today with globalization you might be an
American leading a team in India you
might be a Brazilian selling your
products in China you might be a French
person who's trying to win a deal in
Saudi Arabia you know you can do your
work on the phone or over Skype or you
can get on an airplane but that's the
easy part the difficult part is trying
to figure out how to adapt your style to
the population that you're working with
in order to get the results that you
need
and we've seen that people build trust
differently in different parts of the
world the decisions are made differently
in different countries and if you're not
aware of these nuances you might find
that you're not able to maximize your
potential when I started looking at how
cultural differences were impacting
business success I really wanted to
develop a system that would help
managers to be able to decode to tease
out all these complex and subtle ways
that culture was impacting their work so
I developed a system that I call the
culture map which breaks culture down
into eight different dimensions and it
looks just at the simple things that you
need to accomplish during a work day
like you need to build trust or make a
decision or give criticism to someone
and then we look at differences in how
one culture falls to another so I have
about 55 countries that we've research
that fall up and down these dimensions
although I wrote the book for business
people any businessperson who is in a
situation where they're working with
someone who was raised in or comes from
another cultural background I actually
think in today's global world this book
is for everybody I mean no matter if
your son-in-law comes from no Spain or
you are now have an aerobics teacher who
just came over from Iran we're all in
touch with people from other countries
and I think it's our responsibility as
global citizens to do as much as we can
to better understand how do we see the
other cultures that we're working with
and why and how do they see us so we can
be more effective in this global world
you