Who Am I? Analyze and Understand Your Own Culture First

It is one thing to resolve a conflict with a fellow marketing employee who works in the same location and for the same division of a firm as you do and who has an educational and ethnic background similar to your own. It is quite a different case if the other person is an engineer (or an accountant) who was born and lives in another country, works

Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

This sort of “contrasting rationality,” whereby differences in cultural values lead to divergent decision-making processes, can come into play in just about any cross-cultural interaction, which makes it incredibly important to cultivate a sixth sense: the sense of “why.”