
shelf instruments.’ And it’s fast and convenient because it’s a ready to use
product. You sign the contract, you know that it’s enforceable, it’s a level
of trust that can be established in a second.” He was, of course, describ-
ing the environment of generalized trust he found in the United States
due to its strong legitimate institutions.
Kabanov then described environments relying on particularized
trust: “Then you come to Ethiopia, or Russia, or China, and you try
to use the same instruments that you are familiar with. You say, ‘Okay,
I have a contract. The instrument looks good, very similar to the
instrument that I use in my own country.’ However, it’s not the same
tool that can be used to build trust because it’s not 100 percent enforce-
able. I cannot rely on this document to build trust with a partner.
Another example can be a judicial system in a developing country.
The system looks similar, there are legislations, courts, lawyers, but
in the country it’s a ridiculous system that can’t be used to enforce
something transparently, not a system that can be used to build trust.
So the next alternative is, ‘I have a friend who knows this guy. Probably
a solid reference who can become an instrument to build trust.’ Because
you want to do business. And then you ﬁnd, ‘OK, it’s not as good as a
contract, it’s not as good as being able to go to court, it’s not as good as
money in a bank account,’ but you want to do some business. And you
ﬁnally use this vehicle as a way to establish trust.’’
In a twist to his story, Kabanov added: “But what’s interesting is I’ve
found so many similarities between Russia and the US. It’s the extent of
networking here. For instance, I interviewed people in the US, espe-
cially people who came from Europe, from Russia, from all over the
world, as well as native-born Americans. And all of them said that the
value of networks is tremendous in the US and even much stronger than
in Europe. Your network is almost the most important vehicle to do
business here. In Europe, I would say, ‘No, you have to spend more

time in advance, and it cannot be so straightforward or direct.’ So

networks work really well here and for me. It’s good, I like the trans-
parency, effectiveness, and efficiency. So is it something new for me?
Yes, and it’s a thing I absolutely like.” Kabanov had analyzed the
contrast between gaining trust in a more developed institutional envir-
onment and in environments with less legitimate formal institutions
and even the importance of informal institutions like networks in the
United States
A very different experience and point of view was described by
Dmitry Kuzmenko, Senior Software Engineer at Google, who came
from Ukraine in 2005 at age twenty-three: “So, first of all, in a new
environment you just trust people. I mean, you have to trust them. But
there are different trust models for different professions, for different
psychological types. Some people, if they’ve read something from a
trustworthy source and they trust that source, they would trust what’s
written. Engineers, however, are usually the kind of people who follow
a more mathematical approach. They trust what they can prove to
themselves, what they understand and can follow through reasoning.”
Kuzmenko’s story is limited to considering trust in a technological
work environment, an important insight given the context of this
book with its focus on the US innovation economy.
An even sharper contrast came from several interviewees who
expressed resistance to, or at least skepticism in, accepting trust too
readily. Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder and CEO of Semantria who came
from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 2003 at age seventeen, recounted:
“I learned from my dad’s mistakes back in Ukraine. I learned that you
can’t really rely on partners until the rules of the game are defined and
there are checks and balances. I learned that you can’t completely trust
people until they’re proven. So the American mentality is to trust and
then pull back when they screw you over. I learned to first make sure
that they are trustworthy, and then trust. So I learned to deal with a lot
of cultural stuff.” A somewhat similar example was recounted by
Alexei Masterov, Product Manager at Google who came from Penza,
Russia, in 1996 at age sixteen: “I had a professor, Daniel Cohen, at
Hunter College in New York, and I don’t remember the words exactly,
but he used to say that the Russian national pastime was complaining
and skepticism, or something like that. He had Lenin posters in his
office and stuff like that. A very interesting guy.” Thinking about
himself, Masterov elaborated: “I’m still fighting with my skepticism

