Increasing reliance on working globally while communicating in the virtual space breeds complacency to cultural differences that can affect business outcomes. Erin Meyer's new book explains how to avoid such pitfalls. "TODAY, WE MIGHT be managing a team in China, or selling our products in Brazil, or we might have suppliers in India," says Erin Meyer. For the INSEAD professor, who is an expert in multiculturalism in the business space, this creates a set of challenges that might have seemed less common two decades ago, but are becoming part of the standard model for the engineering manager. We still need to achieve our objectives, she says, but the problem is that as we deal with more colleagues from different cultural backgrounds, the essential building blocks of communication - such as building trust, decision making and the dissemination of feedback - "work differently from one country to another. Most people who are working internationally have little in the way of tools to enable them to understand these differences and subsequently manage effectively across them."
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