<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Best Bet
Review: Gannon and his associates have written a delightful, must-read book for people who work across cultures. The cultural descriptions are easy to remember and provide much greater depth than most treatments of culture. The book provides many new insights, even for people who know these cultures well, and is very good at explaining why other cultures behave as they do. Gannon's book is so well-written and interesting that my MBA students complain that they have difficulty wrestling the book away from other family members who pick it up and get hooked. If someone asked me to recommend just one book to read on culture, Understanding Global Cultures would get my vote.
Rating:
Summary: Best Bet
Review: Gannon and his associates have written a delightful, must-read book for people who work across cultures. The cultural descriptions are easy to remember and provide much greater depth than most treatments of culture. The book provides many new insights, even for people who know these cultures well, and is very good at explaining why other cultures behave as they do. Gannon's book is so well-written and interesting that my MBA students complain that they have difficulty wrestling the book away from other family members who pick it up and get hooked. If someone asked me to recommend just one book to read on culture, Understanding Global Cultures would get my vote.
Rating:
Summary: Invaluable Academic Resource
Review: I have now used Gannon's book at both the MBA and senior undergraduate level in courses on Cross-Cultural Management. It is the best approach I have found for synthesizing material from the sociological, anthropological and business disciplines in the education of the manager/student with regard to organizational design and its adaptation to the local characteristics of the market, the legislation, the fiscal regime, the socio-political system and the cultural system encountered in the international environment. Coupled with Gannon's other book of readings, research translations and commentary on cultural metaphors and his book of applications and exercises for working across cultures, the instructor has the most thorough framework and set of tools for dealing with the difficult issues encountered in understanding other cultures that I have seen to date. International students in my graduate courses have unanimously acknowledged that Gannon's metaphors for their cultures are perceptively and creatively right on the mark.
Rating: 
Summary: MBA level reading or superficial nonsense???
Review: Questions:1. Why does anyone want to know, at the MBA level, cultural information about 23 countries? 2. What MBA, is going to be managing 23 or more countries at the same time? 3. What good is a 10-15 page overview of a country with millions of people? Do you think you can adequately describe the United States in such a short space? (for a foreign MBA for example - reversing the situation) 4. Why are MBA's reading this instead of peer reviewed journals? 5. As with the Hofstede debacle, where does the author demonstrate language skills to get down to the true motivations and causes of cultural behaviors, particularly those that play a role in the global game of economics? If you are an MBA student or a Ph.D. candidate, you need to avoid all materials like this and get down to the real grit of cross cultural studies by learning to a competent level, another language and at least living in the target country for a year or two, asking deep, penetrating questions while you are there. Anything less, and the reader/student is being untrue not to academic pursuits but to himself/herself!
<< 1 >>
| 
