The Culture Map

The Culture Map is like a reference book of cultural knowledge for global citizens and international business-doing people to revisit repeatedly. The book has a simple structure of anecdotes from Erin, stories from her life-long cultural trainer career and her generalization of cultural patterns throughout the continents.

I think the eight-scale model naming communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling are practical covers all business interactions. Each chapter goes with some stories of communication failures in specific business contexts different cultural representatives involved. Some sound hilarious, ridiculous and sometimes ignorant from a one-sided perspective. However, as an individual with firsthand experiences of stumbling upon conflicts, I highly value Erin’s daily examples of simple conflicts as it might sound. Cultural understanding is no joke and can be the key to win or loss in a business context.

Those who benefit the most from the book is probably business managers across borders leading multicultural teams. I love Erin’s graph summary after each chapter: very concise and relatively comparable, and I think global citizens in general gain so much for their international communications and travels as well.