Social Impact Tech: Nicholas McMahon of United Language Group On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
Our solutions for healthcare, education, legal and commercial markets help people to get better outcomes. Our technology allows people to address each other directly within language by rooting you to a culturally specific resource. Instead of your first point of interaction being something like “Press two for Spanish” or “I don’t even know what you’re saying because I don’t speak your language and I’m super frustrated,” your primary point of contact would be someone who understands you linguistically and as a person based on an appropriate cultural understanding.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicholas McMahon.
Nicholas McMahon is the CEO of United Language Group (ULG), the world’s leading Language Solutions provider. Nic has more than 20 years of experience working for many of the top companies in the language industry and has traveled extensively in almost every continent. During his career, he has worked on language solutions for diverse projects ranging from healthcare and education disparity to commercial market expansions for the world’s №1 control valve manufacturer, and effectively supported the entire Fortune 500 to achieve their global growth and expansion. In all of Nic’s experiences, the impact and opportunity of culture and language have been the constant foundational theme.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
My father was in the military and I was raised on a military base, so every 2–3 years we would move around, either out of the country or within a country. It was very exciting because it was always a new area and a new group of people to get to know. For the most part I think I loved it, but soon as I became a teenager it got a little tricky.
It did give me a lot of resilience and appreciation of different cultures. All of my early life — actually, up until I was about 26 — every 2–3 years I moved and went somewhere else. When I think about my upbringing, it was always constant change. It was constant new environments, constant new groups of people.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I worked for a company in England as a project manager, and I got the opportunity to go out to the Bay Area or Silicon Valley to meet with one of my customers. It was crazy! People were becoming millionaires overnight, they were throwing crazy parties, and everything was free. I was in my early twenties, and thought, “This is an awesome place.”
The company I worked for was in a town called Maidenhead about an hour outside of London. I went back and said that we need an office out in Silicon Valley, and I know just the guy to do it. I was lucky because they were willing to let me do it. About nine months later, I was out in Silicon Valley finding an office, finding a sofa and a printer, and setting up an office.
It was really a very lucky event for me. It really changed a lot of my attitude in terms of careers and what is possible within a work environment. It was a remarkable experience, and it always sticks out how lucky I was that I got to go visit that client. It was a very exciting time!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful toward who helped get you where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Interestingly enough, during almost my entire career I’ve had female bosses. I was in the army and my mom used to basically be the boss in our family because she was the one who was always there when my dad was out and about. A lot of my bosses in my professional career have also been women. Certainly, the woman who helped me come to America, someone called Kathleen Bostick, stands out as somebody who raised the profile in terms of what was possible.
You’re in England, and you’re in this little town in England, and you think you understand how the world works. When I came to America, I discovered that it operates on a very different level. It’s like the Olympic level of business compared to Europe, in my opinion. Europe does business in a different way. A lot of people are very successful, but in America the level of competition and the level of opportunity is just unbelievable.
Kathleen Bostick was somebody who helped me navigate that and opened my eyes to what was really possible and how the American business environment worked, so she’s always a standout for me.
Can you please give us your favorite “life lesson quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite quote is from Winston Churchill: “Success consists of going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
When I think about how we do things, what’s important from a business perspective and our team as we try to achieve goals together, you have to be willing to keep going. Resilience is a very valuable skill, so I always think you have to keep going, and sooner or later it does drive you to success. You’ve got to be willing to fail a lot before you get there and not let it drag you down.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The three are listening, resiliency, and learning.
Leadership is earned, not given by circumstance or title. You may have the title of leadership but you won’t be a leader until you earn it..
I have seen some people who, as they rise, they listen less. But I think as I’ve risen and I see my team rise with me that you must choose to listen more. You must listen to the group of people that you’re leading, be willing to get their input and understanding, and make sure you can really see the business or the environment from the perspective of the people you’re trying to work with. Listening is a critically valuable skill. In escalations that I am involved in at a senior manager level, it’s rarely the difficulty of the challenge that causes escalation. It’s almost always a lack of listening or understanding each other that has created the escalation
Resiliency, I spoke to earlier. That concept that I fail all the time. I’m very resilient to failure at this point. You try this or that and it doesn’t always work, but if you can spot it and react, and you’re open to changing, then you can progress as a team.
