By: Mary Kamau on September 19, 2022
“Unless you know the road you’ve come from, you cannot know where you’re going,” an African proverbial saying that underscores the default recourse to history to predict the future or to find an explanation for current phenomena, came to mind as I read the book, Global Leadership Perspectives. by Simon Western and Eric – Jean…
By: Jonathan Lee on September 15, 2022
Global Leadership Perspectives was written by Simon Western and Eric-Jean Garcia. The book is split into two parts: Part 1 – presentation of various leadership from 20 countries all over the globe and Part 2 – Critical analysis of leadership and conclusion. This book offers great insights into the history and cultural context of understanding…
By: Denise Johnson on September 15, 2022
This week’s post is coming to you from the perspective of cross-cultural sojourner, whose identity is in flux due to all the adaptations. There is a special tension that exists between the person you are that has God given purpose and the servant that humbly steps into another’s country (1 Corinthians 9:20-21). The questions rise,…
By: Nicole Richardson on September 15, 2022
This week we found ourselves in the waters of Letter From a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr as a response to an open letter by 8 white Christian Pastors, A Call to Unity , that was published in the Birmingham News. A Call to Unity was an attempt to reign in the…
By: Elmarie Parker on September 15, 2022
Simon Western and Éric-Jean Garcia have facilitated a fascinating collection of leadership voices along with critical analysis that allows the reader to not only more deeply understand the themes that have emerged in Western research and practice on leadership, but to hear the ways leadership is practiced around this diverse globe—listening for both the places…
By: Roy Gruber on September 15, 2022
My research for my project necessitated me to articulate a definition of leadership. That task proved challenging because there are thousands of definitions. The sheer number of definitions makes it obvious that leadership cannot be reduced or simplified. Beyond trying to define it, leadership also gets applied in real and diverse ways. Leadership never takes…
By: Troy Rappold on September 15, 2022
In reading chapter seventeen of Simon Western and Eric-Jean Garcia’s book, “Global Leadership Perspectives,” I learned there are three leadership issues in South Africa that are most pressing to confront. The first is to de-politicize leadership; that is, to remove the infighting of different factions and put the well being of all to the forefront.…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on September 14, 2022
Four days prior to the writing of Letter from Birmingham Jail, on April 12, Martin Luther King, Jr. and nearly 50 other protestors and civil rights leaders had been arrested after leading a Good Friday demonstration as part of the Birmingham Campaign, designed to bring national attention to the brutal, racist treatment suffered by blacks…
By: Henry Gwani on September 14, 2022
The two books I focus on this week are written in the spirit of The Danger of a Single Story. In the 19-minute Ted Talk, rated as one of the 25 most popular of all time[1], Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions about the folly of building a worldview on the basis of a single…
By: Michael Simmons on September 14, 2022
This week’s reading beautifully displays perspectives spanning the continuum of both subjective and objective historical viewpoints while centering leadership in its most honest, visceral, and human forms. MLK Jr’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail provided an intimate, incarnate, and soul wrenching glimpse into the imprisonment black Americans experienced from our nation’s inception through Civil Rights…
By: Andy Hale on September 14, 2022
For those who grew up in a Western Euro-American context, a general leadership philosophy is known based on several key models. You know the gurus, Heifetz on adaptive leadership, Kotter on leading change, Sinek on a company’s why and culture, Goleman on emotional intelligence, and Maxwell on whatever John Maxwell thinks he is producing in…
By: Eric Basye on September 14, 2022
Confession. For years I struggled with the praise of MLK, especially in Christian circles. It wasn’t that I didn’t whole-heartedly agree with his movement to advocate for the rights of blacks, but I struggled with the dark side of King, the alleged affairs and womanizing. It probably didn’t help my ignorance that I grew up…
By: Mary Kamau on September 11, 2022
There is a common belief that the world is fast becoming a globalized and virtual village, and it’s for a good reason. The greatest contributor to globalization is technological advances that have made communication, commerce, and even travel easier across geographical and other barriers. The ease of communication, commerce, and travel has increased interaction between…
By: Elmarie Parker on September 8, 2022
We all know the story of the religious legal expert wanting to test Jesus regarding the correct pathway to eternal life. It ends up that loving God with one’s whole being and one’s neighbor as oneself is what it all, in Jesus’ estimation, boils down to. But the legal expert wanted to press things further,…
By: Denise Johnson on September 8, 2022
Culture, the lens through which we all interpret life. It colors everything from communication styles, decision making, to resolving conflict and trust. Yet, we are seldom aware of it in ourselves. It is just the way things are done. This status quo remains until that moment we are confronted by a different culture. Erin Meyer,…
By: Jonathan Lee on September 8, 2022
Erin Meyer, the author of The Culture Map, is a professor at INSEAD business school and focuses on helping business leaders and organizations navigate through the complexities of cultural differences in communication. The Culture Map was her first book and it presents her research on how people communicate in different global and cultural settings. She…
By: Roy Gruber on September 8, 2022
The first time I met my future wife’s family I found them to be rude. The reason for that perception was a spirited conversation between her parents and their five children. I don’t remember the topic but I do remember the loud volume and how multiple people spoke simultaneously. The loudest speaker got finish their…
By: Troy Rappold on September 8, 2022
Jesus, at times, was misunderstood; so was the Apostle Paul. All of us have been, perhaps especially when it comes to sharing our Christian faith with others. It is an inescapable aspect of human communication that the message one is trying to transmit is oftentimes distorted and misunderstood. In the book, “The Culture Map: Breaking…
By: Eric Basye on September 7, 2022
Born and raised in Minnesota, Erin Meyer broke free of her cultural roots and became a well-known international author and professor at INSEAD Business School in Paris, France. Focusing on organizational culture, Meyer has sought to understand cultural differences to improve effective leadership in the international business setting. Though she was raised in the Midwest,…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on September 7, 2022
Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map bridges the disciplines of business and psychology to pave the way for clearer international communication. Using eight scales, countries are mapped on a continuum which then can be compared against one another using mapping – the importance being their relative positioning to one another.[1] This visualization brings context to common…
