In a nutshell, this book has something of the appeal of a bowl of potato chips plonked right before your eyes. They are neither wholesome nor substantial; yet you can’t help but reach for another. The best part is you won’t find a lot of useless theory or lofty messages in Cross-Cultural Business Behavior. Author Richard R Gesteland, a globalisation consultant and speaker on negotiating and managing across cultures, states at the outset that Cross-Cultural Business Behavior: A Guide for Global Management is intended to be a handy reference for people on the front lines of world trade, those who face every day the frustrating difference in global business customs and practices. This book will help them get a lay of the land. Now, if you’re visiting a place for the first time, a good guidebook is a fantastic planning tool, provided it offers authentic information and is up to date.
The foreword to the fifth edition, the one I am currently holding, says the book has been updated. Feedback from participants in hundreds of global management seminars and workshops revealed the need to revise much of the book, says the author. Hence a new edition. No complaints on that front.
Now the issue of authenticity. I will jump to the chapter on “Indian Business Behaviour”. Gesteland makes two stunning revelations. “India is a complex multicultural country of 500,000 villages with 22 major languages and 22,000 dialects and numerous religions.” Ouch!
If the 2001 census data are anything to go by, 72.2 per cent of the country’s population lives in about 638,000 villages and the remaining lives in 5,000-odd towns and 380 urban agglomerations.
So where is the rest of my country?
By the way, the 2001 census also recorded 29 major languages — that is, languages having more than 1 million native speakers.
Now the next one: “In Hindi, kal means both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ and kal-kal can mean ‘the day before yesterday’ as well as ‘the day after tomorrow’.” Well…
When you come across statements like that, the rest of the book looks distinctly suspicious. Mind you, this not just about getting a few lakhs here and there. It is also about not living your own advice: about understanding a country before trying to negotiate the choppy waters of doing business there.
Now, I don’t have much experience in doing business across continents, so I can’t vouch for the veracity of Gesteland’s myriad claims about other countries, his analysis of their culture and his observations about how best to negotiate there. Having said that, the book helps to bring out one thing competently: the issue of understanding and respecting a country’s culture. It reiterates how appropriate business conduct helps foster trust and is, therefore, the key to business cooperation and success. To that end, most of the author’s advice is designed to help avoid uncomfortable situations and tactfully handle unpredictable people at various levels in business. It would have helped if there were some real-life case studies and anecdotes.
Of course, any person dealing with corporate strategy is well advised to keep the lessons from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory in mind, especially when doing business across borders, but here I could point out at least one book on the subject I have reviewed that, in my opinion, has done the job better. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner’s Riding the Waves of Culture. This book illustrates the point with examples of successful and failed cross-cultural business transactions of multinational firms such as Motorola, AT&T and Volvo, among others. This book was first published more than a decade ago but I still remember it for the country-by-country graphs and other comparisons that it used to illustrate how different cultures respond to various management approaches.
And if you can’t get your hands on that book, there’s always the Dun & Bradstreet’s Guide to Doing Business Around the World. And, of course, there’s the Internet.
That said, if you were to go by the pure look and feel of Cross-Cultural Business Behavior, the format is pretty simple. Part One is the general introduction. Two and Three are more application-oriented manner — Part Two lays down some basic theoretical constructs and discusses how they can be applied to understanding interactive human behaviour; Part Three lays down the behavioural cues and contextual cues country by country.
The author does have several pieces of advice, and he tends to emphasise them by repeating them quite often. His most notable counsel is to say thank you, to smile, to keep some margin for negotiation. For people with any degree of business experience or international exposure, this is common sense.
In the end, the book is neither well-planned nor particularly deep, but it might be a useful addition to the briefcase of neophytes for its basic utility and good nature.
CROSS-CULTURAL BUSINESS BEHAVIOR
Richard R Gesteland
Copenhagen Business School Press
351 pages; $25
