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Mindaugas Mozūras's Reviews > The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
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by
Think carefully about your larger objectives before you mix cultures up.
I found "The Culture Map" to be a very practical guide to decoding cultural differences. I was most positively surprised by the practicality of this book. Some other books on this topic include a lot of fluff. Not the case here.
Each chapter covers a specific aspect: communication, evaluation, persuasion, leading, decision-making, trust, disagreement, and scheduling. There is plenty of examples to illustrate cultural differences and ways to deal with them.
There's a lot of focus on countries, but the author also recognizes that country of origin is not end-all-be-all. We should not assume that we can determine anything specific about how a person behaves from what we know about their cultural background.
I've long been a proponent of diverse teams. But I've used to think of diversity more simply. This book opened my eyes to the scales of diversity, and the number of ways cultures can be different. I now understand the challenges of building diverse teams better. Some of those challenges are not easy to solve - and it's worth considering how not to end up in a situation where they need to be solved.
Let me share a real example to illustrate my last point. I remember a situation where a foreign company opened an office in Lithuania (where I live). The country from which this company was from has a very different business culture (which was confirmed through The Culture Map) than we do in Lithuania. They've tried to build cross-office teams and do a lot of collaboration between locations. They've ended up closing the office less than a year after opening it. They might've been better served if they chose not to try to mix the two very different cultures.
Overall, I found The Cultural Map to be an excellent book. I would recommend it strongly for anyone who works in culturally diverse contexts. And these days that's a lot of us.
I found "The Culture Map" to be a very practical guide to decoding cultural differences. I was most positively surprised by the practicality of this book. Some other books on this topic include a lot of fluff. Not the case here.
Each chapter covers a specific aspect: communication, evaluation, persuasion, leading, decision-making, trust, disagreement, and scheduling. There is plenty of examples to illustrate cultural differences and ways to deal with them.
There's a lot of focus on countries, but the author also recognizes that country of origin is not end-all-be-all. We should not assume that we can determine anything specific about how a person behaves from what we know about their cultural background.
I've long been a proponent of diverse teams. But I've used to think of diversity more simply. This book opened my eyes to the scales of diversity, and the number of ways cultures can be different. I now understand the challenges of building diverse teams better. Some of those challenges are not easy to solve - and it's worth considering how not to end up in a situation where they need to be solved.
Let me share a real example to illustrate my last point. I remember a situation where a foreign company opened an office in Lithuania (where I live). The country from which this company was from has a very different business culture (which was confirmed through The Culture Map) than we do in Lithuania. They've tried to build cross-office teams and do a lot of collaboration between locations. They've ended up closing the office less than a year after opening it. They might've been better served if they chose not to try to mix the two very different cultures.
Overall, I found The Cultural Map to be an excellent book. I would recommend it strongly for anyone who works in culturally diverse contexts. And these days that's a lot of us.
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