Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business
Author: Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars
List Price: $34.95
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ISBN: 0786311258
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade (01 December, 1997)
Sales Rank: 14,837
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
A very informative and insightful book
Having read a number of books on intercultural management, I can only say that in my opinion, "Riding the Waves of Culture" is by far the best book on this subject. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner present the results of their research on cultural differences in a most engaging way. Their book is a quick read that is full of wonderful anecdotes about cross-cultural business dilemmas. The stories are presented in a way that demonstrates great awareness of and respect for very diverse approaches to business. The authors also offer a methodology for reconciling value differences that incorporates the best of both worlds.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Why are those foreigners so hard to deal with?
Did you ever wonder why your international counterparts or customers are so hard to deal with?If your work involves people from multiple countries and multiple cultures, this book is required reading. If your work involves understanding culture at all, it is definitely worth a quick read.
Authors Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner share their cultural insights based on broad research - 30,000 interviews and questionnaires so far - which puts this work on solid ground. They distinguish culture along a number of interesting axes, including relationships and rules, group versus individual, feelings, personal Involvement, status, time, inner directed versus outer directed, and national versus corporate culture.
The writing, while not exciting, is clear. And the statistical graphics further clarify and simplify many of the authors' points.
On a personal note, whenever the book authors ascribed a particular cultural aspect to Americans, I naturally tried to locate myself on the USA part of the graph. The surprising part was that although I was often squarely in the "right" place, this was not the case a good amount of the time.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Riding the Waves of Culture
An excellent overview of culture and cultural differences. For a more specific look at Americans, read Working with Americans (Stewart-Allen/Denslow) Similar Products
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