The Global Etiquette Guide to Africa and the Middle East: Everything You Need to Know for Business and Travel Success

by Dean Foster

Authored by one of the world's leading cross-cultural experts.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 2002

About the author

Long, long ago, in a land far, far away, I walked into a hotel banquet hall in New York and discovered that every single Indonesian flag hanging from the ceiling was actually the flag of Poland. The Indonesian delegation was arriving in twenty minutes. That story is in my new book. So are thirty-four years and more than one hundred countries worth of moments like it. Business Beyond Borders: Stories, Tales and Lessons Learned from Working in 100 Cultures Around the World is the book I was always meant to write. It won the Goody Business Book Award, took the Bronze Medal at the Axiom Business Book Awards, and was longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Awards. Readers have called it a new genre of business book writing. One finished it in a single day. Another said it reads like a spy novel. I will take both. I have spent my career as the person global companies call when the culture gap threatens to derail the deal, the relationship, or the room. I founded DFA Intercultural Global Solutions and was the founder and Worldwide Director of Berlitz Cross-Cultural. I have worked with most major Fortune 500 companies, the United Nations, and premier universities including Harvard Business School and Columbia. I have been on CNN, the BBC, and National Geographic. In 2012 I was inducted into the Worldwide ERC Hall of Leaders. None of that prepared me for the upside-down flags. You can find more of my stories on my podcast Oops, Your Culture's Showing, my Substack blog (deanfosterglobal.substack.com), and at deanfosterglobal.com.

Reviews

[Prisacariu Diana]

As I am working for the Middle East and Africa I was considering that a ,,modus operandi" like this would be helpful. And it really is, ,,sharpening your cultural antennae" for the customs and protocols of those regions. It did enjoy reading it as I completely ,,fell in love" from the first year of master with Intercultural communication in business subject :)) Nice, nice!!

[Nicole Chardenet]

This is not a bad book to have if you plan or do a lot of traveling to Africa and the Middle East. It goes through each country and tells you what to expect. However it's extremely redundant - book is much thicker than it needs to be as the author merely copied & pasted a lot of material into each country section. He also treats male and female travelers as the same and you simply can't assume that in either the Middle East or Africa; apart from warning that women shouldn't travel alone, he gives no advice on how to handle things like business meetings if you're in a country that's extremely conservative about women and may not be used to seeing them much in power; or whether a woman might find herself in danger in certain situations which is certainly the case in some of these places. I figure the author was trying to be inoffensive but it means a book that's less useful than it could have been. Otherwise, he's got some very good advice on various customs, traditions, the history of each country, etc.