part, but I hope I don’t complain as much as I used to.” Regarding his
lingering skepticism, he noted: “I just had this conversation with some-
one recently. I think the skepticism part sort of comes from risk man-
agement. It’s almost easier to bet on being right if you’re skeptical
because, you know, good things or risky things or great things don’t
happen as often as ordinary things and bad things. But if somebody
wants to do something crazy here at Google, as many people do with
things that might initially sound outrageous, it’s almost easier to say
that it’s not going to work if your goal is to be right. But that’s not the
attitude that’s going to get you anywhere. So I fully realize that.
“But I also realize that sometimes I’m being skeptical just because I
came from that culture. So to help overcome this, ﬁrst of all, I guess I’ve
changed my goals a little bit, like being right is not an important goal
anymore. You don’t always have to be right to be a good person or to
be successful, or whatever. If your goal is to achieve something great,
then you have to take risks, and you may have to be wrong every once
in awhile. Relationships in Russia were much more informal, and that
may be a good thing because they have more friendships, it’s all about
relationships. But, at the same time, if somebody doesn’t like you, they
feel entitled to tell you about that and yell at you. It’s just part of the
Russian culture. And another thing that is very typical of Russian
culture is the high level of skepticism. So I mean, historically, I think
there was no motivation. In the Soviet era, there was no motivation for
people to take risks because the system didn’t promote that. It didn’t
promote risk takers, it didn’t promote people who wanted to defy the
order. I mentioned that the educational system wasn’t designed for
that. If you know about the history of innovation in Russia, for the
most part, it was done under the point of a gun. Google has this risk-
taking culture, and it’s actually encouraged. I just used some of the
same terminology and the same words that I had seen others use to help
inspire them if we were to succeed.” Masterov’s insights provide addi-
tional illumination on the skepticism and risk aversion found in
Russian culture, which also applies to that of the broader Soviet
culture.
Another interviewee who expressed very clearly that he is highly
skeptical – in a business environment at least – is Eugene Buff, a
technology consultant at Primary Innovation Consulting who came
from Moscow in 1994 at age twenty-seven. He said: “Speaking about
myself is always hard. I think I have the reputation that I’m a no-BS

kind of guy. Some time ago I decided to take an aptitude test that was
going around. And, of course, our wives told us that the company was
wasting our money. They could have told us the results right away. So it
turned out that I had very low numbers on ‘nurture,’ but I had 99 out of
100 on ‘skepticism.’ So they kept saying, ‘If I’m saying something is
OK, it’s actually incredible. And if I’m saying something is bad, then it’s
probably really OK.’ So I’m not very good at sugar-coating in that
sense. I call things the way I see them. Sometimes I do that with
disclaimers that it’s just my opinion, and sometimes without that. I
think in business people appreciate that. I think my skepticism is a
combination of Jewishness and being born in the USSR. Everything you
say or hear is probably not true, unless it’s proven.” As Daniel
Barenboym noted earlier in this chapter, Buff seems to indicate that
skepticism was in his DNA, likely as a result of imprinting in the former
USSR, where, as he noted, there was very little reason to trust people
outside of one’s personal network, perhaps ampliﬁed by further
imprinting during his time in Israel.
Another interviewee who might ﬁt into the skeptical group is Sergei
Ivanov, CEO of Optromix, a company that engages software groups
back in Russia in their projects. Originally from Murmansk, Russia,
he came in 1992 at age twenty-six. In speaking of trust, he noted: “It’s
not that easy to earn trust with Russians you don’t know. And it was
really bad during the 1990s and 2000s when even old friends and
classmates betrayed each other like crazy. So, in Russia, you can’t
really, by default, trust anybody. But once you interact with some-
body for a fair amount of time, some level of trust happens. I read
somewhere that one difference between Russian and American cul-
tures is that for Russians, a contract is sort of the beginning of
negotiations. And that was the case with the company I was working
with in Russia.” Ivanov had a better experience in a more recent
business transaction: “I met some people from Russia in the middle
of last year and we started the project at the beginning of this year.
One of them was interested in bringing three different products into
the market. So far it’s been good, and so far the guy hasn’t broken his
promises.” One reason for his reluctance to trust quickly was likely
his imprinting experience during the breakup of the USSR, when he
noted that even good friends and former classmates turned out to be
untrustworthy toward one another, partly due to the chaotic condi-
tions of that period.

