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Define the values conflicts and seek to correct the conflicts, not the values. A Review of: Building Cross-

Cultural Competence (Part One)

Define the values conflicts and seek to correct the conflicts, not the values. A Review of: Building Cross-

Cultural Competence (Part One)

Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How To Create Wealth from Conflicting Values (Charles Hampden-

Turner and Fons Trompenaars) Yale University Press (2000)

As determinants of intercultural change in MNCs management theorists should not and realistically

cannot be divorced from my perspective on their impact upon my increased reading habits, a

quantifiable change in my intrinsic priorities as referencing salary increases versus increased

opportunities for educational learning and a desire to attempt self-taught diffusive learning in topics ofpersonal observation and discussion. If every consumer could so delve into the roots of global

consumerism trends. So time and again, I attempt to possess my own thoughts on these issues (if I have

any that are my own) simply through the readings of the thoughts of others. In relation to culture,

specifically the effects of expatriation upon individual perspectives on collective culture, I must return

often to ruminate upon suppositions attributed to Clyde Kluckhohn regarding cultural values.

“Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety.” 

Carefully considered, anthropology also allows theorists to borrow its ideals and sell them to corporate

clients, eager to diverge from participant-observer perspectives and involve themselves in cultural

realignments at the level of MNC management hiring practices, educational evaluations, and data

compilations which implicate the working practices and successful alignments of nearly half the working

world population as their subjects of persistent study. These theorists have all been coaxed and gone

irreperably "native". But what is consumed here is not peyote. Wholey business-sponsored research

implicates new ideas, based on specific research outcomes.

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"Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how

can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get

along peaceably together?"

In intercultural management strategies the question becomes how can all of these impacts be measured

and evaluated, how can these dimensions be realigned to maximize profit and growth for MNCs? Under

such desired outcomes, an understanding of anthropology, or even a brief interlude with its topics is

irrelevant.

"People typically feel their own cultural beliefs and practices are normal and natural, and those of

others to be strange, or even inferior- abnormal."

This implicates that anyone attempting to make critical observations upon the logical usefulness of the

models of acclaimed cross-cultural experts, specifically outsiders not sponsored or supported by elite

organisations, which critically self-examine aspects of culture in their own workforces to implicate

reorganisation of localized cultural values to further support global MNC successes, will obviously be

considered of inferior analytical logic because the extent of personal understanding of the outcomes is

irrelevant. The desired outcomes of cross-cultural business studies are necessarily, and singularly

measured by corporate profits and internal or external customer satifaction measures due to new

alignments.

I have not dawdled over these pages or orientations however. I have been picking over some of these

managerial precepts of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner since July 2004 courtesy of "Riding the

Waves of Culture" and "International Management Behaviour" (Lane , DiStefano Maznevski: Fifth

Edition). As per the Blackwell Site these authors are heavyweights in the topics: "Henry W. Lane is the

Darla and Frederick Brodsky Trustee Professor in International Business and Director of the Institute for

Global Innovation Management at Northeastern University. He has written numerous books, articles

and case studies and has taught in France, Germany, Finland and Mexico. Joseph J. DiStefano is a

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Professor at the International Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, and Professor

Emeritus at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. He recently spent three

years setting up UWO's first off-shore operations in Hong Kong. Martha L. Maznevski is Professor of

International Management and Organizational Behavior at the International Institute for Management

Development, Lausanne."

That these writers provide more than mere mouthfuls of relevant material for debate should be more

than obvious. They are the decorated champions of the application of business-based cross-cultural

business management studies for decades. Their outcomes and findings have implicated the successes

of foundations-level cross-cultural management research, however flawed, for example, as the IBM-

based categorization patterns of Geert Hofstede, easily applied in theory, but easily found to be merely

a first step towards standard-setting in an obviously statistics-starved area of study with great heaps of

wishful extrapolations of scant statistical data. Trompennars and Hampden-Turner and their purposes

can be reviewed at: http://www.7d-culture.nl/index1.html

First of all, this book is useful as a reference text, and deals with a topic of increasing interest to

international business, namely the strategic methods by which experts tend to classify and categorize

social or soft elements of cultural values on management behaviour which may impact positively on

managerial decisions which can quickly effect regional profits and losses. It is a topic area with profitable

elements perhaps not immediately tangibly monetary in value,perhaps purpose-built for those ready

and capable to attach themselves to the challenges of effectively analyzing and observing changing

corporate managerial perspectives on how to do business internationally. One may easily espouse these

methods from case study approaches, which rival cookie cutters in their ability to replicate supposed

cross-cultural challenges and supposed solutions. Readers may consider these theories not only in their

impacts upon their own cultural milieus, but in the ever-expanding international realms where key

competitive advantages may often be in unexplored cultural values realignments.

