I came across a book couple of weeks ago through a colleague. It was The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I was eager to learn more about the communication challenges of international people with pretty different backgrounds working together because I am working at such an office in the Netherlands. I read the book quickly and got so fascinated that I even asked my team lead to add it as a pre-requisite for the future employees. Next thing I saw was that she was ordering the book online for the company library. According to Meyer’s experience at teaching at INSEAD business school, there are eight scales that measure the behavior of cultures in relation to each other. These show how people from different cultures approach the issue at hand. Here are the eight scales: 1. Communicating 2. Evaluating 3. Persuading 4. Leading 5. Deciding 6. Trusting 7. Disagreeing 8. Scheduling While reading it and now that I finished it, I can truly say that it opened my eyes about the underlying social psychological and historical reasons why my colleagues and I say or act in a certain way separate from each other. At the end, I couldn’t stop myself from roughly mapping the Turkish culture with friends in comparison to the given German, French, Japanese and Chinese maps. It was fun!
I would recommend The Culture Map for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of communication across cultures, not only in business sphere but also in private.