Culture Clash: Managing the Global High-Performance Team (Global Leader Series)
"Globalization is both good and bad news," writes Zweifel, CEO of the Swiss Consulting Group, which has 20 years of experience in cross-cultural management and human-centered strategy. It's good because it "presents us with new opportunities, and bad because it challenges our assumptions about what it means to be human today." Addressing these challenges, Zweifel fills this book-the first in the press's Global Leader Series-with assessments of the global landscape and its recent changes. Leaders would do well to heed Zweifel's advice; he reminds them of the high cost of mistakes when cultures clash (they "can run into billions of dollars, as the cases of Coca-Cola, DaimlerChrysler" and others illustrate). Although Zweifel isn't precise in explaining how to deal with specific countries (he drops anecdotes about promise-keeping Swedes and laid-back Latinos here and there), he does lay out general-and vital-rules that players in the global business game should be aware of, such as the ever-important "never take English for granted."Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.