Core application areas of expertise: Intercultural management and leadership; intercultural communication; understanding, handling and leveraging cultural complexity; intercultural competence and its development.
- Successful university teacher and researcher
- Experienced corporate trainer and coach
- Curriculum, programme, course and materials developer
- (Co-)author of readable books and articles for practitioners, students and academics
- Leader and participant in international R & D project teams
- Bi-cultural English – German and a near-native user of German
Born and brought up in the U.K. but resident all my working life in Germany, I have been communicating and working across cultures for a very long time! I am a professor at Hochschule Konstanz University of Applied Sciences, Germany, where I teach and write about intercultural communication and intercultural management. There I work on the B.A. in Asian Studies and Management and the M.A. in International Management Asia – Europe.
At my university’s Lake Constance Graduate School, I teach on the M.B.A. in General Management. I also contribute to the School’s E.M.B.A. in Leadership and Integrity Management delivered mainly in China or online for executives of Daimler Greater China and its associated companies. I also teach occasionally at other business schools in China, Germany and Switzerland.
Intercultural Management. A Case-based Approach to Synergy and Complementarity, a collection of case studies edited by Christoph Barmeyer and myself, was published in 2016. Intercultural Interaction, which I co-authored with Helen Spencer-Oatey, was published by Palgrave in 2009, is available in English in China from FLTRP and was published in Chinese by Peking University Press in 2012. I am currently working on a new book with Helen Spencer-Oatey and Domna Lazidou.
In addition to my university work, since 1989 I have advised, trained and addressed hundreds of people from more than 90 companies and institutions working internationally, mainly in Europe and China. I help organisations and individuals to understand, handle and leverage the cultural complexity they experience daily.
My focus is on managing and leading across cultures, international change management, post-merger integration, HQ-subsidiary relationships, expatriate assignments, international / virtual teams, Anglo-German cooperation and developing / assessing intercultural leadership and management competence.
I have also coached countless international managers using The International Profiler psychometric development tool. I am co-author with Jeremy Comfort of a long-selling book for professionals and practising managers – The Mindful International Manager: How to Work Effectively Across Cultures.
These are some of my inisght articles aimed at practicing managers and other professionals:
- Sugar-coated and dishonest or overly assertive and rude?
- Getting familiar: how we make language choices
- Mindful communication and McMindfulness
- Miss Sophie and the Englishman in Germany: Shared knowledge in intercultural communication
- Misplaced humour and managing relations
- Getting people on board: Leadership, influencing and cultural values
- Done and dusted in a day? The ABC of intercultural development interventions
- Getting it right: Appropriateness in intercultural communication
- Male, pale and stale: Status and culture
- Me, me, me: Entrepreneurship and culture
- When push comes to shove: Codes of conduct and culture
- Corona and culture
- The rise and fall of intercultural leader par excellence Carlos Ghosn: Intercultural leadership competencies
To learn about my book publications, click here. To see a full list of my publications, visit my Konstanz University of Applied Sciences page.
