Global Business Leadership: GeoLeadership Strategies for the International Marketplace

E.S. Wibbeke

Global Business Leadership discusses the urgent issues facing global business leaders and presents seven strategies found necessary for successful intercultural business ventures. It provides business professionals and students with insight into the failure of businesses to prepare leaders for stepping into complex cultural contexts.

The Geoleadership Model developed by Dr. Wibbeke is applied to global business situations using cases taken from leading companies such as Google and eBay. The book uses a case study format to present salient issues related to intercultural leadership and then principles of the model are applied to the case in discussion format. The concepts of care, communication, consciousness, change, capability and others are analyzed in relation to how each concept is seen in different parts of the business world. Each chapter concludes with a "bottom line" example of how each Geoleadership concept directly affects business results.

Global Business Leadership also provides instruction about entry into cultural contexts, negotiating, preventing and managing cultural-based local-global conflict, and preparing global leaders to increase intercultural awareness and sensitivity.

Dr. Wibbeke founded and managed the leading Internet website (Web of Culture) for cross-cultural information on the Internet and shares such global experiences with other would-be globetrotters.

When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge

K. David Harrison

Speakers of thousands of the world's languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What exactly is lost when speakers of indigenous languages switch to speaking English, Hindi, Russian, or other global tongues? And why should we care if small languages vanish?

Building on my fieldwork in Russia, Mongolia, India, the Philippines and Lithuania, and drawing examples from a wide array of threatened or recently vanished languages, this book highlights the complex systems of knowledge embedded in indigenous languages. It illuminates individual faces of language loss, while revealing its global scale.

Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people's science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The disappearance of a language is not only a loss for the community of speakers itself, but for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we are facing a massive erosion of the human knowledge base.

As the book explores technologies for survival and the languages that communicate them, we are introduced to people such as Aunt Marta, one of the last speakers of the language of the reindeer-herding Tofa people of Siberia; Vasya Gabov, at 54 the youngest speaker of Ös, who, after being pressured into speaking only Russian as a child, invented in secret a writing system for his mother tongue; and Shoydak-ool, a Tuvan storyteller who practices the vanishing art of telling Tuva's traditional epics.

The global abandonment of indigenous languages will bring a massive loss of accumulated knowledge and culture – this book argues for the irreplaceable nature of these unique knowledge systems and the urgency of documenting them before they are lost forever.

Negotiating Globally: How to Negotiate Deals, Resolve Disputes, and Make Decisions Across Cultural Boundaries

Jeanne M. Brett

In today's global business environment, negotiators who understand how culture affects negotiation fundamentals have a decided advantage at the bargaining table. Negotiators' interests, their assumptions about strategy, and the economic, social, legal, and political context of negotiation all vary with culture. Negotiating Globally shows how to successfully navigate across boundaries of national culture when negotiating deals, resolving disputes, and making decisions. Rather than offering country-specific protocol and customs, Negotiating Globally provides a general framework to help negotiators manage cultural differences whenever they appear at the negotiation table. The book explains how to navigate the treacherous waters of conflict management in cultures where direct confrontation is not the norm and face saving is imperative and provides concrete advice for managers and leaders to coax high-quality decisions out of multicultural teams.

The Author Jeanne M. Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, where she is also the director and a founding member of the Dispute Resolution Research Center. She divides her time between research, teaching and consulting on negotiation strategies in a global environment. Brett is coauthor of Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict (Jossey-Bass, 1988).