The Quick Culture Guide for Global Business

How to Increase Cooperation and Productivity in a Multicultural Environment.

Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

Initially, this post was for paid subscribers only. When I started Born Without Borders, I thought I’d make my stories free, and research articles paid. I gave into the system that devalues art and pushes the ceaseless consumption of information.

In a world of AI, our job as writers is to be more human than ever. We must conjure stories and essays that overwhelm us with the truth, confront us with the uncomfortable, and submerge us in the sublime. Our job is to bring back a sense of mystique to show we are one consciousness experiencing life subjectively.

This article doesn’t do any of that. AI could have written it. So why the hell am I reposting it? Because when we understand why we are different, we can discover how we’re all the same.

Plus, I want to help people increase cooperation and productivity in a multicultural environment. The capitalist claws haven’t loosened their grip.

I encourage people to comment, discuss, and learn more about the practical findings by reading Erin Meyer's The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (the following maps are based on Meyer's culture mapping tool) and Steven J Heine's Cultural Psychology textbook.

Some of you will want to know the theory before reading this guide, and some of you will be happy to get straight to the bullet points. Why?

Persuading

• People from theory-first cultures generally want to understand reasons before taking action. They prefer deductive reasoning (deriving conclusions or facts from general principles).

• People from application-first cultures focus on the facts, statements, and how to get things done. The theory is avoided in business settings unless necessary. Instead, they prefer inductive reasoning (conclusions are based on a pattern of factual observations from the real world).

• Mix the two styles when presenting to people from various cultures. Answer the theoretical questions so people from theory-first cultures trust your results and return to the practical points, so people from application-first countries don't get bored.

• Westerners think good communication is clear and explicit (due to a more heterogenous and low-context culture), whereas, in many Asian and African countries, good communication is implicit and filled with subtext (due to a more homogenous and high-context culture). This also applies to Latin countries and some southern Western European countries.

More on persuasion and motivation