From: Steven Sinofsky To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> Subject: why are israeli's hard to work with Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 13:53:09 +0000 Importance: Normal http://www.quora.comilsraeli-Culture/Why-are-Israeli-people-so-hard-to-work-withianswer/Oren-Shamir? srid=trDd&share=1 Oren Shamir, Worked with several multinational corporates Votes by Marc Budnick. Anne Handle. George Thampy. Tal Hoffman, and 712 more. I'm an Israeli. My grandmother was American and my mother grew up in Brooklyn. I've worked for (and with) a few American companies. The following story might highlight some of the cultural differences, the way I see them. Imagine you're an executive in a big American company that makes home appliances. Your market research team suggests that people may want to have straight bananas, since Americans love to slice bananas up and put them in a sandwich or a cereal bowl, and straight bananas are easier to slice. You decide to try and solve this problem using both of your R&D teams. One is located in the US and the other in Israel. You call the two team leaders and tell them what you need - a machine that bends bananas backwards to straighten them up. The American team leader says they will get right on it. The next morning he posts a job opening on Linkedin, looking for a banana expert. He hires a guy from CalTech who knows everything there is to know about the molecular structure of bananas. He also hires two more engineers and an industrial designer. Initially. After around 24-30 months of hard work, you have a sleek, shiny new machine that bends bananas backwards and produces perfect, straight as an arrow bananas 100% of the time, with any kind of banana that currently exists. It costs about 300 dollars and needs as much power as a small refrigerator. At the same time, the Israeli team leader listens to you for about 3 minutes then interrupts to say that this is a really stupid idea. He doesn't know anybody who slices bananas. Is