Cultural Advantage: The New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams

It is all too common - and costly - for people in international groups to misunderstand each other. The Cultural Advantage: A New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams introduces a powerful new tool for international companies to overcome the obstacles inherent in global teams. The Model of Freedom helps individuals distinguish between personal and cultural behavior and allows them to contribute to better teamwork. Mijnd Huijser's insights are relevant for a wide variety of groups, helping to achieve better results on a national level, an organizational level and even at a small unit level when dealing with cultural differences. The Cultural Advantage teaches both managers and team members how to turn tensions in their corporate cultures into sources of energy, leveraging the advantages of cultural diversity for improved results. In The Cultural Advantage, the well-traveled management consultant Mijnd Huijser provides a glimpse into 'The Model of Freedom' (MoF), the tool he has designed for intercultural understanding and managing conflict in diverse teams. Huijser's model is 'new' in the sense that it attempts to provide a tidier constellation of intercultural insights in a more elegant way (in the technical sense of 'explaining more with less'). Willy-nilly, we all stand on each other's shoulders. The author acknowledges roots in the work of Hofstede and Trompenaars who have provided the boilerplate for the lion's share of intercultural research and work. Having worked with both, he also points out both conflicts in their viewpoints and inconsistencies in some of their conclusions while respecting them as gurus in the field.-Dr. George Simons, dialogin.com Business people working on international teams face a myriad of communication and business challenges, addressed here in Cultural Advantage: A New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams. The author has over fifteen years of international experience training intercultural groups and has tested his tool for overcoming common team problems; his Cultural Advantage reads with the excitement of fiction, following a case study through the book to teach methodology in an inviting, appealing manner business libraries and readers will appreciate.-The Midwest Book Review March 2007 ContentsIntroduction1 From Hurricane to Drizzle2 Beyond Mars and Venus: On Cultural Identity3 The Model of Freedom: On the Cultural Model4 Perceptions of Reality: On Cultural Orientations5 Paterfamilias or Superman: On Leadership6 Living with Barbarians: On Communication7 Gladiators with Unequal Weapons: On Meetings8 Crossing the River Rubicon: On Change Processes9 Hunters and Farmers: On Corporate Cultures10 Ceci n'est pas un team: On a Winning Intercultural TeamAppendix 1: The Theories of Hofstede and TrompenaarsAppendix 2: The Origins of the Model of FreedomAppendix 3: The Model of Freedom in One ViewAppendix 4: Train the TrainersAppendix 5: LiteratureAbout the Author