I have just finished the Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It’s taken me longer to read than it should, but that’s not her fault. She argues, building on the work of, her predecessors, including Geerte Hofstede, that there are eight dimensions of business communication, these are communicating, evaluating (feedback), leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling and persuading. She argues that cultures share positions on these dimensions as people’s comfort and natural style is based on their education systems and often deep seated cultural and historical factors. She argues that differences are relative i.e. you might be mediumly robust in offering direct feedback, but if you come across someone more so, you will find them rude, and need to recognise that if delivering such feed back to some one from a more robust culture, they may fail to understand. She uses charts to illustrate cultural differences across the dimensions and I reproduce one. I also offer an Anglo-Dutch phrase translator. I finish by wondering how useful this is for 121s. The blog article says much more, ...
On Cyber-security
I posted a note on cyber security on my linkedin blog. I post some pointers on the standards and controls needed to defend against a cyberattack and implement “adequate technical and organisational” protection. It looks and links at the NIST cyber-security framework and lists some of the necesary controls to implement a reasonable defence and prove “adequate technical and organisational” controls. If you do what I suggest badly, you might get away with it, if you do it well, you might stop and or recover from attacks. …