The Culture Map: A Short Book Review

My job to the outside world is a little like Chandler’s job from the TV show Friends; I’m a data transponster. I often struggle to explain what I do to people who do not belong to this industry, and hence I leave it at business development. With time, Ruki has learned what I do and is now able to explain to anyone who asks what RFPs and RFIs are… Her world is fundamentally different from mine, and it was difficult to explain work calls late into the night or early in the morning. Having worked for close to eight years in a role that requires me to coordinate and collaborate with stakeholders from different nationalities and cultures, I can relate to almost every aspect that Erin Meyer covers in her book, The Culture Map.

Robert Iger’s Excelsior Moment: A Short Book Review

There are certain things that you can’t learn by simply reading about them – kindness, empathy, listening, trusting your gut, etc. And it is these very things that self-help books and autobiographies of business leaders espouse. People often pick up these books expecting ah-ha wisdom, but it boils down to completely banal and cliched life-lessons that we’re all aware of. These lessons are a rite of passage and can’t possibly be understood or acquired by reading about them. There’s also the fact that individual journeys are more about luck and circumstance than anything else, and thus, force-fitting a bunch of generic leadership traits into a story about a leader’s rise to the top is in no way representative of how most of these journeys progress.