“Management speak can be hard enough to understand at the best of times: paradigm shifts? Blue sky thinking? Incentivise? Ehm what? But imagine if boardroom strategy was outlined in Swahili rather than business English. Presentations as dry as a martini can leave cosmopolitan boardrooms at a loss; country-specific humour rarely makes it past the unhappy customs officials. Today, in the ever-expanding global marketplace, cultural sensitivity is at a premium. Step in Solomon and Schell, experts in cross-cultural training, who are promising to change all this. Crucially, their self-help manual features case studies on how Colgate-Palmolive integrates cultural understanding into global marketing, how GE adapts management style to local cultures and how Intel’s global corporate culture is critical to its ongoing vision. It’s not just a catalogue of different customs, gestures and language faux pas. Problematically, however, the book rigidly focuses on western corporates, raising an interesting question. If translated for non-English speaking businesses, would it not get lost in translation too?”

Sean

RW-3.com