Happy Chinese New Year from Sydney Australia!

Chinese families around the world are beginning to prepare or are travelling home for the Chinese New Year celebrations.  This year (the Year of the Dragon) the New Year begins on January 23^rd and ends on 9 February 2013.  The New Year celebration is known as the Spring Festival and officially lasts for 14 days ending with the Lantern festival.

If you have colleagues or friends in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore or Taiwan

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Journaling to increase cultural intelligence

At this time of year many of us are writing.  In journals and notebooks and blogs people are recording their hopes, dreams and plans for the New Year. 

There’s a significant amount of research which points to the power of writing with benefits ranging from increases in well-being, decreases in ill health, greater goal achievement and self efficacy. 

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Gifts across cultures

From a cultural perspective gifts can be a challenging issue. I was laughing with some colleagues recently about my embarrassing faux pas, years ago in China, asking the shop assistant to wrap a wedding gift in white paper. Very appropriate in Australia, but very inappropriate in China where the colour white is traditionally associated more with death and mourning. My colleagues had similar stories about their experiences in China of almost giving inappropriate gifts such as a clock and a set of knives.

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4 things not to do on an international business trip!

On a recent business trip to Hong Kong I made a number of critical travelling errors so I thought I would document them to acknowledge my foolishness and hopefully prevent them from happening to me again (public humiliation is good like that!).  And although with me, I’m usually all about focusing on the culture –these mistakes weren’t cultural based but they did impact on my effectiveness in the culture!

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Culture shock: working on foreign shores

Earlier this month, the Australian government ran events in Athens and Berlin called Skills Australia Needs. It was an attempt to lure Greeks and Germans to fill shortages in industries such as healthcare and engineering.

It's all very well to attract foreign workers, but once they are here and working in Aussie companies, what happens?

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