The one sentence summary

Mindset factors such as social structure, institutions, and value orientations can explain different patterns of perceiving and reasoning around the world.

Want to buy the book? CLICK HERE

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS 

  • This is all about the role of culture and perception in international relations, with many lessons for global business.
  • The author coined the word mindset to explain different patterns of perceiving and reasoning around the world.
  • People view issues and events through a cultural lens.
  • The culture concept involves a set of implications that derive from a culture’s function as the human being’s unique way of coping with the environment (physical and social).
  • The mindset factors that are the most consequential are social structure, institutions, and value orientations. All provide basic programming for the brain, just as a computer is progammed. This is referred to as deep culture.
  • The most important questions to ask about cultural mindsets are:
    1. What significant values and assumptions about dealing with nature and its resources result from coping with a group’s physical environment?
    2. How does the human environment and the way culture defines social structure mould mindsets?
    3. How does the society’s collective past experience survive in the form of a culturally transmitted memory?
    4. What knowledge will people bring to this particular event?
    5. Is there a unique deep cultural lens at work?
    6. What should be taken into account regarding the process by which mindsets came to be engaged?

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Cognitive factors that affect economic and social behaviour include orientation toward the self, achievement motivation views of time, social relationships, and abstract thinking and reasoning.
  • Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the hypothesis that “the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment.” Language really matters.
  • Does the old hand have twenty years’ experience or one year’s experience twenty times?

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Originally written in 1988 and updated in 1997, it is mainly based on experience from the foreign service. You need to apply the suggestions across to a business context.