Search Results for: Careers

The Real Warren Buffett unveils the secret of how Warren Buffett led Berkshire Hathaway to staggering success.

Zeroing in on his original management style and leadership approach, author James O’Loughlin exposes the powerful and practical lessons of Buffett, demonstrating how he became the second richest man in America.

A fusion of voices and deeply personal experiences from every corner of the globe, Unrooted Childhoods presents a cultural mosaic of today’s citizens of the world. In twenty stirring memoirs of childhoods spent packing, writings by both world-famous and first-time authors (many published here for the first time) make universal the story of growing up without the opportunity to ever feel rooted. Best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Pat Conroy, Pico Iyer and Ariel Dorfman contribute powerful and deeply personal accounts of mobile childhoods and the cultural experiences they engender. The memoirs touch on both the benefits and the difficulties of growing up in the ever changing landscape of diplomatic, military and other expatriate communities.

When top-performing employees leave a job, they’re often quitting their manager rather than their position or their company. In this book, copublished with the Society for Human Resource Management, Nancy Ahlrichs charts unexplored territory as she explains how to become a “manager of choice” in a business environment in which managing human capital is the new imperative.

Today employees care more about family, leisure time, and personal satisfaction than about money, status, or company loyalty, and they have more job choices than ever before. They are “consumers of the work experience,” says Ahlrichs, and managers must adapt to their individual needs just as they adapt to the preferences of valued customers.

Employers of Choice have set the standard for superior work environments. Now, with the help of worksheets, resource lists, and compelling case studies, Ahlrichs shows how to develop the five critical skills for becoming a manager of choice: talent scouting, relationship building, trust building, skill building, and brand building.

Taking a new assignment in your company’s foreign office? Meeting a business associate from another country? Videoconferencing with a group of global co-workers? Negotiating a project deadline with the foreign software engineer across the hall? Learn how to apply a new set of cultural competencies to successfully cross national or cultural boundaries.

Working GlobeSmart shows how global people skills add value to global business and captures the essence of what global leadership means: the ability to create a corporate culture that builds cooperation across borders and cultures, between customers and suppliers-across every organizational line.

Four forms of energy pulse through each of us at all times: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. To thrive, we must recruit all four of these energies in the service of a specific mission. To be fully engaged means to be physically energized, emotially engaged, mentally focused, and spiritually vested.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz draw on 30 years of research and experience with thousands of world-class atheletes, FBI hostage rescue teams, emergency service workers, and corporate executives who must sustain high performance in the face of pressure. In this book they offer their precise understanding of how to help individuals and organizations manage energy to drive full engagement – along with a step-by step programme to make that happen.

In 52 Activities for Exploring Values Differences, Donna Stringer and Patricia Cassiday have written and adapted sounds, ready-to-use activities for settings where the exploration of values differences is beneficial: the workplace, the classroom, corporate diversity training, international team development workshops, conflict management and others. The activities cover a broad spectrum for the varied needs of trainers and teachers: those who like hands-on, practical but low-risk activities; those who prefer experimental activities; and those who learn best if they can reflect on ideas. The authors’ “Classification of Activities” at the front of the book helps users choose activities that are appropriate for their needs according to risk level, time required, context (work, personal or general) and group (individual, team, organization, domestic diversity or multinational). The directions for the activities are easy to follow, and the worksheets and handouts can be photocopied for use.

As coaches and clients increasingly realise, the demands of business mean that it is now vital to integrate, understand and leverage cultural differences across countries and corporations. This work bridges the gap between coaching and interculturalism.

Praised by Business Week as ‘invaluable political and psychological profiles of each nationality…a wonderfully entertaining view of others as well a ourselves’ and named a Financial Times Business Book of the Year, Mind Your Manners has become a 50,000-copy bestseller and the standard guide to European business cultures for over a decade.

Now in a fully expanded and updated third edition, this practical guide contains a further fifteen country chapters including all the additional countries – from the Baltics to the Balkans – becoming a members of the European Union, the world’s biggest global market.

This major new edition comprehensively covers no fewer than thirty-three different business cultures including non-EU Norway, Switzerland, Russia and America.

