Latest Thinking

Michael has been in Frankfurt for about a week and is really missing his home office in Chicago.

One of the greatest assets we have as natives of a culture is our ability to quickly “read” another person’s emotions.

Xavier Frei wanted to get down to business. A Zurich-born manager with 10 years’ experience working in Germany and Switzerland, Xavier had just landed a few days ago in Monterrey, Mexico, at a small pharmaceutical company that was recently purchased by Xavier’s company, a major European pharmaceutical firm.

The internationalization of business education is nothing new. Case studies featuring foreign companies are taken for granted in MBA programs.

You want your employees to become more effective and emotionally intelligent communicators, savvier negotiators, more compassionate and effective deliverers of bad news, better coaches, and more sophisticated cross-cultural communicators.

Multicultural teams are ubiquitous in today’s business environment, and a lot has been written about them.

Picture the following: Greg O’Leary, a 32-year-old mid-level manager, is in Shanghai for the first time to negotiate a critical deal with a distributor.

Mohammed Abdullah fixed his tie, took a deep breath, and walked into the room.

Imagine you’re at a networking event in the United States and you hear your colleague make the following statement to a potential employer: “… I’d be very interested in learning more about your company to see if there might be a fit for me.