Christina Eide, Vice President Volvo Information Technology AB
Businespeople everywhere should have this book.
Product Description
Once people from diverse cultures start to work together, unexpected and puzzling behavior patterns can crop up. Suddenly things can go wrong an no one knows why! Now Gwyneth Olofsson takes on these work-related intercultural issues and offers practical advice in her new book, When in Rome or Rio or Riyadh. After sixteen years of cultural training and business consulting, Olofsson has collected the cultural questions her students and business trainees have asked her and compiled them in brief, to-the-point letters and answers. Largely drawn from her column in Volvo's magazine, Global, she shares answers to burning questions on topics best related to the 33 countries with the largest gross domestic product-those where businesspeople are most likely to be. Olofsson uses each specific cultural question as a springboard to explore cultural commonalities and differences. She also provides "Global Warnings" for topics that are particularly sensitive in certain cultures. And, she's made the book easy to navigate with a country-specific index at the front of the book.Whether searching for the answer to a specific cultural question (such as making a good impression) or understanding a specific area of the world (such as Belgium or Indonesia), the reader can locate the information quickly through this index.
From the Author
I wrote this book because I wanted to produce a book putting "ordinary" business people’s intercultural experiences center stage. It is these thousands of daily person-to-person contacts, whether in the boardroom or the shop floor, that determine how successful (or not) a multinational company is going to be. Everyone involved in intercultural contacts has found themselves in unexpected situations, and their observations and impressions, as well as their questions, deserve respect and attention.
Secondly, I wanted to write a book that in some small way examined our potentially harmful human tendency to divide people into "them" and "us." The danger when a company suddenly experiences a greatly increased amount of international contact is that groups emerge with the "us" group being fellow nationals and "them" being those from other countries. Of course, you will find this "us" and "them" dichotomy in any company with more than ten employees–it is a natural part of human behavior. But "they" become easier to identify when they are from another country, or look, dress, or sound different from "us." If divisions widen beyond a critical point and employees feel they have nothing in common, the company will start to suffer. Unfortunately, mission statements, however worthy, are not going to make a lot of difference if they ignore the underlying cultural differences of a company’s workforce.
The best way to break down these divisions, or to stop them from arising in the first place, is of course to learn about the way the foreign group usually does business. But just as important is to step back from your own national and corporate cultures and try to see them through new eyes–the eyes of someone who does not automatically share your beliefs and values. This can be an uncomfortable experience, but it is a vital one, because before you can make sense of another culture, you have to understand your own.
My third reason for writing this book was to give everyone the opportunity to learn from the uncomfortable situations in which other people have found themselves. This is, of course, a much more pleasant way of learning than by making all the mistakes yourself!
About the Author
Gwyneth Olofsson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. Having taught in England and Singapore, she now lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, with her 'Swenglish' family. She has worked as a free-lance consultant at many international companies over the last twenty years, and has been told that she speaks Swedish with a faint Geordie accent.
