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Reading the Book

8 October, 2015 - 11:50

This book outlines the importance of understanding culture and its impact on our lives, the strategic value of cultural intelligence, and the significance of integrating and practicing cultural intelligence in everyday life. The book is designed to help you overcome the challenges in intercultural interactions by focusing on cultural intelligence in leadership and management.

This book does not focus on specific cultural etiquettes or how to do business in other countries. It is a book designed to help you apply cultural intelligence to any cultural situation. This is not an academic textbook, although the concepts presented here are essential to your knowledge about culture and intercultural interactions.

The eight chapters in this book consist of reflection exercises and case studies that can be used as a guide to your continued learning and development in cultural intelligence. Each chapter begins with a personal story, quote, or idea about culture and intercultural work and ends with a summary of the key concepts.

To continue your work in cultural intelligence, there is a website that has been set up to provide you with more sample case studies and inventories.

  • Introduction: A Global Community  provides an overview to the topic of cultural intelligence. It examines globalization and its significance for culturally intelligent leadership.
  • Culturally Intelligent Leadership Matters explores the literature on culture and leadership. It examines several studies that illustrate the importance of understanding culture in leadership and management.
  • Understanding Culture  examines the concept of culture. The chapter focuses on recognizing the different levels of culture and how culture is shared and learned. It also highlights the significance of cultural value dimensions in intercultural work.
  • Cultural Intelligence Defined  focuses on what cultural intelligence is and what it consists of. It describes how cultural intelligence is different from other forms of intelligences.
  • Thinking About Thinking delves into the first component of cultural intelligence: cultural strategic thinking. It focuses on the topics of cognition and metacognition. Techniques and tools to practice and improve metacognition are offered.
  • I Think I Can and I Will  moves into a discussion of motivation and mindfulness, the second part to cultural intelligence. The chapter centers on the role of self-efficacy in culture and the value mindfulness has in intercultural interactions.
  • Adapting and Performing  focuses on the third component of cultural intelligence: behavior. It focuses on the notion of self-concept and how this impacts behavior and attitudes. Additionally, this section examines the impact of behavioral communication.
  • Cultural Intelligence in Action  consists of 10 case studies that illustrate different cultural situations. It provides you with the opportunity to practice the cultural intelligence principles.
  • The Future of Cultural Intelligence looks into the future and examines what is needed for cultural intelligence principles to thrive. It also discusses the types of leadership needed to bring more attention to cultural intelligence.

You can read this book in the following ways:

  • Begin at the beginning. If you would like to understand cultural intelligence and its relationship to culture in depth, I recommend starting at the beginning and reading the book sequentially. The book is written as if you were taking a workshop in cultural intelligence; it begins with a basic foundation to culture before delving into principles of cultural intelligence.
  • Read individual chapters. Cultural intelligence principles overlap with each other. In this book, each cultural intelligence principle is discussed separately in its own chapter so you can choose which chapter to focus on. But each chapter is written in a way to help you connect that principle to other principles of cultural intelligence.
  • Read case studies and work on inventories. If you would like to use cultural intelligence as a training tool, you can visit the website for a list of inventories and updated case studies.