Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values

by Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars, David R. Lewis (Illustrations)

Cross-cultural competence is a skill that has become increasingly essential for the managers in multinational companies. For other business people, this kind of competence may spell the difference between surviving and perishing in the new global economy. This book focuses on the dilemmas of these managers and offers constructive advice on dealing with culture shock and turning it to business advantage. Opposing values can be understood as complementary and reconcilable, say Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars. A manager who concentrates on integrating rather than polarizing values will make much better business decisions. Furthermore, the authors show, wealth is actually created by reconciling values-in-conflict.

Based on fourteen years of research involving nearly 50,000 managerial respondents and on the authors’ extensive experience in international business, the book compares American cultural values to those of more than forty other nations. It explores six culture-defining dimensions and their reverse images (universalism-particularism, individualism-communitarianism, specificity-diffusion, achieved status–ascribed status, inner direction–outer direction, and sequential time–synchronous time) and discusses them as alternative ways of coping with life’s―and business’s―exigencies. With humor, cartoons, and an array of business examples, the authors demonstrate how the reconciliation of cultural differences can cause whole organizations to grow healthier, wealthier, and wiser.

388 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many cartoons! Well, and graphs. Talking about things like culture is hard, so in my opinion some graph(ic)s here and there don't hurt.

This is a structured collection of cases and stories, and by stories I mean sometimes it's a retelling of a movie's plot. The chapters follow a pattern: here's one end of the spectrum, here's the other. Here are the best and the worst things about each. And here's a story where these two were somehow creatively combined to get the best of both worlds.

Some of these creative solutions were pretty illuminating. The main idea of the book though seems to be "insisting that your culture is the best and everyone should follow won't get you far".

[Martyna Fijol · Rating 4 out of 5]

What we see so clearly, some foreigners miss. What they see so clearly, most of us miss. The book may shed light on how important cultural understanding is for the international environments.

[Glownthedarc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my style of book, but at least I finished it.

[Negowatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

After "Riding the Waves of Culture" Von Trompenaars teamed up with Hampden Turner to produce this very readable tome.
Spirit of E.T. Hall ever present!