ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the foundation for this book by examining the questions: As leaders why should we care about the intersection of culture and business? Why are globalization and evolving demographics increasingly more complex? What is culture? How do we identify, let alone define, something so complex and abstract? A more technical definition would describe globalization as: the increasing interdependence among national governments, businesses, non-profit organizations, and individual citizens. The drivers facilitating globalization are the free movement of goods, services, knowledge, and communication across national boundaries; the development of new technologies—think high-speed Internet and air travel; the lowering of tariffs and other obstacles to such movement; and human migration, especially from developing to developed countries. Many countries have hundreds of languages that are mutually unintelligible, which creates the need to learn several in order to communicate within the community, the marketplace, and at work.
