I finished another book handling one of my favorite subjects, culture: Managing Cultural Differences: Strategies for Competitive Advantage by Lisa Hoecklin. The book is part of a series by the EIU – Economist Intelligence Unit and being published in 1995 it is not exactly brand new. One would think research on this area would’ve progressed by leaps and bounds since, but surprisingly no – most of what is in this book is still very relevant today. It’s interesting to note that the book is not about managing culture as such, but managing or coping with the cultural differences – an important distinction.

The book basically reviews the accepted theories and “best practises” in the field, albeit at a rather high level. Being less than 160 pages long, it nevertheless manages to introduce a lot of the classic results by people like Hofstede and Adler in a concise manner. What I found very nice is the use of a multiple case studies, mainly positive but also some negative examples. Also, the book attempts (and, to some extent, succeeds) to take a somewhat hands-on approach to the cultural issues and gives the often-lacking practical advise on how to tackle various issues. Of course, given the small size, there is limited amount of room for this.

One interesting chapter is about advertising across cultures. Speaking of USA, it’s aptly stated that “No other culture is as keen to make rules for everyone to live by.” Further, quoting in turn Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, it is said:

The American ideal is of the Universal Product, reducible to parts (analysis) and infinitely replicable.
…
No wonder, then, that the United States excelled early at mass manufacture and mass marketing. And should we be surprised that as markets became more customized, more fragmented, more oriented to unique requests, America’s difficulties have mounted?

Indeed, this sounds right when one thinks of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. But what occurred to me is that the drive for a universal product apparently doesn’t reach everywhere – just look at what kind of chaos ensued in the mobile communications business with no set standards. Or then it could be the result of two interacting qualities gone wrong – extreme competition and drive for universality. Anyhow, the above quote reminds me of another point that the book makes – that markets are not becoming “globalized” in general. Only the very top-end and the very low-end markets can be thought of becoming more global, but the masses are not. Perhaps even the opposite is true; cultural differences may become more entrenched with advancing globalization.

Too many topics are discussed in the book to provide an overview here; what I did like is the soft, “we may not know best”-attitude. Indeed, some essential points are readily acknowledged and noted:

  • Every culture tends to form stereotypes of other cultures, usually based on exaggerated forms of behaviour.
  • However objective or uniform we try to make organizations, they will not have the same meaning for individuals in different cultures.
  • It is possible to see that your own solutions may not be the only, the best or the most appropriate for the task at hand.
  • Most models of the organization and many of the fundamental principles of management studies [..] were developed in the USA [..] and involve very particular assumptions about science, technology, human behaviour and research.

Talking of Trompenaars and Hofstede, someting very important is also spelled out:

It should not escape your notice that the two most prominent presenters of models of national culture in the past generations have both been Dutch and have both used bipolar dimensions as a means of communicating their models, each based upon a questionnaire research.

Despite being a decade old, I still enjoyed the book. When reading business success cases, it’s always funny to see how a company used as a role model no more than a few years ago is now doing very poorly. This book is no exception, which just goes to show that doing one or two things well – even if one of them is managing cultural aspects well – isn’t enough. But there’s plenty of evidence that cultural knowledge and appropriate behaviour – that is, managing cultural differences – is an increasingly critical success factor.

Overall, as far as business books come, I’ll give this 4 out of 5 points.