4. Cultures of Our World

Are you starting a new project with Japan? Do you encounter difficulties in building relationships with your French partners? Or, are you about to be expatriated to China? Has your Russian contact gone sour for unknown reasons? Is your project in Germany straining your nerves? Or, are you planning a business trip or a holiday in Nigeria, in India? In this chapter, we will attempt to give you answers by transposing the findings from the previous chapter “ Access to other cultures ” in relation to individual countries. You will discover the uniqueness and richness of the cultural heritage of the African Continent, the Arabic and Islamic world, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Central Europe, China and the Chinese cultural circle, France, Germany, India Italy, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Spain and other cultures speaking the Spanish language, the United Kingdom and last but not least the USA. You will get answers on how to prepare and approach women and men from other worlds, avoid or preempt conflicts, solve them after they have happened, all this illustrated by many case histories.

In this part of the manual, we—as authors—have primarily focused on the countries known to us from or business activities, project work and teaching whilst authors from other countries joined us to describe their cultures for a completer pictures of our today’s world. For all those countries not covered by our manual, we believe that countries presented here will become examples and will serve the reader as a guide to develop his own approach to a culture of his own interest. (Note: If you bought this chapter, we strongly recommend to add Chap. 3, as it contains basic information to understand other cultures.)