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Erin Meyer: The Culture Map (Hardcover, 2014, PublicAffairs) 1 star

"As today's business world becomes ever-more global and virtual, executives and managers are expected to …

Review of 'The culture map' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

Possibly the worst book I've ever read.

It's a huge collection of biases for all the possible countries and cultures. The whole book is structured with examples like: if you are working with Chinese people, you should take this approach, instead if your team is composed by German people you should do this etc....

While I can't possibily verify all the claimings for every culture mentioned (since there are no references about all these claiming. No studies mentioned. Nothing. All based on author own experience), I can at least say that everything I've read about Italians is based on bias. To give you an example, I'm Italian and this doesn't mean (like the author says) that if the appointment is at 10:00 I will arrive at 10:15 or 10:20.
I will possibly arrive at 9:55 and wait 5 minutes and I would be quite annoyed if the other person arrived late.

There is also a very bold statement about diversity: the author says that if what we are looking for is diversity of opinions and ideas, then a multi cultural team is what we need but if the most important thing is the productivity then we should have a mono cultural team.

Excuse me, what?! You are basically saying that a multi cultural team won't be productive?! This simply disgusted me.