I offer two things. Both address the same problem: colleagues from different cultures misreading each other, and not knowing why.
Direct consulting
I work personally with German-American teams. The focus has always been the same three questions:
Where do we differ in how we think, therefore in how we work? What impact do those differences have on our collaboration? How can we get the differences to work for, not against, us?
This takes different forms depending on what the situation requires. Training sessions for teams preparing for long-term cross-border collaboration. Workshops for management navigating post-merger integration. Coaching for senior leaders working across the Atlantic. Analysis of specific collaboration problems that have stalled.
I started doing this work at Siemens-Westinghouse, supporting the post-acquisition integration across all levels, all disciplines, and all locations in the U.S. and Germany. I have continued it independently for more than two decades, with major DAX and Fortune companies.
It wasn’t always pretty. It often got rough. A little bloody. But always results. And clarity.
UC — understand culture
I created UC to make cultural intelligence available at scale — embedded in the AI systems companies already use.
UC provides the cultural intelligence that powers a Culture Agent — an AI advisor that understands how cultures think and work. It lives inside the tools your employees already use. One person can deploy it in a day. No IT project.
When a colleague is confused, frustrated, or unsettled by something a colleague from another culture said or did, the Culture Agent helps them understand what happened, why it happened, and how to move forward.
The intelligence behind the Culture Agent is produced through a research method I developed and refined over 25 years. It currently covers seventeen countries and sixteen topics, with more in development.
Test it at understand-culture.com.