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
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