Over the past seven years, Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun and a team of researchers have interviewed managers at some 10,000 organizations in 20 countries. The goal: to determine how and why management practices differ vastly in style and quality not only across nations, but also across various organizations and industries.

Concepts of "face" and "trust" will help you understand the complexity of Chinese behavior if you also consider that their decisions are guided by five concurrent, seemingly contradictory, realities. Keep them ever in your mind. The Chinese do.

In an increasingly multicultural age, communication between business people becomes increasingly tricky. An article coauthored by IESE's Carlos Sánchez-Runde reveals how culture affects cognition and how companies can enhance their multicultural communication.

False assumptions can trip up foreign expansion plans.

English may be the lingua franca of business gatherings, but that doesn’t mean non-native speakers are always in sync. There are ways to bridge the gap.

Competing successfully in this new decade requires companies to meet the needs of both low-growth and high-growth markets while differentiating themselves from foreign and local competitors. Building a low-cost global production network that taps into the strengths of each geographical region is critical. Also crucial to success: innovating products, processes and business models to increase margins wherever possible -- and to gain market share. Key decisions will involve looking at profit vs. growth, best price vs. best value, and new rewards systems.

How do companies improve operationally with diverse and talented workforces? By taking advantage of individuals who feel at home in multiple cultures, says INSEAD visiting professor Mary Yoko Brannen.

Paul Beamish is Professor of International Business at the Richard Ivey School of Business and the Founding Director of the School’s Asian Management Institute. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and journal articles and more than 100 case studies. His latest book is Joint Venturing. In the book, Professor Beamish, who has consulted on numerous international joint ventures, discusses the opportunities that international joint ventures represent, as well as the management challenges that must be considered and overcome for them to succeed. The questions and answers below are based on the book.

How do you manage a team across borders and time zones? Start by tearing up your old management rule book, says Erin Meyer.

Capital flowing around the world is changing the way businesses grow and shrink. And, like an explorer trying to find his way out of the wilderness, business leaders would be wise to follow the pathways that capital follows. In so doing, business leaders can uncover new business opportunities and shun emerging risks.

Humans have evolved four priorities or "drives," according to HBS professor emeritus Paul R. Lawrence: the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond, and to comprehend. In an excerpt from his new book, Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, Lawrence describes how the four drives impact globalization.

To respond to opportunities in global production, research and development, and innovation, as well as to optimize customer sales, service, and growth, companies need to deploy the right people to the right places at the right cost. Along with changing employee expectations, companies also face an increasing need to attract, develop, deploy, and retain employees and leaders who know how to think and operate globally. In short, companies need a global workforce, and global mobility, more than ever.

This article offers ideas on how to execute and implement key strategy, process, and technology elements to support an effective global mobility program. The report builds on the themes explored in a prior publication, Smart Moves: A New Approach to International Assignments and Global Mobility, which introduced a new model for global mobility that offers business, HR, and talent leaders an integrated framework for analyzing and assessing global assignments.

Procuring materials. Locating operations. Raising capital. Sourcing talent and ideas. It often seems that, as the world gets smaller, the challenges become larger. One way businesses can cope is to develop an overarching geographic strategy. Accenture explains what such an effort entails and profiles its five underlying fundamentals.

BCG has developed an analytical framework—the Global Advantage Diamond—for assessing a company’s current market position and devising strategies to achieve global competitive advantage. The Global Advantage Diamond differs from previous global-strategy models in its focus on all four aspects of global advantage: market access to reach new markets and segments, resource access to maximize competitive advantage, local adaptation to meet the full range of needs of RDE customers, and network coordination to capitalize on the business’s global reach.

No one disputes that the competitive chessboard today is global, and will continue to become even more international in scope as emerging markets like China, India and Latin America burgeon. Yet, most U.S. multinationals, alleging impediments like travel impositions and language and cultural barriers, retain boards that reflect the American and not the global marketplace.

When facing a cross-border negotiation, the standard preparatory assessments—of the parties, their interests, their no-deal options, opportunities for and barriers to creating and claiming value, the most promising sequence and process design, etc.— should be informed and modified by two classes of potentially relevant cross-border factors, the general and the negotiation-specific. Drawing on considerable literature in cross-border and cross-cultural negotiation, this paper develops the first two levels of a four-level prescriptive framework for effectively carrying out such assessments:

1. Common expectations for surface behavior: etiquette, protocol, and deportment. A surface-level assessment informs one about local expectations concerning greetings, business cards, gift giving, dress, punctuality, body language, table manners, and so forth.
2. Deeper cultural characteristics and their implications for the negotiation process itself. Below the surface are characteristics such as whether a culture is focused on the individual or the collective, the nature and importance of relationships, how personal space and the role of time are viewed, the extent to which authority and hierarchy are accepted, how ambiguity and risk are regarded, and so on. Extending this assessment to expectations that are more specific to the negotiation process itself yields several questions: Is there a view that negotiation is a collaborative process aimed at mutual advantage or a competitive battle? Should one focus on specific issues early on or is there a lengthy process of relationship building first? Is the process formal or informal? Is communication direct or indirect? Are agreements constructed from general principles "down" or from specific provisions "up"? And so on.
3. The bulk of this essay develops these two points but with some strong caveats against stereotyping, overemphasizing national culture, falling prey to potent psychological biases in cross-cultural perception, as well as potentially adapting "past" one's counterpart. [A close companion paper-"Assess, Don't Assume, Part II: Decision Making, Governance, and Political Economy in Negotiation"—elaborates the importance to effective negotiating strategy and tactics of incorporating two less well-studied factors beyond etiquette and deeper cultural characteristics: 3) systematic cross-border differences in decision making, governance, and 4) the broader economic and political context for negotiation as well as salient "comparable" deals.]