Other interviewees noted the importance of trust in business, includ-

ing Katya Stesin, Founder of IoT fashion ﬁrm, Fit-Any, who came from
Moscow in 1991 at age twenty-three: “You can’t really expect trust
right away. You just have to extend trust before a trusting relationship
can develop, but sometimes that doesn’t work. You never know even
with people you’ve known for years, because sometimes they change if
they get into tough circumstances. I’ve had that experience. They break
their agreements, and almost anybody could do it depending upon the
pressure they’re under. But you just have to move on, you know. That’s
life. You have to be positive as an entrepreneur because otherwise you
can’t do what you need to do.”
Another interviewee with an experience similar to Ivanov’s back in
the USSR is Anton Voskresenskiy, CTO of Northern Light, who came
from St. Petersburg in 2006 at age thirty: “I think a lot of things
changed in Russia in regards to trust. When I was growing up during
the breakup of the former USSR, the system fell apart and people were,
you know, trying to make a living, stooping to things they would never
do otherwise in better times. I think I was experiencing degradation, at
least that’s my take on it. When I was living there, every year was worse
in terms of trust, in terms of people being decent. I think that the
pressure of all those things that happened with the chaos in the
USSR, and then Russia, ended up being an unbearable burden on
the morality of people, at least that’s my take, and I was sometimes
thinking I would just have to get out. I was not very happy with how
things were in Russia in that regard. So when I moved to the US, I was
relieved to see that, you know, it’s not something that was happening
everywhere, but it was something that happened with that particular
group of people.”
From a more general point of view, Voskresenskiy offered interesting
insights in comparing the openness shown by people in the United
States, including their readiness to smile: “I’m not sure this is how
people do it all over Russia, but in St. Petersburg, at least, you don’t
see many smiles on people’s faces when you walk down the street. And
it’s not because these people don’t know how to have fun. They’re not
necessarily friendly to you when you approach them, but when you
befriend them, they can be very friendly and exhibit sympathy or
empathy after you establish a relationship with them. But before that,
they envelop themselves in this protective shell, which I kind of grew
weary of.” Voskresenskiy’s time in the former USSR had certainly

influenced his thinking about trust. And his dismay at the nonverbal
communication of lack of smiling and the withdrawal into one’s shell
that he witnessed in St. Petersburg was again a barrier to establishing
generalized trust. Like others, he noted that even particularized trust
with another individual took a great deal of time due at least in part to
the low level of generalized trust that imprinted people, but that was
susceptible to being overlaid with different imprinting in a new
environment.
Shalva Kashmadze, Product Manager at Pocket Gems who came
from Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2011 at age twenty-five, had more to say
about trust: “In terms of trust, I’ve never had an issue with that.” He
then went on to add: “I think the one thing you need to do is to kind of
recalibrate how you capture social cues because the way people behave
with you, the way people smile at you, and how friendly they are, have
different consequences here in America than in the former USSR.
People are really friendly here, and, at the same time, they are still
distant, and the amount of friendliness, or how friendly they are, does
not really reflect how close you are with them. So even someone who
you’re seeing for a second time might be super friendly, but you should
not assume that you’re a member of his close circle. This means you just
have to be more careful about those cues. But in terms of trust, yeah,
I think there are no problems.”
Kashmadze added: “Right now I’m feeling much more comfortable
than back there in Georgia. I think the environment here, at the end of
the day, is more meritocratic. I mean, as long as you’re good at what
you do and you’re getting your stuff done, people are going to trust you
and give you more stuff to do. It’s not like back home in Georgia, where
it’s all about navigating who is whose friend and, like, how does the
political structure work and who are you going to be friends with.”
Kashmadze also noted a topic that others mentioned, the importance of
cues in both the former USSR and the United States. Smiling, for
instance, was noted by several interviewees, either the lack of it in the
former USSR and its frequency in the United States. Voskresenskiy
noted the lack of smiling back in St. Petersburg and how that bothered
him, and how refreshing it was to see people in the United States
smiling easily and frequently. Kashmadze, however, emphasized that,
on a personal basis, not too much should be read into another person’s
smile, such as interpreting it as a sign of a close relationship. The stories
from various interviewees in this chapter have illustrated different