That leads to the last one, which is learning. I learn from everybody.. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the workplace for a week or if you’ve been in the workplace for 15 years. If you’re an expert or if you’re brand new to it, there’s always stuff you can learn from each and every conversation. When I go to a solution or to an opportunity or a new market we want to develop, I try to listen and really understand it from the perspective of the people in the market.
As a team, we try to be resilient, and accept that we will fail repeatedly before we can really succeed within that marketplace, and not let that failure define us but keep driving forward. I try to learn from every single person on the team. I’m never above listening to anyone. You can learn a surprising amount from virtually everybody you meet, provided you’re open to it.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Where we have a clear focus is disparity. Through the application of language, there is an inherent risk of creating inaccessibility of culture. In any situation involving education, the law, or healthcare, you are trying to make a connection to someone. And that person sits within a culture that defines meaning and importance, risk, and reward.
You connect to them through language, but in your culture the settings of risk and reward, opportunity, and challenge can be entirely different. The U.S. is a great evolving example of this. Think of gun control. To one person it’s a cultural tag for independence, and for another it’s a tag for violence and pain. If I say, “Grab your guns,” is it a call for independence or violence? The answer is tied to the cultural rooting of the audience.
As a less polarized example, if you’re Hispanic within the U.S., you don’t have access to a lot of opportunities that other groups would have access to. Part of it is language access, but the deeper part is cultural access. For instance if I say, “Take the pill,” I can translate the words in many accurate ways. But it may not lead to the Hispanic patient taking the pill, because culturally there is distrust of a government that has at times been vocal about removing Hispanic groups.
Effectively using both language and culture together can build a bridge through these types of disparities. Addressing language and culture in harmony can help Hispanic populations get the care they need and help unite seemingly disparate groups to a common goal. It’s about trying to help people get the full value and potential of them as people, regardless of the envelope of culture that surrounds them and prohibits their opportunities.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Our technology is focused on providing and supporting cultural and language interactions, so it provides the ability for people to connect directly within culture.
Imagine if I’m a healthcare provider, a lot of the technology is set up for me to chat about your healthcare issue. Typically, five minutes in, we realize that we can’t really understand each other. I’m really frustrated, you’re really frustrated, and we’re already starting to move to conflict and reducing the potential outcomes. In healthcare, this leads to billions of dollars in additional costs as frustrated patients leave hospitals still sick and without clear guidance on what medicine to take. They are proven to get sicker and return with greater complications to the ER.
Our solutions for healthcare, education, legal and commercial markets help people to get better outcomes. Our technology allows people to address each other directly within language by rooting you to a culturally specific resource. Instead of your first point of interaction being something like “Press two for Spanish” or “I don’t even know what you’re saying because I don’t speak your language and I’m super frustrated,” your primary point of contact would be someone who understands you linguistically and as a person based on an appropriate cultural understanding.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
Culture was originally where it started. When you move around a lot, you start to realize people are trying to say similar things, but their culture prohibits them. It’s a very sensitive subject, but within each defined culture there are terms and phrases that could be good or bad triggers.
As I went around, I tried to blend in as an individual into a new school. I was always the new kid every two years, every one year, sometimes. I always turned up and the same things happened in every school. There’s always a process where a group of people try to balance and integrate the overall culture the new person has entered into. There’s always the connection to the people who really want to make a change within a group and to the people who really don’t. Then there are a lot of people who just want to get by and keep moving. I kept seeing the same thing again and again and again. I think that’s what attracted me to this industry of language and culture.
As I have grown up, I’ve seen the same dynamic that I saw in the schools repeat again and again. In digging deeper into the challenges that this creates, I found and read a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It speaks about how this cultural challenge can escalate into a life-and-death situation, and it really consolidated for me why this mix of language and culture is so critical to address. It made me realize how important of an issue it was in a critical setting, and that made me passionate about finding solutions.
In conflicts, it typically goes both ways. It’s not as simple as one culture (let’s say healthcare professionals in the healthcare field) is right and one is wrong (let’s say the patients). Both people come with a stereotypical view of the other culture. Then, they start to use language to address the interaction between them, but the language embeds a lot of cultural missteps. The doctor believes the patient trusts them. The patient thinks the doctor works for the government and can’t be trusted.
