The management topic that keeps my brain busy this year is "dealing with different cultures in projects". Recently I read an interesting discussion about the differences between doing Project Management in Western countries and India and China. One of the participants in the discussion geared my attention towards the work of Geert Hofstede (who is also Dutch ).

Hofstede has performed decades of research on cultures in business settings. He has defined five cultural dimensions and provides us with a web page where you can compare countries along those dimensions.

His five dimensions are:

Power Distance, that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.

Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, that is the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups.

Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found.

Uncertainty Avoidance deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man's search for Truth.

Long-Term Orientation versus short-term orientation.