The Culture Map by Erin Meyer (Summary)

The book in 50 words:

Cultures operate differently across 8 key scales: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling. Understanding where our own culture lies on each scale relative to other cultures helps us contextualise and work better with people from different cultural contexts.

1. The Communicating Scale — High Context v.s. Low Context.

• Low context cultures communicate explicitly while high context cultures rely on shared meaning and symbols to interpret hidden messages (e.g. Japan).
• In a multi-cultural team, use low context processes as much as possible so that the messages are explicit, and the risk of misinterpretation is miminised.

2. The Evaluating Scale — Direct Negative Feedback v.s. Indirect Negative Feedback

• Communication is usually direct in US culture, yet they take a very indirect approach to negative feedback. For instance, the most common strategy for feedback is the sandwich method, where negative feedback is cushioned by other positive feedback. Thus this may be misinterpreted by a colleague from a direct negative feedback culture (such as many European cultures), who do not grasp the severity of the negative feedback their American colleague is trying to communicate.