Each language interaction entwines these misconceptions. Each side wants the same outcome, but each side lacks the understanding to achieve it. It’s so sad to see this in a legal, educational, or healthcare setting — there is so much to achieve and so much at stake.
How do you think this might change the world?
I think culture is the key to everything. We are trapped in our bodies and our minds, and then outside of our minds we try to touch the real world. The first layer is culture. We interact with it from a cultural bias. I’m English, and I see someone like Winston Churchill and I think, “I like that guy.” Somebody could come from outside my culture, perhaps from India, and think, “I don’t like that guy. That was not a good period of time for us. That was not a good net support or outcome for our culture.”
If we could start to break down culture as a way to communicate, language is the secondary input to that communication. If I don’t quite understand you as an individual, and then I am going to use language to connect to a culture and person I don’t understand, we can really create a gap between us. A misunderstanding becomes a radical mis-position between the two of us. It results in wars. When I really look at it, it goes from something that is just a simple misunderstanding to an extenuated continuous misunderstanding as the challenges evolve eventually turning into an embittered conflict.
If we could really dig deeper into cultures and understand how cultures interact, you can unwind almost every single problem based on a series of misunderstandings.. Ninety-nine percent of people want the same things. It’s just our ability to dialogue about those things and their trade-offs that creates challenges. Ninety-nine percent of people aren’t trying to destroy an alternative culture. It’s how we actually dialogue it and turn it into the discussion that it needs to be to resolve trade-offs and bargaining, which is complicated and difficult. But this gets lost in the culture and language that stop us from working through the trade-offs and lead to frustrations that create conflict.
During my time in the heyday of Silicon Valley, I could see what happened when you really did bring people from all over the world to work on common problems and move forward. You need different points of view, you need different perspectives, you need different voices in a conversation. Opportunity combined them together and encouraged them to overcome cultural differences to find the common good. When this happens, it’s clear that we have the potential to be a phenomenal species, but it’s our language and cultural differences that prohibit this true potential.
Keeping Black Mirror and the law of unintended consequences in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
If you can hijack a culture, and you can work out an effective way to manipulate a culture, you can create a lot of trouble. You see it in political positions not just in the U.S., but on a global basis when the culture is hijacked for a political end. Now, I’m going to use my ability to relate to your culture as a personal weapon for personal gain. Effectively, I am weaponizing culture.
Whenever a tiny group of people decide to manipulate a culture for their own personal gain, I think it always ends badly. When you have tools that connect to culture better, you always have to check the intent and purpose of those tools. Whoever uses them, you have to trust them or you have to put in a regulatory framework to make sure that the net outcome is positive. On a global basis, Facebook has provided an illustration of the ability to create a technology that allows a small group of people to hijack culture for their own specific personal use and gain.
Culture is a powerful tool, but like Spiderman says, “With great power comes great responsibility!”
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example for each.)
1.) Point of engagement: First, I think you have to consider the point of engagement. Having a technology that actually engages individual people. If we pick out the previous examples of technology that we provide, the first point of contact was in English. So I’m going to try to engage you in a healthcare outcome or educational outcome, and I’m going to immediately engage you in English, and you don’t speak English.
You have to think about the first point of engagement and make sure you’re engaging in a way that will create a positive flow to your end result. You have to consider the historic relationship from within the culture to your technology.
2.) Historic relationship with product or service from cultural perspective: eBay lost the Japanese market because they didn’t think about the way that market worked with technology and, in this specific case, auction sites. If you’re developing a solution for something, what is the historic way that people engage with that type of solution and that type of project? Make sure you understand the cultural history before you try to move forward with your technology.
For us, it was the concept of translating “take the pill.” We would focus on translation on “take the pill” within our services and solutions. It wasn’t “take the pill” from a medical basis that was the problem. Culturally, when they heard a government body saying “take the pill,” they didn’t trust that advice. They understood that maybe the government might try to poison them or do something that was negative to their outcome. You have to understand the cultural relationship from within the culture, so your product will be successful within the market and make the difference you hope it will.
3.) Engagement of target audience and how they like to engage with the technology or solution: You also have to consider the engagement habits within your technology. When you’re trying to create a new community for your product or for your solution, you have to work out how they actually want to engage with your technology. Some people are very happy to download apps, but other people want to go to fixed websites. Culturally, it changes from market to market and area to area.
