language courses

Get Culture AND Language!

All of our culture programs now come with a complimentary language course! We have been offering online language learning courses for business professionals for more than a year now. Enabled via our partnership with Gymglish our clients have been able to choose French and English as available course work. As one of our service improvements for this year we are now happy to announce that we added Spanish and German …

The Mayor who Manages a Multicultural Municipality [The Culture Guy Podcast]

Ted Terry on how a hyper-diverse community becomes inclusive He is in his 30s. He has been called a hipster. And he is the mayor who has been putting a small town just outside of Atlanta on the map. Ted Terry shot to fame via an episode of season 2 of the hugely successful Netflix show Queer Eye. during which …

How To Market Your Business Across The Atlantic

Marketing and selling products and services around the world can be both promising and profitable – it can also be a minefield and full of missed opportunities. No matter whether you are selling Nike in Düsseldorf or Adidas in Dallas. Or if you want consumers in Hanover to spread peanut butter on their toast and people in Houston to dip …

Daren Menabney The Culture Guy odcast

Why Focusing on Differences Won’t Help You Build Commonality [The Culture Guy Podcast]

Darren Menabney talks about the things you may want to stop doing when working across cultures When Darren Menabney moved to Japan in 2011 it was to attend an MBA program in Tokyo. Before that, the Northern Ireland-born Torontonian spent over twenty years working for the federal government in Canada, in the Departments of Revenue, Industry, Foreign Affairs, and Defense. Today, …

Talking Mind, Body, and Business with Brian Kelly

No matter where in the world you work, establishing and maintaining a business requires more than an idea, a plan, and execution. In order to be successful professionally, you also want to thrive as an individual. Because all business problems are also personal problems. So, whether you work on your own business or you are employed – your mind and …

body language

Learn to Read Body Language Across Cultures for Global Business Success

No matter how strong your foreign language skills may be – without the ability to effectively interpret body language across cultures, you’ll struggle to understand all the complex communicative details of global business. So how can you learn to make sense of nonverbal cues in different cultural contexts and feel more confident in a range of situations? You may find …

expat management

Money, Time, Manpower – Stinginess With a Tiny Slice May Cost You the Entire Expat Pie

Any cost-conscious organization sending employees abroad needs to be prudent and justify all the expenses of an expatriate assignment. Smart organizations know that a small percentage of the overall expat management cost protects their investment in global talent. International employee relocations can fail for various reasons: A company may have chosen the wrong team member for the overseas job. The expat …

Get the Latest on Developing a Global HR Strategy

In order to help global assignees and their families succeed when relocating internationally, human resources departments in multinational organizations need to have state-of-the-art tools to manage employee mobility and they need to have a wellformed global HR strategy. On September 27, 2018 language services firms TransNation Translations and Fluency Corp will host a lunch and learn session for human resources professionals …

Growing up as a black TCK in Germany [The Culture Guy Podcast]

Trevor Gillies talks about his experience with racism and ethnic inequality as a U.S. third-culture kid in Deutschland Spending your childhood and adolescence abroad and being raised as a third-culture kid (TCK) is a unique experience. As the child of U.S. service members, Trevor Gillies grew up as the only black kid in a Southern Germany town in the ’80s …

How Culture Considerably Influences Children’s Development

From educational toys to governmental guidelines and detailed nursery progress reports, there are lots of resources available to help parents track and facilitate their children’s development. But while there are tricks we can use to teach children to talk, count, draw or respect others, a surprisingly big part of how they develop is determined by the culture they grow up …

How Unmanaged Diversity Will Lead to a Mess in Global Business [The Culture Guy Podcast]

When companies fail abroad, 50% to 70% of the time this is due to cultural differences that have not been addressed, says Sophie Lechner. The CEO of Global Commerce Education and creator of The G2 Experience is dedicated to making her clients aware of the dissimilarities and contrasts between markets and countries. Sophie Lechner about how organizing diversity properly will …

Can cultural differences between France and Croatia impact the World Cup Final?

The 2018 World Cup final will be football’s clash of the year, as France plays Croatia for the ultimate title. But will a contest on the pitch also translate to a collision of cultures? Right before the start of this year’s World Cup we put together an overview of all the cultures which were represented at the tournament. Here now is a …

Why knowing Spanish isn’t good enough to be successful in Latin America [The Culture Guy Podcast]

Adjusting to cultural differences between Spain and the Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas Spanish is the world’s second most common language with more than 400 million native speakers. Comparable to English it has been a lingua franca for centuries and you’ll find people on five continents whose first language is Spanish. This linguistic commonality, however, does not translate into cultural …

webinar #GermanCultureGap

Are Mexico and the United States really two distant neighbors?

Learn how to remove US-Mexican cultural roadblocks during this webinar 🇲🇽 💥 🇺🇸 With immigration and border security issues unresolved and while NAFTA is undergoing an overhaul with unclear outcome, trade relations between Mexico and the United States remain vital to both countries’ bottom line. The legal and political frameworks of business across North America may experience a reorganization, yet the nature of …

Younger Isn’t Necessarily Better When Learning a Second Language

It is often thought that it is better to start learning a second language at a young age. But research shows that this is not necessarily true. In fact, the best age to start learning a second language can vary significantly, depending on how the language is being learned. The belief that younger children are better language learners is based …

How Learning a New Language Builds Cultural Competence and Tolerance

Why is foreign language study important? There are many benefits to knowing more than one language. For example, it has been shown that aging adults who speak more than one language have less likelihood of developing dementia. Additionally, the bilingual brain becomes better at filtering out distractions, and learning multiple languages improves creativity. Evidence also shows that learning subsequent languages …

Atlanta mural ATL downtown

Join us at the Global HR Business Conference

Learn, Engage, Connect, Exchange Ideas, Collaborate The Global HR Business series of conferences is coming to Atlanta, GA this April. Event organizer Edwin B. Cohen has been putting together an impressive speaker roster. This full-day event on April 11, 2018 will bring together professionals from various industries. Ed and his team have been connecting business people from across silos, from across …

How “untranslatable” words from other languages can reveal the secrets to happiness

Language shapes the limits of people’s world view The limits of our language are said to define the boundaries of our world. This is because in our everyday lives, we can only really register and make sense of what we can name. We are restricted by the words we know, which shape what we can and cannot experience. It is …

How this psychologist discovered there are (at least) 14 different kinds of love

Is there a way to define “love”? No emotion, surely, is as cherished and sought after as love. Yet on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, or Valentine’s day, we can often be misled into thinking that it consists solely in the swooning, star-crossed romance of falling deeply “in love”. But on reflection, love is far more complex. Indeed, arguably no …

Combining Czech, Japanese, and U.S. Influences to Boost Global Business [The Culture Guy Podcast]

From Third Culture Kid to International Business Etiquette Expert She lived abroad as a child and as an adult; she studied, worked, and traveled to more than 70 countries on 7 continents; she speaks French and Czech. Today Sharon Schweitzer has built a career around understanding cultural differences and the tremendous role they play in building strong and successful international business …