I recently read Ram Charan’s latest book, Global Tilt: Leading Your Business Through the Great Economic Power Shift, whose title refers to the fact that “the world has tilted. Its economic center has shifted from what have traditionally been called the advanced or Western countries of the northern hemisphere to fast developing countries including China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and others in the Middle East and even parts of Africa…Wealth is moving from North to South, and so are jobs…The South is driving change. The North is afraid of it…The world is in an inevitable transition to a more even distribution of opportunity and wealth…The global financial system, which h connects the economies of all countries every second of the day, is highly unstable…Many countries below the thirty-first parallel are creating their own rules of the road and executing their growth plans to win jobs and resources for their people… Companies are competing against countries – not just other companies. Northern companies may be building their future competition in exchange for access to markets…The tilt will seesaw along the way…Like it or not, you have no choice but to figure out how to position your business in light of the changes.”

I recalled this composite excerpt while then reading Andy Molinsky‘s recently published Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process. In the Conclusion section, Molinsky juxtaposes conventional wisdom and reality and, when doing so, nourishes our understanding of how and why cross cultural management must demonstrate dexterity to be effective in an ever-expanding global marketplace.

Conventional Wisdom: The key to successful cultural adaptation is learning about howe another culture is different from yours.
Reality: The key to successful cultural adaptation is learning how to change your behavior to account for these differences.

Conventional Wisdom: You can’t easily break your own cultural tendencies.
Reality: Your own cultural tendencies are more malleable than you think.

Conventional Wisdom: You don’t have much, if any, leeway in another culture to behave as you want to behave.
Reality: You have far more leeway than you think to choose the way you’ll behave in another culture.

Conventional Wisdom:  Culture is a soft, squishy concept that is hard to define or assess.
Reality: You can clearly diagnose cultural style in six easy-to-understand and distinguishable dimensions.

Conventional Wisdom:  You have to suppress your “true” nature when adapting to a doreign culktuure to be effectuve.
Reality: You can be yourself and be effective.

According to Molinsky, he wrote his book “because I believe there is a serious gap in what has been written and communicated about cross-cultural management and what people actually struggle with on the ground.” After having read Charan’s and then Molinsky’s book, I realize that effective cross-cultural management requires dexterity wherever supervision of others is involved; moreover, if cross-cultural management in only one country is analogous with checkers, then cross-cultural management in several countries is analogous with chess…and if the countries are from the first, second, and third “worlds,” cross cultural management is analogous with three-dimensional chess played at lightning speed.