Introduction

My work as a language and intercultural consultant in Scandinavia has meant that I have spent a lot of time with businesspeople over the last fifteen years . Many hours have gone into listening to and correcting accounts (delivered with varying degrees of fluency) of meetings, sales campaigns , negotiations, development budgets , and the like. At the same time I have learned an enormous amount about how large and small companies work and about the problems individual employees face in their day-to-day work.

A growing number of these problems are a result of the globalization process. Over the last six years, the volume of world trade has risen by 50 percent, which has had enormous consequences for many corporations. All the companies I have worked with in the last ten years, whether large or small, whether in the fields of engineering, IT, or pharmaceuticals , have had greatly increased international contact. Some of this has been the result of mergers, takeovers, new markets opening up, or the growth of new suppliers in distant countries . Whatever the reason, employees often had to learn to deal with new ways of working and communicating, usually without the slightest knowledge of the customs and values of the people with whom they suddenly had daily contact. The consequences of this lack of preparation for increased intercultural contact have often been negative, and occasionally catastrophic.

A Wealth of Material

The people I meet work in a large number of companies in all sorts of different capacities . They include IT specialists, sales personnel, purchasers , trade union representatives, CEOs, and just about everyone in between. Many work for global organizations, and most have some degree of contact with people from other countries. Some travel widely, others stay at home but have extensive international phone and e-mail contact, while still others receive foreign visitors on a weekly basis.

It is people like these who have provided me with the material for this book, for during our meetings they told me about what they were working on and asked questions about the strange way foreign managers, customers, or suppliers acted. From there, it was a natural progression for me to start to look for answers to these questions. Eventually I began keeping a written record of the kind of questions I was asked and the answers I came up with. At the same time, when my students were out traveling, they would e-mail or fax me with inquiries or comments, so I began to amass quite a collection. Then I started writing cross-cultural columns in Volvo s internal magazine Global , the Wilson Group s magazine Network , and Eka Chemicals Echo , and still more letters arrived. It is this material that forms the basis of this book.

The first books I consulted to help me answer these questions posed by my clients were the ground-breaking works of Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, and Charles Hampden-Turner. They were my guides when I set out to find answers to questions about how people from different cultures reacted to each other. I also consulted country-specific business guides for information as well as using my own network of business and professional contacts who had firsthand experience with the country in question.

The Internet was an invaluable resource, providing access to intercultural study groups, newsletters, and mountains of information on inter-culturalism in general and individual countries cultural peculiarities in particular. One especially valuable source of information was Meridian Resources GlobeSmart service, a Web-based tool that provides access to detailed, country-specific information on a wide range of topics.