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I recently ran two training sessions at the London Branch office of a major Japanese investment bank. In the morning, I worked with a group of senior Japanese expatriates who have been seconded into the London Office – we were looking at the major differences in approach to business between Tokyo and London.  This session…

Intra-team communication within virtual teams who are working across the barriers of culture, language, geography and technology is bound to present certain challenges which are less problematic amongst co-located teams.  Many of these communication challenges are cultural in origin and this blog highlights one such challenge. One major cultural difference in terms of global communication…

The difference between cultural sensitivity and ethical correctness Global Business Culture works with a large number of major global corporations and as they become more and more engaged in business activities outside their home bases in North America and Western Europe, they seem to be asking increasingly difficult questions about the difference between cultural sensitivity…

Like it or not, English is the common global language adopted by most international companies.  The trouble is that language levels in English vary around the world – even within one organisation.  Native speakers often assume that ‘if somebody is working in my company, they have to have really high levels of English.’ This is…

It may be a contentious statement but many of the well-documented difficulties associated with getting international shared service centres (ISSC’s) to work effectively and efficiently are actually cultural and linguistic in origin. Maybe it isn’t that contentious a statement after all because what you are actually saying when moving to an ISSC model is that…

As more and more companies organise themselves in regional or even global structures, the need for some form of global bench-marking of performance becomes ever more pressing – but is it really possible to have one system that can accurately grade performance in the USA, China and Nigeria? The problems start to arise as soon…

International cultural differences will have an impact on absolutely every element of any global supply chain. Every single element of the complex chain you have developed will be touched by the effect of global differing mindsets. However, I’m going to take just four illustrative issues and highlight why lack of cultural knowledge and the practical…

Lots of organizations seem to face huge capability gaps when it comes to successfully implementing global strategy.  The strategy may be fine as a concept but individuals within companies very often lack a sufficiently global mindset to allow them to implement the strategy successfully – and that’s when things can go badly wrong. Many of…