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A review by stevex
Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business by Fons Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner
3.0
The authors have collected analysed data from 50+ nationalities along 7 "dimensions" of thought & behaviour, and their findings are presented in easily digestible form here, using a "case study" of an American HR officer trying to understand why an American-style bonus programme isn't received favourably in other parts of the world.
A lot of the insight and advice seems believable, and about what you would expect: maybe we've all become a bit more attuned to national characteristics in the nearly-20 years since the book was written, or maybe because their analysis seems to agree with common stereotypes of various nationalities.
The first dozen chapters cover all their analysis, and the last couple are a fairly superficial race through a couple of other examples - post-apartheid South Africa and gender/ethnic differences in an American HR conference. All of these are pretty interesting and well argued.
In between, there are two pretty poor chapters that summarise the first portiion of the book and then make some vague prognistication over where this may lead in terms on international understanding.
Overall, pretty good, but I have a couple of caveats. 1) most of the coverage is superficially about 50+ countries, but it only covers about a dozen in any more depth; 2) I'm slightly nervous about them drawing conclusions from their database, which they trumpet as holding 30,000 sets of responses - but which is only an average of ~600 per country, mostly taken from 30 large companies, which seems like an awfully small sample size from which to draw such sweeping conclusions.
A lot of the insight and advice seems believable, and about what you would expect: maybe we've all become a bit more attuned to national characteristics in the nearly-20 years since the book was written, or maybe because their analysis seems to agree with common stereotypes of various nationalities.
The first dozen chapters cover all their analysis, and the last couple are a fairly superficial race through a couple of other examples - post-apartheid South Africa and gender/ethnic differences in an American HR conference. All of these are pretty interesting and well argued.
In between, there are two pretty poor chapters that summarise the first portiion of the book and then make some vague prognistication over where this may lead in terms on international understanding.
Overall, pretty good, but I have a couple of caveats. 1) most of the coverage is superficially about 50+ countries, but it only covers about a dozen in any more depth; 2) I'm slightly nervous about them drawing conclusions from their database, which they trumpet as holding 30,000 sets of responses - but which is only an average of ~600 per country, mostly taken from 30 large companies, which seems like an awfully small sample size from which to draw such sweeping conclusions.