A book that delivers an effective approach to leveraging a company’s underlying precepts.
Business consultants showcase how uncovering unwritten ground rules can transform a company’s culture in this debut fable.
Bruce Bottomline, chief operating officer of Australia-based Very Important Corporation, has missed his flight to join his wife in Hawaii in time for their anniversary. He’s stressed out about his company, founded with CEO Helen Hardcharger 20 years ago, including that it has just lost a major client, share price is slipping, and there’s a rumor that its “hotshot young consultant” will exercise his option to leave. Onboard the next flight, Bruce meets Sam Sherlock, a retired consultant who advises on how to fix things. Returning from his trip, Bruce implements Sam’s process, with the critical first step being a buy-in from Helen, who becomes increasingly aware of the quelling effect that she’s had on others. Meetings are then held to tackle the company’s unwritten ground rules (UGRs), the “undiscussed rules that actually drive behaviour in organisations...people’s perceptions of ‘the way we do things around here.’ ” “Around here” is used as a lead-in to write out current UGRs, then all get involved in “creating and prioritizing aspirational, positive UGRs—linked to the KCAs or Key Cultural Attributes or value statements—by which they would like to characterise the organization into the future.” By fable’s end, employees are reinvigorated, particularly because bad-attitude workers are given the boot, and Helen tells Bruce to leave the office and enjoy a vacation. Simpson and du Plessis, business consultants based in Australia and South Africa, respectively, put forth a clever idea in this book—to look at the “real” rules at play in a company and rework these rather than impose lofty new “values” from above, which are quite rightly often greeted with cynicism by employees. Placing this process within a fictional story efficiently highlights how UGR activity can be an engaging exercise for teams. The narrative gets a bit pedantic by also introducing a KCA concept (aren’t KCAs just good UGRs?) and describing this a bit intimidatingly as a five-step process to Envision, Assess, Teach, Involve, and Embed. But overall, this volume presents an illuminating, mobilizing concept.
A book that delivers an effective approach to leveraging a company’s underlying precepts.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4810-1765-7
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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