For aspiring global managers and organizations developing tomorrow's leaders, WORKING GLOBESMART delivers strategies for success on the global stage. Whether you are working in your company's foreign office or on a virtual team that spans the globe, this field guide can help you discover how competencies for crossing national or cultural boundaries add value to global business.

Rich in examples--from Italy to India, Turkey to Thailand--WORKING GLOBESMART bridges the gap between what we know about business success and what we know about differences in values, abilities, and behavioral characteristics across various cultural dimensions. Global consultant Ernest Gundling provides the tools to transcend the limitations of local perspectives and bring out the links between communication and change, culture and commerce. With his unique GlobeSmart model, he shows how to develop cultural competencies at the organizational, group, and interpersonal level, highlighting 12 key skills critical for success.

WORKING GLOBESMART addresses issues of greatest concern to contemporary leaders--global teamwork, customer relations, change management, strategy, and innovation--and demonstrates the power of the Global People Skills framework to bring vision and strategy to life, to create training and development programs for multicultural learners, and to develop or participate effectively in a global team.

Soundview Executive Summaries - books selected in 2003

Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right by Badaracco Jr. Joseph
The Art Of The Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide For Anyone Starting Anything by Kawasaki, Guy

Packed with Knowledge!
This basic, solid book on global business takes nothing for granted. Author Ernest Gundling teaches by example and illustration, and has something approaching a horror of direct statement. At the end of each chapter, where a bolder writer might insert points to remember, he provides, instead, lists of questions to consider. This book will tell you the skills you need and will make you very aware of your deficits, but it will not tell you precisely how to develop those skills. Gundling does provide a wealth of little, fictitious anecdotes about people who have done the right or wrong thing in global business. In a refreshingly humble approach, he sometimes uses his own blunders as examples of what not to do. We recommend his book, which brings to mind that Socrates was judged the wisest of men because he knew he knew nothing. Readers will come a few steps closer to such Socratic enlightenment. What you may not know about conducting yourself in international business would fill a book - this one.