In Was That Really Me?, Naomi Quenk has provided the next giant step in applying Jung’s model of development in healthy personalities. That step is to understand, accept, and learn to handle our hidden personality responsibly.

Updating the classic Beside Ourselves, Quenk has given us a way to understand this part of ourselves as well as a practical guide for turning what appears to be negative into a positive awareness that enhances our growth and effectiveness. People typically find this to be a surprisingly freeing experience.

Exploring Culture brings Geert Hofstede’s five dimensions of national culture to life. Gert Jan Hofstede and his co-authors Paul Pedersen and Geert Hofstede introduce synthetic cultures, the ten “pure” cultural types derived from the extremes of the five dimensions. The result is a playful book of practice that is firmly rooted in theory.

Part light, part serious, but always thought-provoking, this unique book approaches training through the three-part process of building awareness, knowledge, and skills. It leads the reader through the first two components with more than 75 activities, dialogues, stories, and incidents. The Synthetic Culture Laboratory and two full simulations fulfill the skill-building component.

Exploring Culture is suitable for students, trainers, coaches and educators. It can be used for individual study or as a text, and it serves as an excellent partner to Geert Hofstede’s popular Cultures and Organizations.

In recent years mediation has become an increasingly popular approach and powerful technique and has been used successfully in such areas as commercial disputes and customer complaints-handling.

Here, for the first time, is an accessible and practical book on mediation at work and in the workplace itself. Packed with real-life examples and cases, it focuses on mediation’s positive way of looking at conflict, how it injects a new dimension into people’s “conflict zone”, and outlines the qualities needed to be a mediating manager.

Mediating managers become beacons of positive energy perceived as people capable of holding things together when others are “losing it”. They are able to do this because they are enablers, not judge and jury, catalysts not fixers, encouragers not enforcers.

Mapping out the overall steps of the mediation process, what mediating managers’ core tasks are at each stage, the opportunities offered to those involved, and illustrating different key moments of effectively resolved workplace disputes, the book demonstrates how transferable mediation skills are and how they can be used in a wide range of workplace settings.

By 2030 Latinos will comprise roughly 20 percent of the population of the United States. Growing numbers of health professionals are realizing the importance of understanding Latino cultural values as they impact the clinical encounter. Such knowledge can enhance their ability to communicate with and treat Latina patients effectively and respectfully. The Latino Patient provides an in-depth exploration of Latino diversity, relevant cultural values, health status, beliefs, and practices; and effective communication strategies. The author has developed an original, practice-oriented model that leads the reader from greeting the patient to ultimately negotiating treatment. The book is hands-on and provides numerous vignettes gleaned from the author’s experience. The Latino Patient should be high-priority reading for physicians, nurses, physician’s assistants, therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers and other clinicians.

Modern-Day Vikings provides a window into what one world traveler called the most American of European countries: Sweden. Yet, surface similarities between the two nations conceal essential differences. Christina Robinowitz and Lisa Werner Carr provide insights and strategies for successful interactions with Swedes, whether business or social.

True to its title, Modern-Day Vikings traces some of Sweden’s most ingrained cultural traits back to its Viking heritage: self-sufficiency, fairness, egalitarianism and democracy. The authors also examine Sweden’s famous “cradle-to-grave” social model and explore the values underlying modern Swedish culture, such as lagom (moderation), the law of Jante (personal modesty), communication styles and business practices.

Revised and updated for the new economy, this text describes how the radical redesign of a company’s processes, organization and culture can achieve a quantum leap in performance. In the 1990s, reengineering was implemented in the back office, the factory and the warehouse.

For the new century it is being applied to the front office and the revenue producing side of the business. “Business Week” dubbed the implementation of e-commerce, “e-engineering”. The Internet demands new ways of working, and reengineering is the tool that can create them.

The new wave of reengineering is breaking down the walls that separate corporations from each other. Processes do not stop at corporate doorsteps. Product development, planning and many other processes are really inter-enterprise in nature; entailing work by both customer and supplier. The Internet facilitates the reengineering of these inter-corporate processes by allowing information to be shared across corporate boundaries.

