An organization’s conception of human capital is manifest in its culture, and culture is inculcated by process and behavior guidelines that are passed along as one employee imitates another. The process is most effective when the capacity for self-expression in the ranks is consonant with expectations set at the top and an autonomous spirit flourishes.

Companies should not presume to treat all employees—or customers, for that matter—in a single country as having the same culture or national identity, even in developed nations. Many of today’s employees have spent long periods of time in more than one country, creating sustained connections that deeply affect spending and consumption (for example, continued remittances to family in home countries), social ties, gender roles and relations, and involvement in local politics, as well as cross-border entrepreneurship and business networks. Companies must no longer assume their employees’ fundamental loyalties, mindsets, and values and beliefs are those of the country in which they labor.

People tend to only look at national culture when they go into international negotiations … but there is also educational culture, race culture, gender culture, a religious culture. All of these also impact the way people behave and they are all ‘cross cultural,’ which means that we’re underestimating the role of culture because we are only looking at the national one; but as negotiators, we need to try to understand all the others.

One of the executives I interviewed said, “There’s no such thing as corporate culture.” His point was that the minute you start talking about corporate culture, it be comes somebody else’s problem—the leader’s problem. He said, “We don’t focus on corporate culture. We focus on character.” When you use the word character, that’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s about how we treat each other.

The center is an essential element of social interaction. There are no strong cultures without an organizing middle. Human beings are social creations. They develop and progress by means of collective actions--in other words, in proximity to other human beings. Centers establish order and organize coexistence, whether it be spiritual, religious, social, political, or cultural. Centers are the sites of thought and planning, where great initiatives are launched and innumerable innovations born. They reflect shared values. Since the center represents power, it attracts people who want to fit into it.

I have found that language is a great window into culture. Most expatriates aren't in a country long enough to become fluent, but it's certainly worthwhile to make an effort to learn the language. It becomes a way to understand a country's customs and gain some insight into how things work.

We tend to underestimate the cultural dimension of managerial processes, techniques and tools...Just because something is best practice in one country does not make it necessarily transferable to another. This can be impossible when such practice is the product of the western culture, values and relationships embedded within an organization, and is significantly different from those emerging in China. Best practice and the management techniques and tools to achieve this are thought to be neutral - but they are certainly not. They are values-loaded.

In globalization we can come closer together, but we still don't know one another. We can start up a new business fast, but growing wise in the way of life takes a long time. It's never complete, never right, and never perfect. An ethic is deeper than morality or custom. It comes out of our deepest desire to make meaning out of our lives and hence resides in the areas of spirituality and religion. The deepest and most meaningful relationships develop out of this level of interaction. To have integrity is to bring deep meaning to bear in all aspects of one's life. And to deal effectively in a global arena, one must have some notion of the deep meaning imbedded in various cultures.

Many managers believe that a good corporate culture can encourage employees to share their opinions and solve the diversity requirement, but with few exceptions corporate cultures work against the sharing of dissimilar ideas. In the competing schools of thought on culture -- team versus competitive -- both models embody elements that undermine collective intelligence. The team concept, based on fostering familiarity and friendly cooperation between employees, often results in congeniality taking precedence over the introduction of ideas that might prove unpopular. In an environment that values teamwork as the top priority, employees hesitate to do anything that might cause tension or question the status quo. Harmony and established procedures prevail over legitimate open discussion. When this happens, action takes a back seat to talk, and meetings become less about solving problems than about finding agreement. By putting the team above all else, this type of culture undermines the diversity of thought necessary for effective group decision-making.

On the other end of the spectrum is the culture of competition. The reasoning here is to treat the entire company as a microcosm of the free-market economy...But intra-corporate competition can easily backfire: Individual units of a company are interdependent and must share internal information, while companies competing against each other in the broad market do not. When performance is measured as a competition with winners and losers, individual achievement takes precedence over company goals, and withholding knowledge becomes unavoidable...In direct contrast to the team culture, the competitive culture succeeds in creating independent and diverse thinking -- but makes it impossible to aggregate that knowledge because people are unwilling to share.

The preoccupation with self led many people from repudiating unnecessary sacrifice to discarding the ethic of sacrifice altogether. The emphasis on relative values, as opposed to absolute values, left people somewhat bereft of common agreement about right and wrong. The current explosion of religious belief represents a search for something absolute to believe in. But in the larger culture, particularly the business culture, there is no overarching sense of shared morality.

This cultural trend then converged with...the perversion of shareholder value into the primacy of short-term earnings. And there was a third trend: deregulation. Deregulation had its main effects on the gatekeepers: law firms and accounting firms. They learned quickly that the firms that got hired most were those which showed clients how to skirt the edge of the law. A report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences concluded that there wouldn't have been a fraction of the recent scandals were it not for the collusion of the gatekeepers.