views of openness to trust as well as the differences of being affected by

various levels of imprinting that occurred not only in the former USSR,
but also in their new environments, that influenced their views and
beliefs.
We included several related topics in this chapter that we see as being
elements of the soft skills necessary in technology workplaces. We
noted that these skills were emphasized by a number of sources as
being deficiencies in technological professionals working in the US
innovation economy. Interviewees related accounts of probable weak-
nesses within their soft skills that would likely be transferred to the US
business environment, such as in teamwork and communication, as
well as in leadership and managerial styles. We first covered teamwork
since we wanted to illustrate how well interviewees had adapted to
their new workplaces in the US innovation economy, and we illustrated
that most were able to do so quite successfully both as leaders or as
participants in teams. Most were involved with technical teams and
some with remote teams, particularly with their companies’ operations
back in the former USSR. We believe that they generally illustrated the
same success in adapting their leadership and managerial styles, but
with notable exceptions. We then covered problems they had with
communication, both verbal and nonverbal. The major issue within
their soft skill set seemed to be difficulty in developing a more trusting
attitude, which a number of interviewees attributed to the skepticism
they had developed in the former USSR. That environment was
described as fostering skepticism, which led to a lack of generalized
trust, characteristics we attributed to the imprinting they had received
in environments of weak legitimate institutions.
These conclusions are consistent with literature about life in the
former USSR that we described in Chapter 2. We discussed in this
chapter how and why trust, especially generalized trust, is a foundation
for soft skills. It is important, then, to discuss potential mechanisms for
developing and improving one’s soft skills to be successful in the US
innovation economy, beginning with a willingness to be more open and
trusting. Those mechanisms can include the organizations in which the
interviewees work, specifically the culture and training that is often
provided in various soft skills, as well as the mentoring, networking,
and other sources of support noted in Chapter 7 that could accomplish
the same objectives. Our interviewees validate these sources for
improving an individual’s range and depth of the soft skills typically

needed to advance careers. In all of these situations that have the

potential to help develop soft skills, individuals need to be open and
willing to change their attitudes and behaviors and thus receive new
imprinting in their adopted environment. In the process, they would
receive new layers of imprinting on top of their experiences in the
former USSR. This usually disruptive process is fundamental to creat-
ing a new identity more consistent with their new environment but also
may create potential conﬂicts with the identity developed during their
formative years in the vastly different institutional environment of the
former USSR. The next chapter explores the important and complex
search for identity that almost uniformly resulted from the migration
experience of our interviewees as they experienced a markedly different
institutional environment.

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8 Workplace Adaptation

Developing Soft Skills

This chapter emphasizes the need for immigrant technological profes-

any number of locations – they need to be able to operate in whatever

Soft skills that are effective in the US innovation economy were

inclination toward entrepreneurship. Additionally, there was little

including customer insights and developer creativity and ﬂexibility to

algorithms and optimization techniques, that’s sort of my edge. That’s

if somebody really thinks it’s worth doing, they’ll come round a

Managerial and Leadership Styles

TranscribeMe specializes in voice recognition software in multiple

company that had a very open culture, but we were acquired by a

would do something differently.’ It may be my personality, but I’m not

somewhat in their approaches to achieving goals. For instance, one

“I know I need development, and my biggest negative thing is per-

They always think that they’re missing something, or they’re prob-

offered by a number of interviewees, beginning with Anya Kogan,

Other interviewees expressed a preference for the directness found in

are helpful in viewing how organizations might help employees make

how feedback might be looked at differently by people in the United

balance. It’s also speciﬁc to the amount of the communication needed by

that, at least in my family. There is no politeness. They just barrage

of social bonding, and often served as a safety valve, as a way to ridicule

Eugene Trosman, Applications Engineer at Analog Devices who came

closed, protective, skeptical, and even suspicious of people outside their

United States. And it is clear, even if unspoken in his statement, that

time in advance, and it cannot be so straightforward or direct.’ So

Other interviewees noted the importance of trust in business, includ-

views of openness to trust as well as the differences of being affected by

needed to advance careers. In all of these situations that have the

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