If you do business in multiple cultures, it would really behoove you to understand the differences between your home culture and the country you’re working in.
In fact, the greatest factor affecting the success or failure of a global business is understanding the cultural differences that lie hidden, like minefields, in day-to-day work.
If you can recognize and manage these cultural differences, chances are you’ll be able to accelerate your success; ignore them and they will undermine your global performance.
That’s what the upcoming book “Business Beyond Borders: Stories, Tales and Lessons Learned from Working in 100 Cultures Around the World” by Dean Foster means to help you achieve.
“I find few things more exciting than wrapping my head around how people can behave so differently while remaining fundamentally the same,” Foster writes in the introduction. “That they embody every aspect of human possibility simply by their presence, and that their world — the culture which they have created in order to give meaning and order to their lives and those they love — presents me with a promise of new ways of seeing, tasting (yes, it often begins with that!), thinking and feeling. Ways I never could have imagined on my own.”
The book showcases 25 real-life stories revealing the “how-to” rules for working successfully across cultures.
“Business Beyond Borders” explains culture through the real-life stories of the author, bringing the cultural challenges inherent in global work to life. From negotiating with Bedouins in the Libyan Sahara, to managing a team of Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro, from outrunning an earthquake during a keynote presentation in Mexico City, to losing a government “handler” in Beijing, each of the stories illustrates a critical cultural issue that global managers need to understand today.
“The world has changed dramatically since I first began my work, and much of the information about working with cultural differences has needed a long-overdue change of focus,” he writes.
Foster has been the president of DFA Intercultural Global Solutions for over three decades and has been involved in researching, writing about and consulting on the nature of culture and its role in society, work and politics in a globalizing world.
As founder and former worldwide director of Berlitz Cross-Cultural Division, as well as the founder and president of Cross-Cultural Consulting Associates, Foster’s work has played a central role in the development of the field of cross-cultural training and consulting.
“Business Beyond Borders” will be available for purchase on Nov. 4, 2025.
