About the Book

During his five-decade global career Richard R. Gesteland did business in 55 different countries. His 30-year effort to understand the differences in negotiating behavior around the world provided the material for the first edition of Cross-Cultural Business Behavior. Richard’s expatriate management assignments in six different countries yielded further valuable insights for the book. New cases and examples for later editions came from his 20 years as management consultant and workshop leader for international companies all across the globe.

Because cultures change, the book’s business behavior profiles were updated in later editions. Of course readers’ needs also change, so fresh cases, anecdotes and examples on managing across cultures have been added in the fifth edition. Hence the subtitle of the latest edition: A Guide to Global Management. 

Richard made his first export sale at age 17, shipping game birds from his family’s pheasant farm to a Canadian hunting preserve. To prepare for an international career he studied French, German and Russian at the University of Wisconsin along with cultural anthropology, international economics and cultural geography.

The first of his eight overseas placements took Richard and his wife to Frankfurt am Main with a Chicago export management company. Later came further expat assignments as a global sourcing executive, first in Austria and then in India twice, Brazil, Germany and Singapore. Each of these assignments required him to train his local employees in negotiating with business partners from differing cultural backgrounds.

In 1987 after Richard’s article on cross-cultural negotiating behavior appeared in the UN International Trade Forum the UNITC invited him to run a training workshop for business negotiators from developing countries in the Asia Pacific region. Recognized as a global   authority on managing and negotiating across cultures, in 1989 the Export Institute of Singapore asked Richard to create and teach a new course titled Cross-Cultural Business Behavior.

After Richard established his Global Management consultancy in 1993, Niels Brock and the Copenhagen Business School invited him to become a visiting lecturer. That in turn led to the offer from the CBS Press to write a book based on his lectures, Cross-Cultural Business Behavior, now in its fifth edition. 

Today, after 26 years of living abroad expat assignments with six children born in four different countries, Richard and Hopi once again live in southern Wisconsin.

RRG

Oregon, Wisconsin

Autumn 2018