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Summary: A Frenchman, an Indian, and a Brazilian Walk into a Bar ¿
Review: Alvy: "You're, like, New York Jewish Left-Wing Liberal Intellectual Central Park West Brandeis University ... the Socialist Summer Camps and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right? And you really, you know, strike-oriented kind of - uh, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself."Allison: "No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype." [Annie Hall, 1977] ------------------------------ Everyone talks about globalization, but few do anything about it. As the world contracts, many once-arrogant executives find themselves humbled by their ignorance of the manners, modes, and mores of other nations and cultures. At the same time, accelerated communication has built self-confidence among those leaders who might once have aped the methods of Western business superpowers. Americans, British, French, and a host of the traditionally smug are discovering that they can't just talk at their counterparts to the east and south. They need to understand them, speak their language (figuratively and literally), and learn how to make the borderless economy work. So argues Robert Rosen and his colleagues in Global Literacies. Using a 1,000-person survey, combined with interviews with 75 CEOs in 28 countries, the authors have developed a model of twenty behaviors and roles for the twenty-first century leader. These competencies - "Chaos Navigator", "authentic flexibility", "Respectful Modernizer", etc. - are here elucidated by example, using extended interview excerpts and admiring descriptions of leaders chosen as competency archetypes. It's a reasonable approach, particularly when complemented by capsule summaries of their leaders' countries and their cultures. If your knowledge of world history, geopolitics, and comparative religions is limited, and if you don't have a World Fact Book near at hand, then you'll find convenient answers in these reports. But every reporter wants to write editorials, and it's in the oration and polemics that Global Literacies stumbles. As a business topic, literacy is not lite and racy, so the authors try to spice up their book with fortune-cookie truisms.... "Leaders are people, too." Global Literacies is clearly the work of a motivational speaker, full of sound bites and fury. It also tends towards proof by sweeping assertion. Discussing China's $30 billion Ping An Insurance, for example, the authors state that "the secret of [its] success is its ability to keep one foot in traditional Chinese culture and one foot in the world, constantly learning and modernizing Chinese culture." This may be true, but how could it be proved? How does one measure "learning and modernizing" as a competitive advantage? Must great leaders always have strong cultural roots? How you respond to Global Literacies will depend in part on where you stand in the classic argument of nature vs. nurture. By overemphasizing "national traits" that predetermine behavior, Rosen and his colleagues have fallen into the classic trap of cultural stereotyping. They argue for example that "we need to combine the egalitarian nature of the Dutch, the change orientation of Americans, the achievement orientation of the Overseas Chinese, and the humility of the Scandinavians." All Scandinavians? Aren't there any supercilious Swedes out there?... Ultimately Global Literacies informs more than it persuades. Some segments are merely unfortunate; Douglas Ivester, held up as the epitome of communication and "urgent listening", has since been fired as CEO of Coca-Cola for a series of gaffes and mishandled controversies. And it is true that the interweaving of interviews and facts can be instructive, even enlightening. But eventually you begin to wonder whether these cultural depictions are portraits or cartoons. If you're going to travel around the world in 400 pages, be warned that travel may narrow the mind.
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Summary: A Welcomed Global Leadership Primer
Review: I happened upon this book and I'm so glad I did! It is a well-written, easy-reference global tool--- much more than just another business book for the shelf. The first-hand stories, study data and format makes it a keeper. Although the study was relatively small, it was globally broad and big enough, with its weighty contributors, to give any leader a good dose of global nourishment to help you forge your own new path. What I like about it most is the straightforward presentation that is free of gobbledegook, so common to many business books. Many leaders across geographies, industries and sectors are trying to find their bearings in the marketplaces, workplaces and communities of the world at this turbulant time of opportunity. This book not only provides stimulating information, but it helps one remember that the solutions we seek are not so complicated. No big surprises. Instead, these times just ask little more of us. Working across cultures and geographies ultimately means working with a new consciousness about others---learning from and thinking more about each other --- and realizing that it is by putting our differences to work that we will open the way for new levels of innovation and a world that benefits all. The book serves as a reminder of how much you already know as a leader that can now be applied to a new set of global problems---as well as, how much you need to learn. I plan to share it with my customers and fellow leaders of change. Thank you for this work!
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Summary: Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.
Review: This book fails on its ambitious agenda of surveying and mapping out the new landscape the authors refer to as "global literacies", and delivers little at the end. Boasting a "landmark study of CEOs from 28 countries" on its cover, the book contains less than 10 survey questions from the study, all of which are freebies which offer no additional insight to the quest at hand. For example, one survey question asks, "do your cultural roots influence your thinking?" The question is so poorly designed from a research point of view, the answer doesn't really matter. The rest of whatever study of CEOs the authors compiled was reduced to regurgitation of current buzz words, "understanding and valuing yourself", "engaging and challenging others", "focusing and mobilizing your organization", "valuing and leveraging cultural differences". The remaining pages are filled with trivia-type facts on who's who around the world, such as a generic list of major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the end, you should expect to get out of this book what R.R. got out of his visiting 30 countries over a two-year period, traveling 250,000 miles, as he explained to the readers in the intro. That's nearly 350 miles of traveling a day, everyday of the year, and less than a month for every country. You tell me how much cultural immersion and interaction a person can experience out of it.
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