Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1: CQ FOR YOU
Your success in today’s globalized world requires an ability to adapt to a variety of cultural situations. Conventional wisdom has been telling us this for decades. But only in recent years have aca-demics discovered a proven way to quantify and develop this ability.
It’s called cultural intelligence, or CQ, and it’s defined as the capability to function effectively in a variety of cultural contexts.
All kinds of people are discovering the possibilities that CQ opens up for them. But improving your cultural intelligence does require some commitment and intentionality on your part. Rest easy. The rewards are well worth the effort.
The world is shrinking. Today, we’re connected to people from around the globe more than ever before. Fifty years ago, you could have lived most of your life surrounded by people who looked like you, believed like you, and saw the world pretty much the same way you do. A few individuals still manage to pull that off. But most of us encounter and work with people who look a believe, and think in radically different ways from us. We’ve learned that we don’t need to become like whomever we’re with.
But our effectiveness and success is largely dependent on our abili-ty to adapt to various cultural contexts. When we learn to effec-tively and respectfully interact with people from diverse cultures a we strike a gold mine of opportunity for personal and professional fulfillment.
The shifting realities of our rapidly globalized world are well documented in best-selling books like The World Is Flat by
Thomas Friedman and One World by Peter Singer. Most of us are well aware that globalization and worldwide connectivity are lunging forward with racing speed. Here are a few examples:
• 1 billion tourist visas are issued annually, and the number keeps rising.1
• General Electric calculates that 60 percent of its growth over the coming decade will come from the developing world, compared with 20 percent over the past decade.2
• 49 percent of U.S. kids five and younger are children of color.3
• China will soon be the number-one English-speaking country in the world.
• 67 percent of international air travel revenue is generated by Asian and Middle Eastern airlines, and the percentage is growing annually.4
• More than 1 million university students study abroad annually.
• 4.5 million North Americans participate in religious international mission trips each year.5
I doubt you’d pick up a book on cultural intelligence if you weren’t already convinced of our global and multicultural connec-tivity. But this is a book about you and your life in our borderless world. To what degree do you possess the capabilities needed to succeed in this cultural mosaic? Why do some of us succeed while others fail at cross-cultural effectiveness?
Intercultural success has little to do with your IQ or EQ (emotional intelligence). It’s primarily dependent on your CQ.
Everyone has a cultural intelligence quotient (CQ), and we can all improve our CQ. This book, along with the corresponding online
CQ Self-Assessment, will enable you to understand your CQ and give you the latest tested strategies for improving it.
