Authors Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner offer a guide for international organizations and managers seeking to understand the impact cultural differences can have in a business setting.
“Riding the Waves of Culture” uses case studies, research findings and examples to show how different cultures respond differently to similar situations, and how organizations can manage cultural differences to create a positive outcome.
The book explains how managers have mediated difficult situations while conducting business in different countries.
The authors have studied the effects of cultural differences in a business setting, and emphasize that a person must first understand his or her own culture in order to understand cultural diversity.
Cultural differences are explored through three aspects: The relationships we have with people, the attitude we have toward time, and the relationship we have with our environment.
The authors explain how the approach to those three relationships differs among cultures, and how it plays a role in the structure of an organization and in conducting business across cultures.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Riding the Waves of Culture’
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Riding the Waves of Culture’
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Bell Jar’
- The bell jar — clear, enclosing, and distorting the air she breathes — becomes the perfect image of Greenwood’s entrapment. Just as telling is the fig tree she imagines, with each fig representing a possible future: writer, traveler, mother, lover
Author: Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (1963) is a raw and luminous portrait of a young woman standing at the edge of adulthood, grappling with ambition, doubt, and the suffocating weight of expectation.
Through the eyes of the novel’s troubled protagonist Esther Greenwood, Plath reveals the loneliness that can lie hidden beneath achievement and the unease brought on by future expectations.
The novel opens in New York, where Greenwood’s magazine internship seems the gateway to success. Yet the city’s glamor soon feels hollow, and the confidence around her thin and brittle.
Her sense of direction begins to fade, and the life laid out before her starts to feel both too small and impossibly distant.
The bell jar — clear, enclosing, and distorting the air she breathes — becomes the perfect image of Greenwood’s entrapment. Just as telling is the fig tree she imagines, with each fig representing a possible future: writer, traveler, mother, lover.
Torn between these possibilities, she hesitates until the figs shrivel and drop. This image, perhaps more than any other, reveals how fear of choice can quietly undo a person.
Plath’s writing is sharp and deeply humane. She exposes the subtle pressures shaping women’s lives at that time without sentiment or complaint.
The narrative’s erratic rhythm mirrors the character’s disoriented state of mind, where thought and memory blur at the edges.
“The Bell Jar” speaks to anyone who has felt caught between possibility and paralysis, between who they are and who they are expected to be.
Plath writes with precision and compassion, turning confusion into clarity and despair into something almost inspiring.
