Cultural Differences Are More Complicated than What Country You’re From

As part of doing business globally and operating across cultures, we often want to predict how others are going to behave. Our typical heuristic, understandably, is culture. We read a book, an article, or a blog post about cultural differences. We learn about how Germans or Chinese or Italians are different from us - how they think or act or even express emotions in a different way - and we feel like we’ve done our homework. We feel prepared.