When you’re still deciding which market you want to go into, you have to imagine how they’re going to culturally interact with your product and service. As we design products and services in some markets, we do direct outreach because we know that’s how they prefer to interact, and in other ways we can outreach without verbal contact. We can just outreach through an app, which they can choose to download because they’re much more comfortable and much more savvy with that, within their environment.
You have to work out how they’re going to culturally engage with you. How does that culture like to engage with that product or service?
4.) Language support: When you think about the type of language support you should offer, it is important to think of technology, culture, and language all as critical components. When we think of success, we work with companies in a wide range of markets like Adobe, Microsoft, Cisco, Emerson, United Healthcare, and Aetna. In all of those markets, the language component is always a secondary view to the primary product development. When it comes to releasing or scaling that on a global basis, that’s why they come to us — because they need technology solutions to allow them to scale and meet language needs.
As you’re considering what makes success and how you can engage in a global market, you should think about language upfront. It saves you a tremendous amount of effort on the back end if you set up your architecture and ability to support multiple languages from the start.
5.) Common tools and approaches within the target culture: Most technologies and solutions exist within an ecosystem. It’s unlikely you’re the single technology point in any given market. It’s going to be a fabric of technologies you need to weave together, which you should always consider.
In America, for example, we have a very developed fabric of technologies. People have seventy-odd apps on their phone, on average. We have a very deep infrastructure. But if you look on a global basis — or even within the U.S. — that can present a very different picture, and you should work out the complementary technologies that are linking together to create the fabric of technology your solution is going to go into.
A good example for us was credit cards and the inclusion of whether you pay through credit cards or not. Many cultures view credit and credit cards very differently to the way the U.S sees it. We’re raised from a very young age to accept credit and see it as an awesome opportunity to invest in the future. I think every week I get the opportunity to try to take some of the equity out of my house and reinvest it in a holiday in Florida. In global markets, however, a lot of people like to have a cash transaction.
That is why you need to consider the common technology infrastructure and the common technology application within your target market. So if you develop a new technology or solution, you’re not going to get these weird barriers to entry because all of a sudden people don’t operate that way or use that type of technology in that market.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Young people represent the most passionate generation that ever lived. Young people want to change stuff. They were raised with the idea, “My generation messed it up. Now we need to fix it.” I think they are an incredibly passionate advocacy generation. I have two daughters, 14 and 16. I speak to them and we talk about these issues over dinner and they inspire me. As a family we know that the desire for change is not enough in its own right. You need the resiliency to see it to its final conclusion because it’s the final conclusion that will ultimately make a difference.
I think where my generation has failed the youth is in not being strong enough advocates, it’s ultimately our failure to produce actual action that’s working for everybody. We could have advocated harder for sure — for the environment, for equality. But it was really our lack of results that led the world to become a more challenging place for the youth.
The younger generation embraces the idea that the tiniest of actions is greater than the greatest of intentions. It’s that concept that you must see it through and get it done. I think it would be more valuable to tell old people to stop moaning about young people and let them help. They’re passionate; they’re committed. As a now old person (I’m not sure how that happened), we should stop moaning and start helping the youth. I think we would get more out of that.
Is there a person in the world, or in the U.S., with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.
It would probably be Elon Musk. I do think he is an inspiring person. The reason I would want to go to breakfast with Elon Musk is because I think one of the biggest disparities in the world is capital access disparity.
Your ability to live your dream and get the capital required to make an investment in your dream is much harder than you imagine. You’ll spend your career trying to get a good job done. Then, when you finally get a good job done and become a CEO, you realize capital is really what drives almost every business, regardless of the good job that’s done within that business.
The issue at a society level is access to capital, and the ability to create companies and create opportunity. Only people who already have a lot of capital can easily get more money. If I’m a college student who wants to change the world, it’s a nightmare for me.
I have a really good idea about capital equality and how we could address capital equality and I think it would radically improve disparity on a global basis. Elon Musk has tons of money and I think does want to make a difference with it. I think he has the right mindset as far as new ideas and innovation and would understand the value of addressing capital accessibility and distribution.
So, I would love to have a breakfast with him and try to sell him on capital equality and the value it could represent to our society. Even if that didn’t work out, I would get some pretty fancy pancakes, I bet, so it wouldn’t be a total loss.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/united-language-group/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Nicholas McMahon of United Language Group On How Their Technology Will Make An… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.