Book take-away: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer (part 1)

Introduction:

Erin Meyer in this book tries to spotlight the differences between cultures to approach time, communication and management. The idea of this book is to help managers in international cooperate to handle effectively and in a healthy way cross culture teams collaboration. Since the book seems for me deserving more going into details. I will try make the book take-away in many parts.

1 - Communication across cultures:

An effective communication in some cultures is a result of a communicator who conenvey an explicit and clear message that the receiver can understand without making any extra effort. Example: USA.

While in other cultures the communicator is not required to explain a lot the message. They can send subtle messages and the receiver needs to read between the lines or read the air like it is called in China.

The main reason behind these two kind of communication is having two kind of societies: USA for example is a newly created one with the highest cultural diversity and a little of shared cultural or historical backgraound between individuals. Hence the need to make every communication as clear as possible from both sides. Try to find a common ground to leave less space for misunderstanding and unneeded communication conflicts.

China as an old country with a lot of history from the different dynasties and empires and so on, has a lot of shared historical and cultural background between individuals. Hence the communication is full of reading between the lines and implicit.

Being aware that they are people with these two kind of communication in your personal or work environment help to identify the differences and bridge them for a more effective collaboration.