Hi, everybody and welcome to our podcast in Good Company. Now, today we have a special guest

with us, Irene Mayer, who is one of the world's leading specialists on cross-cultural management.

And a good thing, she's written one of my favorite books called CultureMap.

So, Irene, what inspired you to write this book?

Yeah, hey, so nice to be here with you today.

Well, so I was raised in Minnesota.

There's a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, you might know, which is in the Midwest of the U.S. And so it was a very monocultural environment.

I was really surrounded by people who had only lived in the same culture as me.

And then after graduating from university, I moved to Botswana to southern Africa, and I was teaching school there.

And I just saw how all of the

techniques that I had learned in the U.S. for how to motivate children and how to create a good

classroom environment were totally falling flat. And the things that they were encouraging me to do in the

classroom were so different than anything we would ever do in the U.S.

So I became very interested in that time to just see how in different cultures we, not only

that we motivate children differently, but that we motivate later on in life our employees

differently, and that we have a whole different psychology about how to communicate and how to build trust and be effective.

So that was the first step on this journey for starting to study how different cultures interact in an international environment, which is what I do now.

Yeah, great.

So you have kind of split culture into eight different dimensions.

And if you don't mind, I'd just love to talk through some of them because I think it's so interesting.

And it really made me think about how we run our fund when we are in several different countries.

You know, we are in Norway, London, we are New York, Singapore.

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