For three decades, I have been wondering about the relationship between culture and performance. My whole life has been a global trip. I was born in Spain, where I attended a French school (Lycée Français D'Alicante) since the age of three. I would spend my summers in Ireland to learn English. In 1986, I jumped over the Atlantic as an exchange student to complete my high school education at Walled Lake, in Michigan, USA. I decided to stay to complete my Bachelor's at Central Michigan University, moving to Glendale, Arizona, to fulfill my dream of getting Master's in International Management from Thunderbird. Then, I started my professional cross-cultural adventure. For over twenty years, I worked in sales, marketing, and strategy planning in four different continents, always wondering why two people would look at the same fact and come up with a different conclusion.
In this book, I aimed to provide you with some understanding on how human complexity affects our daily decisions and filters what we observe. I provided you with a summary of how the brain works and how our own nature tricks us into filtering data and facts in very specific ways, tainted and influenced by our own cultural background and experience. Many of those filters are based on prejudices that we have developed over time and I provide with an overview on how those were developed and how they affect us.
In the second part of the book, we dive into the complexity of our business world. This is a world that is in constant change and turmoil, and where yesterday's answers are no longer applicable to today's issues. We are faced with challenges, not problems, that do not have a clear solution but required from us quick creative actions. This world forces us to evaluate our own horizontal development (knowledge and skills – the "what" we think) and our own vertical development (The "how" we think).
Finally, in the last part of the book, I present solutions that would help you become an inclusive leader that effectively taps and manages the diversity in your organization. I introduce you to a series of tools that will grow your self-awareness as well as support the implementation of processes that will further neutralize the effect of those human biases.
This book is built on my own experience as well as many years of research on the topic of diversity, cross-cultural management and inclusive leadership. I provided you with a long list of sources that would further support your own development. Instead of adding the sources at the end of the book, I have created footnotes for easier reference. If you are like me, you will want to dig more into these topics as you read. I hope that having easy access to the footnotes will help you deepen your knowledge.
I wrote this book after closely working with many executives and organizations whose work is affected by the complexity of our world. During different executive workshops, I received many interesting questions on these topics and I always felt like there was more to the answers. Through extensive research, I addressed those questions and provided you with the background on the why but also on how to overcome those challenges. In "The Shadow of Bias on Leadership", you will find a practical manual that would help you grow the diversity of your organization.