The Culture Map by Erin Meyer – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘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.’

The Culture Map is a book explaining the cultural differences between various places and why it is important to understand them in order to make multicultural teams work. The book is from the American professor based in France, Erin Meyer, and she describes eight scales required to understand cultural differences and navigate through them.

The eight she describes are communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling. And for each of these, the writer has a binary scale (example: for leading – egalitarian vs hierarchical) and the book is split into eight chapters for each of them. Most of them are supported by her own experiences in the corporate world and occasional references to books or studies.

The only takeaway I had from the book is that we need to be conscious that people behave in a certain way for cultural reasons or some other reason and not necessarily to offend the person the other person. This is a benefit of doubt that I believe people ought to be given regardless of cultural differences (even your next-door neighbour from childhood). It was interesting to note that cultural perceptions are relative – where in her book – she states how Germany is strict about timings, France relatively less and India is flexible and thus, a German feels that the French are too flexible with timings and Indians feel they are too rigid. Having been raised in India myself, I would say that for me, coming late for no reason is not good behaviour anywhere, including India.

There was an occasion where she mentioned that some of her observations are ‘dramatic oversimplifications’. I would go further and say that it was not some, but most of her book – building on stereotypes and biases. While it is true that some stereotypes could be true, acting on them as the author suggests could lead put oneself on a very slippery slope.

The book seemed low on research – no references on studies or the data or sample size she had used to build her eight scales axes for the various parameters. The book was entirely based on her personal experiences, while individual experiences provide valuable lessons, the conclusions she has drawn from these personal anecdotes are too strong. This is pertinent considering this was not a book recounting her experiences in the corporate world across geographies, but a book providing instructions on how to prepare presentations or engage in corporate negotiations to its readers.

Owing to her personal experiences, she appears to have knowledge on US and western Europe (particularly France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). However, her knowledge of Asia seemed superficial and often contradictory, where on the one side, she refers to a supposed Confucian culture sphere which courts a very large territory from Vietnam, China, Korea till Japan and on the other side, talking about how different Chinese and Japanese cultures are.

Culture is a factor that is not solely influenced by nationality, it could play a large part but there is also the question of environment, rural or urban upbringing, etc. There could be various distinct cultures within the same sovereign state – where the author herself often refers to herself as a Minnesota mother, not an American mother or even the subnational Midwestern mother.

I would have been perhaps interested if she touched upon what enforces the culture among large groups of people – is it the family traditions? The school system? She does partially try to answer this by saying her son has a ‘French culture’ because of attending a French school but does not elaborate on that. While she comfortably puts people in boxes as per their passports, she does avoid placing multicultural states in Europe in any of the axes or even discuss them – like Belgium or Switzerland. For that matter, when France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK can be seen as being so distinct, it is rather naïve to paint large multi-ethnic countries like India or China with one brush.

While it could be important to navigate the cultural differences, this book does not provide solutions. I have met the equivalent of nearly every person in her anecdotes during my period in the corporate world and they were not necessarily from the countries that the author described and sometimes, from the ‘opposite culture’ (according to this book).

This book is largely targeted at Americans and plays on American stereotypes and biases, it could provide some insights to people who have hardly had interactions with people from other parts of the world. To those who have had, this book is inaccurate and does not help. On that note, I award the book a rating of four on ten.

Rating – 4/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.’

The Psychology of Money is a collection of twenty essays from Morgan Housel – fund manager and former columnist to the Wall Street Journal. The author focuses on how staying wealthy is behavioural than the ability to earn.

To build his case, the book starts with the story of Ronald Read – who had a very different profile compared to other multi-millionaire philanthropists; that he was a janitor and gas station in a small town in Vermont, US. This was the result of frugal living and investing most of the savings in blue chip stocks resulting in compounded gains over the years. Most of us wish to be millionaires but the reasons why we wish to be millionaires in most cases is not for financial independence but rather, a desire to spend a million dollars, which is very different from being a millionaire.

Considering this paradox where to be wealthy, you should not be spending it; the author builds the case for saving money over the many essays. Most of it was behavioural advice which is simple to follow in personal life.

This book was well presented and was simple to read. As promised by the author, each of these essays were short; the 20^th essay being his own journey of accumulating wealth. Some of the observations were important, being an economics graduate myself – one of the fundamental assumptions we have is that financial decisions are rational; though from the perspective of personal economics, it is difficult to be fully rational (need to be only reasonably rational). To elaborate on that, when debt is available cheap and the market returns are higher than the cost of debt – an absolutely rational decision would mean to buy the car or house with debt; however, what is not valued is that people like being debt free and that leads to the decision of buying a major asset at once if the means are available.

The book had the following takeaways – that it is important to save, staying wealthy is largely behavioural and that it is easy to embrace some of these behaviours. A statement from the book, that is very true is:

‘The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.’

This book could be read by all – but if you are looking for ways to make quick money, this book is not for you. That is perhaps the drawback of the book – that it focuses more on savings and compounding of savings and many who live paycheque to paycheque often do not have a choice when it comes to savings.

There were also times I felt that the book could have been better researched; in the notes, the author had stated their source to be ‘Quora’; which is a question-and-answer website where anyone could write an answer; hardly a reliable source. While the author’s point greed was well made, so was the example of Rajat Gupta, former CEO of McKinsey convicted for insider trading; there seems to be a temptation to portray any person with an Indian origin as having had a ‘rags to riches’ story. While Gupta did achieve enormous riches in the US, he certainly was not from the slums of Calcutta as the book described but from a privileged Indian family.

To conclude, this is an easy to read, well researched book and could be read especially by those who still have a long way to go before retirement, as they are the ones who have the maximum potential to tap into the strategies presented by the author. On that note, I would award the book a rating of six on ten.

Rating – 6/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.’

This is a book with description on 24 different clinical cases of Dr. Oliver Sacks during his career. Sacks was a neurologist from the UK who practised in the US. It needs to be mentioned that the book was published in 1985 and thus, some of the terms used are not appropriate today (eg. retarded).

The book is split into four parts – losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. Each of these sections had clinical cases related to the main theme – the title story The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was under the section of ‘losses’, which was about a music professor who was suffering from visual agnosia. Transports included stories (for lack of a better word) where the patients felt transported to another location based on their past memories. In most of these clinical tales, the author also added a postscript – of similar cases the author learnt of in the future or how their patient dealt with their difficulty.

To put it bluntly, this book was neither interesting nor informative. In any non-fiction, it is reasonable to demand who is the intended audience – the public at large or those involved in the field of neuroscience? However, I felt this book pleases neither; to someone like myself with no background in the subject – this book was very technical with several technical terms thrown at me as though it was a given that an average reader would understand them. On the other hand, for someone actually in the field might feel that they do not learn anything new from this book. Moreover, I thought I was in for a scientific reading and I was disturbed by the author’s use of the word soul as though it was a medical concept; I can understand the intent – that the author wants to bring out the human in his patients and is thus randomly throwing this word around like any philosopher does, but that just makes this book lose direction.

I did mention initially that the book was published in 1985 – but at the same time, there is a foreword from the author published in 2001. Considering that, the least that he could have done was to revise some of the words that he had used so casually in this book (like ‘retard’).

My only takeaway from this book was there are several rare neurological conditions which could lead to difficulties / advantages (in some cases) – this was something that I already knew, and this book added no further information to that.

The author was perhaps a great doctor, but writing is certainly not one of his skills and this could have been a better book if there had been a co-author. On that note, I would award this book a rating of two.

Rating – 2/10

Have a nice day,
Andy