- 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 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, that 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 at the simple things that you need to accomplish during a workday, 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 researched that fall up and down these dimensions. Although I wrote the book for business people, any business person 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 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 we see the other cultures that we're working with and why and how they see us, so we can be more effective in this global world.

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