Roots and wings

'Transcultural manager' is a better term than 'global manager, says Karl Moore, professor* at McGill University, Montreal, in an article for World Business (subscription required).  He argues, and I agree, that a 'global manager' who operates sucessfully across different cultures and has a 'global management style' does not and cannot really exist.  A transcultural manager, however, who is at home in two or more cultures, does exist but is a "living paradox" who has roots and wings; roots in their own home culture but wings that have taken them elsewhere and allowed them to develop a real comfort in one or more different cultures, in effect having multiple selves.

Moore says this idea of multiple selves is not new, and refers to William James**'s1890 Principles of Psychology, in which James suggested that rather than a unified self concept, people have multiple selves that they demonstrate in various situations.  Apparently this view has been expanded by post modern psychologists.

This comes as a relief to me, as I have had feelings of resistance towards all the personality and team building tests that I have taken in my career, including Myers Briggs, TMI, Insight etc.  This started with the graduate trainee test at Unilever ("are you warm hearted or cool headed?") and more recently one which tried to deduce whether I preferred working alone, logically and analytically or was more convivial and spontaneous.  This was impossible to answer, because as a person running a training and consulting business from my own home, there are times when I enjoy working alone, logically and analytically doing the accounts and growling at anyone who interrupts, and when I am at a client's running a training session, I am Ms Conviviality (I hope).  I even had a Myers Briggs tester tell me I must have been lying or mis answering questions to have switched from Extrovert to Introvert over the years, when to me it seemed quite understandable that as a rare high profile non-Japanese woman in a Japanese company I was more extroverted, and then when I ended up running a software development team in a British company full of pushy, aggressive people (the company, not the team), I was more introverted.

*Moore is professor of strategy and leadership at McGill, and yet in today's Financial Times, Henry Mintzberg, professor of strategy at McGill, denounces the teaching of 'leadership'.  Must make for some interesting faculty dinner table discussions.

**Another coincidence - William James is a brother of Henry James, who has been the focus of much of my mother's research into the meaning of clothes in fiction - clothes being one of the ways we express our multiple selves, I would say.