When Cultures Collide

"An authoritative roadmap to navigating the world's economy." The Wall Street Journal In When Cultures Collide, Richard Lewis provides a truly global and practical guide to working and communicating across cultures, explaining how our own culture and language affect the ways in which we organise our world, think, feel and respond, before going on to suggest both general and specific ways of making our influence felt across the cultural divide. Discover penetrating insights into how different business cultures accord status, structure their organisations and view the role of the leader, alongside invaluable advice on global negotiation, sales and marketing. The book ranges from differences in etiquette and body language to new thinking in the area of international management and team-building in Europe and the USA, as well as covering challenging new geographical ground in other regions. By focusing on the cultural roots of national behaviour, both in society and business, we can foresee and calculate with a surprising degree of accuracy how others will react and respond to us. The book adds the often overlooked dimension of language - for example, how Japanese often react in a certain way because they are thinking in Japanese. When Cultures Collide gives you a greater understanding of what makes other people tick and enables managers to ensure that their policies and activities exploit cultural synergies and make the right appeal to their chosen market.

Richard Lewis is the chairman of Richard Lewis Communications, an international institute of cross-cultural and language training with offices in over 30 countries. He founded the quartely magazine Cross Culture and is heavily involved in the intercultural field, lecturing in countries from Finland to Hong Kong and working with companies as diverse as Fiat, IBM, Nokia, Andersen Consulting and Nestle. He lives near Winchester, and is one of Britain's foremost linguists, speaking 12 languages - and spent 5 years in Japan, where he was tutor to the Imperial Family.