The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life.

Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out.

In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

ISBN-13: 9781610392501

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Publication Date: 05-27-2014

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, one of the world's leading international business schools. Her work focuses on how the world's most successful global leaders navigate the complexities of cultural differences in a multicultural environment. Living and working in Africa, Europe, and the United States prompted Meyer's study of the communication patterns and business systems of different parts of the world. Her framework allows international executives to pinpoint their leadership preferences, and compare their methods to the management styles of other cultures. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Singapore Business Times, and Forbes.com. In 2013 Erin was selected by the Thinkers50 Radar list as one of the world's up-and-coming business thinkers. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thinkers50 RADAR Award. With Reed Hastings, she is the co-author of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Follow her on Twitter: @ErinMeyerINSEAD

Table of Contents

Introduction: Navigating Cultural Differences and the Wisdom of Mrs. Chen 1

1 Listening to the Air: Communicating Across Cultures 29

2 The Many Faces of Polite: Evaluating Performance and Providing Negative Feedback 61

3 Why Versus How: The Art of Persuasion in a Multicultural World 89

4 How Much Respect Do You Want?: Leadership, Hierarchy, and Power 115

5 Big D or Little d: Who Decides, and How? 143

6 The Head or the Heart: Two Types of Trust and How They Grow 163

7 The Needle, Not the Knife: Disagreeing Productively 195

8 How Late Is Late?: Scheduling and Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Time 219

Epilogue: Putting the Culture Map to Work 243

Acknowledgments 255

Notes 259

Index 263

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