Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition: Software of the Mind: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival (BUSINESS SKILLS AND DEVELOPMENT)

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This book did not provide the answer, its very theoretical and like all textbooks very difficult to keep interested in reading on. A crucial takeaway is also that we should be wary of blindly importing management, educational and other practices from different cultural contexts. Institutions cannot be created from scratch: they are living arrangements, rooted in values and history, which have to grow. It is interesting to have a closer look into the "power distance" or the "avoidance uncertainty" concepts and understand how they reflect on people's mindsets and how they translate into organization's culture. This is a non-judgmental recognition of how different cultures provide for the psychological needs of human nature.

If you have never encountered a different culture from your own, then there are some quite concrete examples that you should be able to relate to. MASCULINITY/FEMININITY: A society is masculine when emotional gender roles are clearly distinct; men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success, whereas women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life. There's a lot of detail and statistical analysis of all of this survey data to explain the differences. There is much we can learn from each other, but practices work better if we modify them to match our cultural values better, and this book can be a starting point on the journey of discovering our shared core values. Interestingly enough, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent chapter in his Nov 2008 book Outliers (also highly recommended) based on this, i.Incidentally, I believe that there are answers to all these questions and they’re found in a little book written by Iain McGilchrist. Cultures manifest themselves at different levels of depth, depicted in the form of concentric circles.

The authors mention 5 simple facts about evolution, namely that it’s unavoidable, backward-looking, path-dependent, multidimensional (not purely genetic! I was truly amazed by the accuracy of these predictions, at least for the few countries I have lived and worked in.Although it is not always perceived as such, any study of human behavior, any discipline of the social sciences and humanities, is involved in looking at an aspect of behavioral or symbolic evolution. What Hofstedes actually did, they quantified value systems, gave them names, dimensions and showed how values for different cultures differ ( or cultures for different cultures differ, which way you like :)). Diplomats lack both the skills and the organizational culture to act as successful entrepreneurs for development consulting activities. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

The discussion is highly informative and touches on Mintzberg's theories as well typical models of organization in different cultures. This book is a potent resource for anyone seeking to gain insights on how best to manage and/or operate in a multicultural / multinational workspace. We have no choice but to pursue the direction of expansion of the moral circle to all people in the world’’(477), a social darwinist end and arbitrary eschatology, moralizing in a menacing manner where the ‘‘moral circle’’ could mean helping the afflicted and exploited persons affected, while likely ‘overlooked’ in favour for the opposing ‘side’, that of imperial re-entrenchment. The book gives you an insight of the cultural differences of nations and explains why behaviors/values/heroes/symbols have a certain meaning and how they start to evolve from inside the family. Human nature is that inherited suite of genetic mechanisms which shape all of humanity, regardless of particular context.For those scientists that previously supported Hofstede's work are unlikely to publicly change their view, which creates a problem for later readers. Hofstede also uses these dimensions of culture to 'classify' organizations to different types according to where they fall on the Power Distance vs. A must read for managers, counselors, coaches and those who either work or want to facilitate international business and deals.

Uncertainty-avoiding cultures shun ambiguous situations and tend to look for structure in their organisations, institutions, and relationships which make events clearly interpretable and predictable. This is not bad -- they simply need to be above board and stop pretending to take the role of the neutral outsider (at least to better influence those of us who are American conservatives; we are big into distinguishing between fact and evaluation of fact; these evaluations are always done through a person's own personal gridwork).The scope of these disciplines varies from the individual to the small group to the society to international affairs. The bottom line is that cultural values were set deep in the past, but that they are continually evolving in response to events and experiences. Even when local wars do not destroy the products of peaceful development, forces in society make development difficult to attain. I recommend this book to everyone, specially for those who deal often with people from other countries and cultures. The end result is that nations can be evaulauted on the basis of criteria such as "uncertainty avoidance," "individualism" and "power distance from superiors.