Global Dexterity. Andy Molinsky

in This Book

      Let me say a few words about the stories and examples you will read about in this book. The vast majority of stories are actual events, as told to me by people I have interviewed or worked with, albeit with a few details changed to protect anonymity. A small percentage of stories do not come from one specific source, but are anecdotes that I have crafted to reflect insights from many different people I have studied or worked with throughout the years. I begin each of these composite narratives with “Imagine that … ” or “Imagine the following … ” to distinguish them from stories told to me by a specific individual.

      In all cases, the material is deeply grounded in years of serious study about global dexterity. For the book alone, I have conducted over seventy interviews with professionals about their experiences adapting cultural behavior and about the norms for appropriate behavior in specific countries and cultures. The book is also based in my own decade-long research program about global dexterity at Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and Brandeis University. Finally, the book is also influenced by the many informal conversations that I have had throughout the years with managers and executives at roundtable discussions and seminars, as well as from teaching and working with foreign-born MBA students. I am particularly indebted to these students for the hundreds of conversations we have had about cultural adaptation. These discussions have been invaluable in helping me craft these ideas around global dexterity and translate them into a series of actionable tools.

      Let me also say a brief word about how cultural differences are portrayed in this book. Throughout, you will see examples of cultural differences: that Indians tend to communicate less directly than Germans or that Israelis tend to communicate more directly than Americans, and so on. When I speak about these cultural differences, I am describing prototypical cultural differences, by which I mean the average or typical differences you will find within a population. In other words, if you took the entire population in Israel and were somehow able to assess their communication style, the average style would be more direct than the average communication style of all Americans. I don’t mean to suggest that all Israelis are more direct than all Americans or that all Indians are less direct than all Americans. That’s simply not true. For example, many Indians actually have a quite direct communication style—perhaps as a result of having lived or worked in the West or from having worked for a multinational company in India. Similarly, plenty of Israelis are less direct than some Americans. So, when I talk about cultural differences in the book, it’s in the spirit of prototypes, rather than stereotypes. These differences do exist on average—as you will hear from talking with natives of these countries or from consulting the academic literature. But they do not necessarily define how any particular individual person from a given culture will behave.

      My hope is that this book can be a useful resource to help you make better sense of the foreign experiences you have had and to help you have more successful experiences in the future. To that end, at the conclusion of each chapter, I provide a series of personalized tools that you can use to directly apply the lessons from that chapter to your own experience.

      I hope I’ve given you a good sense of what’s included in the book and have whetted your appetite for more. I’d also like to give you a quick sense of what’s not included in the book. First, although language is clearly a key issue when crossing cultures, this book is not a language book. I do not talk a great deal about language and the difficulties associated with mastering a foreign language, even though this is clearly a key part of learning to function effectively in a new cultural setting—something I experienced firsthand as a non-native student in Spain and a working professional in France. I also do not provide detailed rules for how to behave appropriately in every cultural situation you will find yourself in. Believe me, I’d love to do that!—but it’s obviously impossible. What I do provide you with, however, is a method and set of frameworks that you can apply to any situation you face.

      Finally, although you will find examples throughout the book from both men and women, I do not focus particularly on gender itself as an issue in intercultural interaction. I understand and appreciate how women in particular may face special challenges when adapting their behavior across cultures, especially in countries with very different gender roles than their own. From studying this issue for many years and from talking with women about their experiences overseas, my sense is that at a broad level, the framework that I present in this book accounts for these gender issues. For example, women might feel resentful or angry about having to adapt to a set of behaviors that a female manager would never have to accommodate to in her native cultural setting. Or women in other situations might feel tremendously inauthentic and disingenuous acting in a way that is not only atypical of their native culture, but that also violates their deeply held values and beliefs about how to interact with the opposite gender. These core reactions to the act of switching cultural behavior are not only covered in the book, but are the essence of the framework that I put forth.

      I’d like to end this preface with a quote from an American executive who truly understood the importance of cultural adaptation. In making the case for the importance of developing cultural competence, Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, said:

      The Jack Welch of the future cannot be like me. I spent my entire career in the United States. The next head of General Electric will be somebody who spent time in Bombay, in Hong Kong, in Buenos Aires. We have to send our best and brightest overseas and make sure they have the training that will allow them to be the global leaders who will make GE flourish in the future.¹

      Do you see what Welch is getting at? He is not necessarily saying that to be successful you need to have a multicultural upbringing. He’s saying that through different experiences in foreign cultural settings, you can develop the global dexterity to be successful. Jack Welch clearly believed in the importance of global dexterity, and I imagine that if you have picked up this book, you also understand its critical importance in today’s business world. So take the leap; start to learn how to operate successfully in a world where cultural differences require changes in behavior. My sincere hope is that this book can be a key building block in your own process of developing global dexterity.

      Acknowledgments

      I am very grateful to so many friends and colleagues who have helped shape and hone the ideas in this book. First, I would like to thank Richard Hackman, who inspired me to write a book in the first place, and who has always been an inspiration for the type of scholar that I aspire to become. Very early in my career, Richard taught me to study what I care about, what interests me, and what might make a difference in the lives of others. I feel so lucky to have had him as my mentor.

      Throughout the years I have also received tremendous assistance and feedback from my academic colleagues who have helped me develop and hone my ideas about cross-cultural adaptation, both in this book and in the pages of academic articles. These colleagues include: Paul Adler, Nalini Ambady, Mary Yoko Brannen, Joel Brockner, May Dabbagh, Jane Dutton, Marshall Ganz, Adam Grant, Judy Hall, Sally Maitlis, Tsedal Neeley, Joyce Osland, Mike Pratt, Ruth Wageman, and Joyce Wang; my business and psychology colleagues at Brandeis—in particular, Ben Gomes Casseres, Sandra Cha, Jane Ebert, Bruce Magid, Brad Morrison, and Detlev Suderow; members of the Boston-area Groups Group seminar at Harvard University; and participants at the yearly “May Meaning Meeting” group who provided such a supportive and collegial atmosphere for helping me develop these ideas.

      I also, of course, owe a debt of gratitude to the many managers, employees, and executives who took time out of their schedules to openly discuss their experiences of cultural adaptation with me. You made this book possible, and I am grateful for your candor and generosity. As part of the writing of this book, I spoke with more than seventy people from around the globe—working professionals from Mexico, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, India, Nigeria, Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. I found these people through my own contacts as well as through those of my generous colleagues Mark Blecher, Greg Chen, Adam Grant, Sujin Jang, Lynne Levesque, Mark Mortensen, Amy Sommer, and Xin Wang.

      Many of the people I spoke with will remain anonymous because I have used their direct stories. However, others whose experiences do not appear