BMW
Cultural differences pose obvious challenges to your ability to exercise leadership. Successful leadership inherently reflects the ability of a leader to induce others to conform to his/her will. This can be difficult enough when leader and followers are socially homogenous and generally agree on values, operating procedures, and objectives. It is much more difficult when leaders try to mobilize cooperation (or obtain acquiescence) of people from very different backgrounds. Individuals from different traditions typically reflect widely differing ways of organizing data, analyzing problems, developing solutions, and reacting to leadership. This lesson is designed to allow you to think about the differences and some of the resulting implications for strategic leaders. The Western World now is painfully sensitive to the problems that have grown out of the frustrations of a radical, minority brand of Islam in recent years. These problems are difficult to resolve: they reflect a clash of profoundly different, mutually exclusive “world views.” Yet strategic leaders in the modern world often must endeavor to bridge similar cultural chasms.