When facing a negotiation that crosses national borders and/or cultures, the standard preparatory assessments—of the parties, their interests, their no-deal options, opportunities for and barriers to creating and claiming value, the most promising sequence and process design, etc.—should be informed and modified by potentially relevant factors. Drawing on considerable literature in cross-border and cross-cultural negotiation, a two-paper series develops a four-level prescriptive framework for effectively carrying out such assessments. The first paper in this series ("Etiquette and National Culture in Negotiation") described:

1. common expectations for surface behavior
2. some implications of deeper cultural characteristics for the negotiation process itself, as well as cross-border caveats such as stereotyping and overemphasizing national culture to the exclusion of other factors. The current paper carries this analysis further by systematically analyzing a third and fourth class of factors that often prove critical in cross-border dealmaking
3. The decision-making and governance processes that are the targets of influence efforts. While negotiations take place with individuals, those individuals are typically enmeshed in organizational processes and cultures. Thus, a key assessment focuses on the organization's decision-making and governance processes. Several questions guide this analysis: Who has what decision rights? Is it a one-person authoritarian process? A simple consensus? A multi-stage consensus process? A key subgroup? How does the formal decision-making and governance process differ from the informal one?
4. The broader economic and political context for negotiation as well as salient "comparable" deals. Several questions guide this analysis: Is there a formal or informal government policy toward the kind of arrangements under negotiation such as the requirement that the majority of a joint venture be owned by a local partner? Are high-tech deals particularly sought after by the state? What recent deals by others, successful or not, will be salient in the minds of your local hosts and authorities when they contemplate yours? Does the political ethos favor state control or privatization? Does a wrenching political transition foster managerial uncertainty and decision paralysis? And so on.

How global does it need to be if your customers are around the world?

Perils of international joint ventures: Foreign companies often enter joint venture partnerships unaware of the dominating corporate governance practices in developing countries. Susan Perkins outlines the potential costs of not recognizing and accounting for these dynamics in the design of a joint venture.

Globality is not a new word for the well-known phenomenon of globalization; it is a fundamentally different business environment that has been been created by the rise of a set of companies based in the rapidly developing economies. These “global challengers” are giving the established multinationals ¯ the “incumbents” ¯ a run for their money in industries and markets around the world, and forcing them to confront the "seven struggles" of globality.

Evaluating country risks is a crucial exercise when deciding where to set up operations in a foreign country. While some risks can be managed with insurance or hedging strategies, others can be measured with a risk-analysis. Though uncertainty will remain in either case, it can be transformed into planned uncertainty, with no surprises in store and contingency plans in place. The author discusses the analytical frameworks a business should examine as it evaluates risk and creates a strategy to manage the uncertainties.

The biggest challenge in creating value from cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in rapidly developing economies (RDEs) is not extracting synergies, but understanding the full spectrum of risks before the deal is closed. Based on a survey of executives with extensive experience in M&A in RDEs, this focus highlights the four main drivers of these risks and how to minimize and manage them.

Given the dearth of national leadership experience in China, companies are turning to expatriates to fill critical leadership roles, and promoting these leaders very quickly. The cultural dimensions of leadership developed by Hofstede help provide a foundation for business leaders operating in foreign territories. These dimensions of leadership include power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. For an expatriate leading a national team in China, it is essential to understand the cultural dimensions of leadership to improve productivity, increase company profits, and improve interpersonal relationships.

Increasingly, companies are spreading “knowledge work” tasks – such as research and product development – overseas as a means to increase competitiveness, reduce costs, access new talent pools and establish a presence in emerging markets. Yet many struggle to achieve the performance to which they aspire.

This paper describes how a structured approach for understanding the link between decision-making (how work is governed) and workflow (how work is organized) can help global businesses structure their organizations effectively for knowledge work. We propose a typology of organization models comprising two dimensions: the degree of workflow across locations and the structure of decision-making responsibilities. We also present several case studies that depict organizations at different points in their journeys.

The framework we present can serve as a starting point for you to understand how strategic choices between the structures of your organization’s decision-making and workflow can help you address organizational design questions and, ultimately, achieve more positive outcomes in your global knowledge-work initiatives.

It doesn’t matter where scientific discoveries and breakthrough technologies originate—for national prosperity, the important thing is who commercializes them. The United States is not behind in that race.