Articles

The Neglected Role of Cultural
Sensitivity in International Business

By Zbigniew T. Rurak, President, Rurak & Associates, Inc.

Companies expanding globally, and the search firms recruiting executives for these global enterprises, face two problems: identifying the attributes of a successful global manager, and finding executives with those attributes.

Executives entrusted with overseas or foreign responsibilities have usually been selected on fairly obvious criteria: language ability, ethnic origin, or the much sought-after record of international experience. Thus international search has been defined by, for example, recruiting a Polish emigré in Montreal to work for a French company's office in Moscow. And such executives, everyone agrees, are scarce.

Yet the checkered performance of trans-border business and the continued frustrations experienced by many global managers suggest that the selection criteria applied to global business management are missing something.

Click here to download this article in PDF format.

---