Kohls shares a feast of Korean culture: a ricebowl of history and tradition complimented by an array of spicy tidbits that capture the reader’s attention like a mouthful of kimchi. Based on personal experience, he provides critical incidents that explore the more puzzling aspects of Korean culture. Kohls explores Korean values—traditional values, value changes over the past forty years and projected values for the early decades of the twenty-first century. He is equally insightful when it comes to discussing the cultural patterns and practices of the workplace. He takes on management style, personal issues, networking and “pull,” negotiating style, persistence, key Korean business relations and more. To a greater extent than most other Asisan countries, Korea adheres to the traditional collectivist and Confucian traits of harmony, hierarchy, ingroups/outgroups, status, and proper behavior. According to Kohls, these traits plus the more Westernized values of the younger generations and the veneer of modern urban savvy surface in surprising combinations in personal and workplace relationships—often where they are least expected.

Bill Lucas, a leading international expert on life-long learning, shows that while we have learned more about how the brain works in the last decade than we have ever known, only a fraction of this is grasped and applied by most people. Power Up Your Mind applies this practical knowledge for the first time and shows you how to learn. Drawing on research from a wide variety of subject areas, from neuroscience to psychology, from motivation theory to accelerated learning, from memory to diet, this book shows how everyone has the capacity to succeed and how most people use only a very small portion of their talents. For learning to be effective, an understanding of how the brain works is essential and unlike most of the recent thinking on the mind, Lucas connects an understanding of the brain with the reality of the workplace and translates what we know about the brain into useful insights for work. Much work-based training is a waste of time and money because the majority of people are neither emotionally ready nor practically inclined to apply their learning to the way they behave. Power Up Your Mind offers a new model of learning-READY, GO, STEADY-which will revolutionize the way you learn and perform.

Based on over thirty years of conversations and interactions with Americans and Asians, Korean American Eun Kim presents American virtues and vices from an Asian perspective, using the ancient Asian concepts of yin and yang, which coexist in everything and complete each other to maintain cosmic harmony. In this way, Kim draws us to look at the yang (light) mirror of American vices and the yin (dark) mirror or American virtues. Examples of the virtues she discusses are generosity, competitive spirit, openness, and volunteerism. Some of the vices she explores are insistence on rights, refusal to grow up, arrogance, and tolerance of violence. In her fifty entries, the author describes and illustrates an American value and provides an Asian perspective on it as well as what she believes to be the dangers and opportunities inherent to each value. She uses personal experience, anecdotes and quotes from Asians and Americans both famous and unknown, historical background, general wisdom, and proverbs to enrich her writing. Eun Kim straddles two cultures, her Asian homeland and her adopted country, the United States. This is a highly personal and readable book, with insights that may make the American reader squirm uncomfortably in one paragraph and glow with pride in the next.

For over twenty years, travelers seeking exciting and rewarding adventures abroad have looked to Bob Kohls for advice and have made Survival Kit for Overseas Living one of the most popular books ever published on crossing cultures, buying over 300,000 copies. With this new edition, sojourners about to set out to live or work overseas will soon discover why Kohls’ experience and wisdom have stood the test of time.

Kohls’ penetrating insights and practical strategies on how to avoid stereotypes, how to explore the mysteries of culture, and how values and different ways of thinking influence behavior make this an indispensable guide. To bridge the cultural divide-whether traveling alone or with a family, for business or education, whether staying a month or a lifetime-pack this guide first!

In this InterAct, Benjamin Broome examines the communication style and cultural patterns in contemporary Greece, known to its residents as Ellada. He deciphers the complexity of Greek culture, providing the reader with an accurate guide for navigating the unknown terrain of its social landscape.

Enriched with numerous examples from the author’s travels and sojourns in the country, Exploring the Greek Mosaic is highly readable, yet it presents as in-depth treatment of many key subjects, including the Greek view of history; the importance of village, family and religion; the role of conversation and conflict in interpersonal relations; and the characteristics of the work environment.

