Cultural Differences & Cultural Diversity in International Business

Mathilde is a 24-year old Master’s student at Copenhagen Business School within the field of business, language, and culture. She is currently doing an internship in Paris for a company that provides business assistance to Danish companies in France and helps Danish companies overcome the cultural barriers that exist between the two countries.

Odi (his calling name) just completed his Master degree program at Anglia Ruskin University, Uk, Cambridge, where he took a class in Intercultural Communication to help him realize his dream to make Nigeria a better country.

Natasha Aks is specializing on doing business in Russia and communicating effectively with Russians. She has been exposed to different cultures, studies, and work-wise, for the last 16 years, having lived and worked across the world, in Russia, the US, Germany, and in the UK. Natasha gained her practical business experience, having worked in media industries for over 11 years. Natasha’s work included acting as a mediator between Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, and English teams, bridging any possible gaps, identifying and resolving issues and problems, and, ultimately, making projects happen. Now she consults on doing business in Russia from the communications perspective and is a published author of a series of articles about doing business in Russia.

Henrik Jeppesen visited every country in the world just before his 28th birthday.

Stephen Frost is Head of Diversity and Inclusion for KPMG UK. He served as Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games from 2007-2012. He was educated as a Hertford College Scholar at Oxford University and a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. He also teaches inclusive leadership at Harvard Business School and an extended class at Sciences Po in Paris. He advises several organizations and governments worldwide and is the author of the book The Inclusion Imperative.

Audrey Mezas is the Dutch owner of Expat in Amsterdam. She is an Expat/Executive Personal Assistant to athletes, professors, families, international entrepreneurs and business executives. The difference between Audrey and say a relocation company is that she delivers "tailor-made personal" service for each of her clients and accompanying them almost everywhere they need to be. Audrey also trains teams in Executive Excellence and has moved 17 times and lived on four continents. Audrey is the "Expat in Amsterdam."

Jeri Weber, a US American lawyer knows about the demands of the legal profession and working with other cultures. She spent the first 18
 years of life viewing the world through her US perspective.

About This Week's Guest Insourcing and cultural differences with Bart van Loon After volunteering for the United Nations in the aftermath of the Kashmir Earthquake in 2005, Bart realized the potential of the South Asian labor market in Europe. Ever since he is building long-lasting professional relationships between companies and employees spanning the globe. His tips to become more culturally competent are: Always realize that when it comes to communication this is a shared responsibility. It is a 50% sender and a 50% receiver thing. Don't stereotype when you're dealing with individuals. When you're dealing with one person, you're not dealing with the "average" person from that culture. So be careful with this. Have patience when you're dealing with someone from another culture. Take for instance the English language (or for that matter any language that two people share to communicate): The first time a Brit speaks to someone from Pakistan, (s)he might face some difficulty in understanding. But give it some time and before you know it you won't even hear the differences in accents. Interview Links Links that are mentioned in this episode: Bart's personal website: http://bbbart.be Email: bart@zeropoint.hr Build Your Cultural Competence In the Culture Matters podcast, we interview real people with real stories. Every other week there is a guest with broad international experience and lots of cultural insights. I interview real people with real stories. To subscribe directly using iTunes or Stitcher, Click here, or here (or click any of the images below). How To Get In Touch With Culture Matters I'd love for you to get in touch. There are a couple of ways you can do this: Email me at chris.smit@culturematters.com Send me a Tweet: @chrissmit Finally Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far, and to listen to my Podcast. I hope you will be back for the next episode of the Culture Matters Podcast! Insourcing and cultural differences on Culture Matters

Effectively working with Remote Teams About This Week's Guest Hugo Messer talks about effectively working with remote teams Hugo Messer has been building and managing teams around the world for over 10 years. His passion is to enable people who are spread across cultures, geography, and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make a global collaboration work. His 6 tips to become more culturally competent are: Focus on creating one team or one partnership. Invest time in this and try to get away from an "us versus them feeling". Take time to think about how you will work remotely. Do this before you actually start executing and working. When you're developing software, use an iterative framework like Scrum. Make the process incremental. You need people with empathy on location to find ways to get across the cultural hurdles. Use daily "standup" meetings. Get together (virtually) every day for 5 to 10 minutes to re-align where everyone is. This way you can truly build a remote virtual team. Everyone in the team must be on the same page. They should all be aligned with each other. Interview Links Links that are mentioned in this episode: To get all the ebooks that Hugo wrote: http://ekipa.co/ebooks Email: hugo@ekipa.com An earlier podcast with Lisette Sutherland on how to work with virtual teams Build Your Cultural Competence In the Culture Matters podcast, we interview real people with real stories. Every other week there is a guest with broad international experience and lots of cultural insights. I interview real people with real stories. To subscribe directly using iTunes or Stitcher, Click here, or here (or click any of the images below). How To Get In Touch With Culture Matters I'd love for you to get in touch. There are a couple of ways you can do this: Via this website: Just use the “Ask Your Question” tab on the right of the screen and leave a voicemail Email me at chris.smit@culturematters.com Send me a Tweet: @chrissmit Finally Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far, and to listen to my Podcast. I hope you will be back for the next episode of the Culture Matters Podcast! Effectively working with Remote Teams on Culture Matters For more on this, click here.