“A Review of The Culture Map” by Crimson Stone
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Barriers of Global Business by Erin Meyer is a book about decoding how people think, lead, and get things done across cultures. Erin is a professor at INSEAD (Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires), one of the world’s leading business schools. Her work focuses on how the world’s most successful global leaders navigate the complexities of cultural differences in a multicultural world. In the book, Meyer provides a guide to decode how different cultures impact international business. She does this by combining an analytical framework with practical advice. But The Culture Map is more than that, it also shows us a way to navigate different cultures beyond the business world and how to apply this framework to other areas of our lives.
Using different facets of communication, Meyer expertly expresses how to read other cultures and how to figure out what you need to do in order to cross the cultural barrier. She talks about leadership, performance, hierarchy, trust, and disagreement among other key communication. For example, she asks “What does a good boss look like? Try to answer the question quickly without giving it much thought” (115). She then highlights a specific instance where the cultural differences of “what a good boss looks like” impacted the success of a Danish businessman when he worked in Russia.
In Denmark, the boss is just one of the guys and so they tend to not have an open-door policy because he already works in an open space among the staff. However, when this Dane goes to Russia to supervise a project, there is a cultural shift. He explains that “Week two into the job, our IT director e-mailed me to outline in detail a problem we were having with the email process and describing various solutions. He ended his email with ‘Mr. President, kindly explain how you would like me to handle this.’”
The Dane’s different leadership style left his staff annoyed because he appeared weak and ineffective. They said he was incompetent and that he didn’t know how to manage the team. However, by the end of the chapter in which Meyer explains this scenario, the Dane has this to say: “I’ve finally learned to lead well in this different environment, although it’s taken a major shift in the way I look at my role as the boss. I can be friendly, as friendly as I would be in Denmark, but I have to maintain a greater distance with my staff and fulfill a type of paternalistic role that was new to me.”
One of the topics that really resonated with me was how different cultures perceive scheduling and time. She explains that “The first time I really understood the impact of the scheduling dimension came when I was working in South America…That afternoon, before the event, Danielle, the conference organizer, had shown me a stack of cards she would be holding in her lap during my forty-minute talk” (221). She goes on to explain that the presentation went on for sixty-five minutes, but it could have gone on longer as the participants were quite enjoying the presentation. The boss of the participants said to her “But I don’t get it. In this situation, we are the customer. We are paying you to be here with us. If you see that we have more questions and would like to continue the discussion, isn’t it simply good customer service to extend the presentation in order to answer our questions and meet our needs?” Meyer has many more examples in that chapter on scheduling, but using her own experiences makes the book a richer experience for the reader.
The book has more examples of these kinds of scenarios and how each facet of communication is applied to the stories. Meyer also comes up with certain terms to describe the types of communication as well as includes charts to explain her reasoning on a sliding scale. One of the reasons this book is wonderful is because it explains how to navigate the complexities of different cultures as they work in a multicultural world. Meyer guides us as we learn about the framework she uses and introduces us to terms that explain what she means. In essence, she shows us the way to navigate different cultures in our lives as she tells us the different ways cultures see leadership, performance, trust, and disagreement.