This posting reminds me of a book that fell by the wayside in 1997 but is well worth finding a copy of: “Mastering the Infinite Game”, by Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars. (The book fell off the radar screen as it had the misfortune to discuss the differences between “Asian” business practice and its focus on relationship, collaboration and the long game vs “Western” winner-take-all contracting and deal-making/-breaking, concluding that the Asian model would win the day, just as the Thai bhat started the Asian currency crisis and economic meltdown of 1997-98.) Coupled with their previous work, “The Seven Cultures of Capitalism”, these two books demonstrate that even Western business comes in a variety of styles and ‘flavours’, some of which are better suited to a collaborative model than others.

And this points out one other thing about the “Western” business model – especially as practiced by far too many of the graduates of Western business education: the notion that nothing much matters other than financial engineering and slam-dunk market advantages. To come into a boardroom and spend time talking about other cultures, or societal differences in trust-formation (Francis Fukayama, “Trust”, another work on differences in business practices), or even some of the work done at Gartner by myself and Jonathan Furlonger back in 1997-98 on multi-country operations in Europe and which national cultures were better suited for certain kinds of work (due to their ways of doing things) is, in many cases to be considered an incorrigible nut case who is “not one of us”. And that, in turn, reinforces an anti-collaborative, winner-take-all approach, due to the monoculture of thinking.