When in Rome Or Rio or Riyadh …

HR Magazine, Feb, 2005 by Leigh Rivenbark

When in Rome Or Rio or Riyadh ...

By Gwyneth Olofsson, Intercultural Press, 2004

List price: $29.95, 326 pages

ISBN: 1-931930-06-6

You just shoved your new contact's business card into your pocket without a glance. In his culture, your actions would be considered rude.

You're hosting managers from the country where your headquarters is located and you're secretly appalled at their casual clothes. How can you take them seriously if they don't dress seriously?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You're about to meet a foreign colleague, someone with whom you exchange e-mail regularly, but you're ashamed to admit you can't tell the person's gender from his or her name.

Such quandaries inspired When in Rome or Rio or Riyadh ..., Gwyneth Olofsson's handbook for anyone who does business internationally. Basing her topics on real questions from businesspeople, Olofsson covers not only international business etiquette but also the effects of cultures on workplace attitudes and roles.

Cultural misunderstandings can lead to graver tensions than mere social gaffes. An American manager might encounter resistance among the German workforce if she expects them to work overtime, because in Germany, overtime isn't usual. An Australian firm might grow frustrated when its Turkish suppliers balk at drawing up contracts, but in Turkey, the spoken word and relationships trump the written word.

Olofsson structures the book so you can find specific topics (gender issues, eating taboos, attitudes about deadlines, etc.) quickly. She includes:

* A section on the "'getting-to-know-you' process," including business card proprieties, initial impressions made by clothing, and guidelines on eating and drinking with international hosts or guests.

* A second section that spotlights "two areas that can cause problems from the first moment in a relationship to the last: communication and time." Olofsson covers language mistakes (like the South Korean firm that translated documents bound for Brazil into Spanish instead of Portuguese) and body language issues (a Finnish employee who used the thumbs-up sign with an Iranian technician and later discovered that the gesture is obscene to Iranians). Regarding time, Olofsson looks at cultures' different attitudes toward overtime, weekend work, religious holidays, early-morning meetings and more.

* A final section that focuses on how culture shapes our working relationships. Cultural differences regarding gender, age, ethnicity and nationality, and religion affect our international interactions. For example, what should a firm in the Netherlands do when it wants to send its sales manager, a woman, to Saudi Arabia to close a deal? Sending a woman to negotiate with men won't work, Olofsson says, because Saudi culture keeps unrelated men and women apart. (The company did send the woman--with her husband, who officially closed the deal while she advised behind the scenes.)

In what cultures would managers who seek consensus appear indecisive to outsiders? Where do personal contacts mean more than facts when it's time to make a decision? In which countries are businesses regarded as least likely to be corrupt? Olofsson provides country-by-country lists that give readers quick hits of such information.

Olofsson is owner of Communico, an international training and consulting firm based in Sweden.