The Culture Map

The Culture Map was the second book I read from Erin Meyer, and I enjoyed both. This book is an insightful and practical guide that helps you understand and navigate cultural differences, perfect for your work and personal life. It introduces eight scales and categorises many countries and nations on those scales where they are positioned relative to each other. The scales are the following:

• Communication: low-context vs. high-context
• Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback
• Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first
• Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical
• Deciding: consensual vs. top-down
• Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based
• Disagreeing: confrontational vs avoids confrontation
• Scheduling: linear-time vs flexible-time

The above scales with their nations would already be enough to pick up this book, but the joy of the book is not this but the perfectly matching examples. The book illustrates everything with a lot of very entertaining examples. It also tries to discover the historical roots of differences between nations, such as how the Romain empire, the Vikings, or the gold diggers from the Wild West influenced today’s world.

The most memorable story was about a Nigerian human resource executive who also had to work with Germans. His suffering that they wanted to book meetings months ahead, while in the Muslim part of Nigeria people don’t even know when the holiday is going to start until the Supreme Leader looks at the moon and says that holidays start now is priceless.

By finishing the book, I got a comprehensive guide on cultural differences, almost like a complete study. Whoever is interested in the subject, this book can be their silver bullet.

What I liked the most:

• It is one of the best books on cultural differences.
• It has a clear message with the eight scales.
• The illustrative examples are very entertaining.

What I didn’t like much:

• Nothing, it is a great book.