Particular attention is given to similarities and differences in perception between Greeks and Americans, and sound advice is presented to those attempting to enter the Greek social world. Managers, diplomats, students and serious travelers will find this insightful examination of Greek culture an especially useful guide to interaction with Greeks, and those teaching intercultural relations will appreciate its refreshing approach to cultural analysis.

The Chinese are fond of using four-character phrases, known as cheng yu, to improve their writing style. The Chinese characters on the cover spell out one such idiom: pao zhuan yin yu. Translated literally, this would be “throw bricks attract jade.” It can also express the idea of throwing out something of little value to induce a potential business partner to offer something more valuable.

The authors of Turning Bricks into Jade, a more idiomatic rendering of pao zhuan yin yu, like to think of each critical incident in this collection as a brick, which, when combined with similar bricks, good sense and effort, can be used to construct relationships more valuable even than jade.

A critical incident is a story about cross-cultural conflict or misunderstanding. Many of the forty-one incidents are based on actual events that involved one or more of the authors or their acquaintances. Some are a composite of several authors’ experiences. You choose one of four or five possible alternatives that explain the misunderstanding. Following each incident is a discussion of possible solutions, based on the authors’ experiences and grounded in current research.

Misunderstandings between Chinese and American interactants are complicated; there is almost never just one thing going on. One result of this complexity is that many of the incidents have more than one correct explanation. Forty-one Americans and Chinese with considerable experience in both cultures read the collection of incidents for validation. As you work through the incidents, you may feel the need for a more detailed explanation or definition of certain recurring themes. A section on key theoretical concepts in Chinese-American interactions provides such detail.

Included are individualism and collectivism, guanxi (interpersonal connections), hierarchies, gender relations in the workplace, regulations, deference to authority, work incentives and ownership. The Index of Incidents According to Themes and Concepts is also helpful.

So we think we know a lot about Germans? After all, more Germans have immigrated to the United States than any other ethnic group, and fifty million American citizens currently claim German heritage. The truth is, though, Germans are different from us-in more ways than we may know.

Greg Nees, in this new InterAct, Germany: Unraveling an Enigma, does an outstanding job of explaining those cultural differences that we most need to know in order to have effective and fulfilling interactions with the Germans. Nees explores major German cultural themes: the need for order and obedience to rules and regulations, the insistence on clarity of thought, compartmentalization, the penchant for rational thinking and the love of abstract debate, the sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders, a strong sense of duty, and German communication patterns.

As a business consultant who has lived and worked many years with Germans, Greg Nees gives special attention to the German social market economy and to cultural differences in the workplace. Perhaps most valuable, in his last chapter he looks to the future as Germany seeks to create a new identity in the twenty-first century, dealing with such issues as multiculturalism, Americanization, changing lifestyles, the European Union, and globalization.

An organization’s character shapes how decisions get made and new ideas are received. In this book, William Bridges identifies 16 organizational character types using the framework of MBTI personality types and shows how these influence an organization’s growth and development.

Improving team performance is made easy with this hands-on tool kit that focuses on what really matters: the dynamic interaction within the team of different personality types and temperaments.

Building on a foundation of field-tested insight, the author explores how personality type and temperament influence the behavior of individual team members and shows how a powerful new model can turn insight into a plan of action to enhance team effectiveness and optimize team performance.

With the publication of this long-awaited companion to Intercultural Sourcebook Volume 1, the editors have brought together a comprehensive collection of training methods and exercises used by top trainers in the cross-cultural field. They include not only descriptions of methods but also examples of activities and suggestions for creating one’s own exercises.

This second volume includes articles by thirty-four leading cross-cultural trainers and covers new or divergent training methods for cross-cultural skill development and intercultural learning. These include self-awareness inventories, videotapes, small group exercises, area studies, and an insightful collection of other methods from the programming of field studies to the use of cross-cultural dialogues, culture heroes, and visual imagery.

One chapter analyzes the role and significance of research in cross-cultural training and another explores how training methods can be adapted for different cultures and age groups. In the epilogue two of the authors share their thoughts on the future of cross-cultural training. Both trainers and educators will find the resources in this volume, as they did with the first, essential for cross-cultural learning.