Not all societies weave achievement stories into their cultural fabric, but in modern-day democracies most of us are taught to want to climb. Hierarchies provide brightly illuminated ladders that are quite consistent with our meritocratic parable: "Work hard, young person, and no matter your origin or pedigree, you too can reach the top." That story remains largely true. Hard and good work really does help us climb ladders to success. But hierarchies are also consistent with a more worrisome corollary, the notion that success deserves to be one's primary life-goal. Yet few of us, even today, dispute the basic righteousness of that whole achievement orientation.

...Here's a more controversial suggestion about why we support the hierarchies that so many of us profess to hate: Hierarchies evaluate us. They tell us how good or bad we are. Those evaluations are often invalid and even more often unjust. Nevertheless, we want to be evaluated-a bald assertion that will surely raise some hackles!

...How can anyone in his right mind assert that we want to be evaluated? Here's an answer: People have achievement needs. On that dimension, managers-from supervisors to CEOs-are probably in the top decile of their nations' populations. Humans are competitive, too, especially males. Twenty years of Jean Lipman-Blumen's research on achieving styles with more than 20,000 male and female managers from around the world comes up with only one consistent difference between the sexes. Men everywhere score higher on competitiveness (one of nine achieving styles) than women. But women managers score higher on competitiveness than non-managerial women. Managers, that is to say, are competitors, and competitors' egos want report cards. The one thing that would probably generate even more fury than existing evaluation procedures would be no evaluation procedures at all.

Go to a bookstore in London and you'll see endless rows of books on the history of British royalty or the Victorian garden or the Great Age of Elizabeth. In a Japanese bookstore, those books are about the future of transportation, the future of health, the future of urban development, and so forth. We Americans, on the other hand, tend to have no past and no future. We are what the advertisers in the '60s called, on behalf of Pepsi, the Now Generation. We tend to be focused on the immediate.

We think of a medium as a thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. The many forms of content we collect and experience online are really just forms of ammunition, an excuse to start a discussion with that attractive person in the next cubicle...

That's why the most successful TV shows, Websites, and music recordings are generally the ones that offer the most valuable forms of social currency to their fans...

If you are creating online content, your success will be directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. The real measure of content's quality is how well it serves as a medium.

The next big thing for the Internet and humanity alike, then, is the realization that our media has served as little more than excuse to interact with one another. Once we make that leap, we will most likely come to wonder what it's all for. Why do we have this overwhelming urge to interact by any means (or medium) available?

A few decades ago, our lives were centered in places. We had the most in common with our village or city neighbors, with the people geographically closest to us. Place formed our connections to the social groups that mattered most: our tribes, churches, jobs, and schools. The defining politics -- and so, defining values -- were those rooted in physical communities.

Today, place has lost relevance for most of us in a connected, global world. We reside in places, of course, but that's basically a lifestyle choice. Rather, Doug Smith writes, "it is in markets, organizations, and networks, and among family and friends that you spend your time, pursue your most pressing purposes, and find meaning in your life." So "Where do you live?" is an interesting question, but "What do you do?" is more telling.

Smith sees the shift in community from place to "purpose," as he says, as profound. For while place-based communities historically understood how to make the values-based decisions that shaped society, organizations -- especially corporations -- are flailing. They have the power to change the future for better or worse, but not the ethical will or know-how.

The serious pursuit of knowledge in organizations will be challenged by an anti-intellectual orientation in the United States that has been present since the days of the frontier.

American culture loves the myth of the lone individual hero. It is built into our cultural DNA as a nation and yet it's not even supported by the evidence of our own history - the West was settled by groups of people not lone individuals; the great industrial advancements of the 1800s and early 1900s were not accomplished by lone geniuses but achieved by people working together who built systems of genius. History shows that it is groups that come together in a common purpose that get the real work done. Nonetheless American ideology and American culture centres on the great, epic heroic male.

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people's walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

Globalization undermines neither the welfare state nor democracy, our survey argues; it is entirely consistent with sound environmental policies; above all, far from increasing poverty in the third world, it is the most effective force for reducing poverty known to mankind. But what about the view that globalization is a kind of cultural conquest? This too is plainly wrong. Under a market system, economic interaction is voluntary. This is the market's greatest virtue, greater by far than its superior productivity. So there is no reason to fear that globalization itself threatens traditional non-western cultures, such as Islam, except in so far as individual freedom threatens them. McDonald's does not march people into its outlets at the point of a gun. Nike does not require people to wear its trainers on pain of imprisonment. If people buy those things, it is because they choose to, not because globalization is forcing them to.

as [Ralphp] Ellison went on to argue, American diversity and unease are more often than not the parents of American excellence.