The Transplanted Executive: Why You Need to Understand How Workers in Other Countries See the World Differently

With the passage of NAFTA and GATT, the steady integration of the European Community, and the emergence of promising new markets in Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim, businesses around the world are globalizing their operations with unprecedented speed. But as executives working in foreign countries have discovered, organizational cultures can differ dramatically from country to country, and management practices effective back home can fail miserably abroad. The Transplanted Executive provides a comprehensive resource for managers of any nationality striving to understand the diversity of workplace values and traditions–and how they can be used to maximize employee efficiency, morale, and the bottom line.

Offering sensible solutions to everyday problems, this informative volume shows how employees with different cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds respond to specific managerial techniques. The authors demonstrate, for example, why effective incentive systems in Japan might decrease productivity in United States, and why successful efforts to create team-based cooperation in Russia could alienate rather than motivate workers in England. Each chapter focuses on a different management problem–effective communication, motivation of workers, turning groups into teams, leadership skills, and quality management production–and following each chapter are quick reference charts that neatly summarize the text. The authors also include a table which provides cultural profiles of nearly 50 countries from major business centers around the world.

Now more than ever, multinational managers need to be in touch with the range of cultural issues that can affect their overseas operations. With The Transplanted Executive in hand, managers the world over will have a user-friendly guide to understanding and mastering the subject.

Review

As an executive who has worked in the Maquiladora industry for twenty-five years, I consider this one of the essential books in my library. It is one of the few international management books that goes beyond identifying cultural differences to recommending actual strategies to implement.