Such a task might be a monumental request when one observes the average CEO or Managerial Cadre of

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any MNC. Far from being the most innovative thinkers out there, "Type A" CEOs and their snakes and

ladders competitive cadres are often the least prepared to evaluate or analyze their individual or

collective approaches to cross-cultural dimensions of their global businesses. Their focus is obviously all

too often necessarily snakeskins and ladder rungs.

Hence increasing demand for cross-cultural business theorists, applications, and studies. For example,

there are plenty of horrific, true to life business pieces out there on the topic of international managerial

chaos and horrendous, shareholder-ire-type losses perpetuated by misplaced but stubbornly perceived

directorial self-interests. Even once existent mislabeled jars of infant formula were once ignorantly

stacked on foreign shelves, interpreted by local nationals (the hoped for consumers) as ground-upbabies meats thanks to misplaced research directions on the illiteracy issues of local markets being

solved theoretically at the board-room decision level(supposedly) by pictures of smiling happy white

babies on labels of little anonymous brown-contents baby foods bottles.

The extent to which such managerial blindness has reached its zenith in modern times may be

exemplified by the proliferation of the case-studies methods for teaching the basics of international

business measures and cross-cultural management issues. It is in effect, the cheapest, most effective

method by which MNCs may attempt to turn horrendous failures in managerial intelligence into

opportuntities for promotional aggrandisements, courtesy of intercultural theorists obviously ready,

willing, and able, to crow up upon and "cross-culturally fix" what may have been simply a brokenmarketing idea, or perhaps a human perception, rooted simply from the timeless and human

ethnocentric perspective which echos of Kluckhohn. One must admit that learning should often be much

more than the elaborate relabeling of poorly selling bottles of product.

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Namely, individuals, regardless of their power or position in a corporate entity may continously, and

continually appear to make bad decisions based on a perspective of cultural ethnocentrism. That

business elites now make greater and greater results-oriented demands of perspectives on cultural

values, while at the same time seeking to remove themselves and elevate their own domains further

and further, seemingly over and above such values is the real paradox of cross-cultural management.That able theorists and researchers sift and delve for a fee, to implicate decisions made by mostly men

and a few women who obviously do not have the skills or experience personally to cross-culturally vet or

clear their own corporate strategies to sell products or services globally implies a requirement of

specialized knowledge. Research-based leadership strategies that "King of the Mountain" does not

teach. However it is quite simply not knowledge requirements which are missing from current business

practices, regardless of the current popular edicts of "Knowledge-Based Economies or Management"

being seemingly the global business world's newest mantra. It is simply (and perhaps more cheaply)

about effective and flexiblized knowledge perspectives. Effectively, perspective is quite a learned

attribute. Impossible to measure independently. But its impact on profit and loss, perhaps only global

business can evaluate such successes or failures in whatever accounting principles it seeks to display.While at the same time...

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Kluckhohn grappled with elements of cultural relativism early in the century and Mirror for Man still

reads well into the following millennium. I am a little surprised that it is out of print however.

Considering the debts to which modern(living) intercultural business enthusiasts obviously owe their

global profits to this particular dead man, it would serve their interests to lay clear foundations back to

origins of business-sponsored adaptations and the divergences necessary of their new orientations on

similar perspectives. Putting "Mirror for Man" on boardroom tables again would make clear the aspects

of continued innovative theories, fresh new ideas, which only originate, seemingly, outside of

boardrooms, the kinds of demands innovation requires of cross-cultural theorists, namely, that

theoretical constructions in contemporary times merely appear to teeter upon historical sequentialities

and recent business-realm references. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/007035071X/104-

7761365-6414369?v=glance&n=283155

The relativistic perspective on cultures which appears to support over-inflated individualistic

perspectives on "anything goes" in developed economies, seemingly concurrent with corporate ideals of

defining and segmenting markets upon which to capitalize greater sales of products and services at the

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cost of and without clearly supporting pro-social or communitarian mechanisms, those social

cooperations of responsible business management, pillars of community, or even supporting values of

spiritual community easily required for eons by evolving business-oriented societies and through which

over the long-term individual relativist values have owed their existence (including those by which

corporations increasingly seek to define their social responsibilites) is carefully noted by Trompennars

and Hampden-Turner. But sadly it really appears they are preaching to quite a tiny choir of seeming

crickets out here.

Individualism in developed economies lends itself to over-arching relativisms of cultural valuations,

especially in comparativisms, which appears to fragment and isolate communities, especially those

existing outside of corporate governance, even one of the world's finest statisticians supposed that good

theories were more worthy of trust, and that one should never trust statistics (I will not name the man

here, but he also appears quite dead theoretically by contemporary standards). But can statistics alone

be blamed for what appears the perfection of greed-based mechanisms of business sustainability? Must

every global business leader economically sign away its cultural community for a uniquely business-

oriented facsimile? Where goes the herd's profits? Where goes the collective middle-class cushion? Will

cross-cultural theorists explore such a phemonena?

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