Book Reviews

Review by Kate Berardo


This review was first published in dialogin The Delta Intercultural Academy, a virtual knowledge community on culture and communication in international business."

Personal Leadership is a timely and foundational contribution to the intercultural field.

As interculturalists in a global world, we live in interesting times. People today are being shaped by multiple societies as increasing numbers of people live in different places and are interacting across cultures is ways not feasible even a decade ago. Thanks to the Internet, sub-cultures that are interest-based rather than place-based are forming rapidly and transcending traditional boundaries and borders.

In this environment, our work is arguably all the more important. Interactions across various types and layers of cultures are growing, and therefore so too does the need for intercultural services.

But in this new environment, are our tools—which are focused mainly on national cultural differences and based often on dated research—still effective?

We have entered a new era that is situationally rather than geographically focused, sub-cultured instead of umbrella-cultured, multifaceted rather than generalized. This makes it increasingly difficult to find that person who falls in the center of the bell curve, who fully represents the ‘mainstream’ or the ‘average’ norm for any culture.

Though this reality does not undo the importance of our existing models and approaches, it does highlight the need for our field to respond by creating more tools that supercede specific cultural environments and that focus on developing the skills needed to work effectively across a variety of differences.

This mindset and behavioral work is exactly what Personal Leadership promises, and why it is a fundamental and timely contribution to the intercultural field.

Personal Leadership is a methodology designed to enable people to take leadership of their experiences, to choose to stay open and to learn both about themselves and others rather than shut down or simply do what they’ve always done. At the heart of Personal Leadership are two principles: 1) mindfulness, meaning being fully conscious and present and employing multiple intelligences, and 2) creativity, meaning being curious and seeking out alternatives in interactions. It also involves the six practices of:

  1. Attending to judgment
  2. Attending to emotion
  3. Attending to physical sensation
  4. Cultivating stillness
  5. Engaging ambiguity
  6. Aligning with vision

Barbara Schaetti, Sheila Ramey, and Gordon Watanabe, the developers of Personal Leadership, have been at work for over a decade building and refining this methodology. They are transparent in recognizing the variety of disciplines that have informed and shaped their approach, which spans religion to science with theories of self-development and leadership in-between. The authors therefore cite everything from Buddhist principles to medical experiments along with the work of the publicly popular Stephen Covey to make salient the principles and practices of Personal Leadership.

The book Personal Leadership serves as an introduction to this methodology, helping readers primarily to understand its principles and practices. Beyond understanding, there are also a few exercises to help people begin applying the methodology as well. Part one of the book introduces Personal Leadership and the two principles that are at its heart. The six accompanying practices are introduced in part two through a series of examples, leaving the final section to focus on the integrative process of putting the principles and practices into action through a process called the critical moment dialogue. Throughout the book, the authors bring concepts to life both in a low-context and high-context fashion. Bulleted lists, key point highlights, and direct descriptions are integrated with stories, haiku, and symbolic quotes.

The strengths of the book are numerous. At a practical level, the high and low context examples enable readers of all types to engage with its concepts, making the book very accessible. In addition, the critical moment dialogue simultaneously allows you 1) to zoom in and focus on the key pivotal point or points where a conversation can take a turn for the worse, or, 2) to step back and look at an entire interaction, situation, or relationships on the whole. In this way, the critical moment dialogue is an elastic tool, which can be used in basic form for split-second pausing, digesting and more informed proceeding, and in complete form for longer-term reflection and action.

The challenge of a book of this nature is two-fold. First, it has to ensure that people can really grasp and own the concepts it offers at a full and holistic level, not just a cognitive one. The structure and sheer number of examples and stories do much to address this challenge. Secondly, and building from the first challenge, a book can only suggest how to practice the methodology it introduces, it can’t ensure you actually follow it. The end-of-chapter exercises and integrative process piece on the critical moment dialogue are a good start to addressing this challenge. Moreover, in the transparent spirit of the book, these challenges are something the authors openly acknowledge. They note that Personal Leadership is ‘simple on the surface, and as profound as you want it to be the deeper you are willing to go’ (151) and ‘just another methodology until we start to practice’ it (148).

In summary, there will likely still be a place, and an important place, for cultural dimensions, value descriptions, and generalizations about cultural difference for decades to come. Yet such knowledge-focused tools are only a small part of the cultural competence equation and can be rendered futile when not matched with the right mindset, skills, and behaviors. Personal Leadership helps address this need. It rests on the powerful premise that intercultural development is a lifestyle and daily practice—not simply a skill you get taught in a cultural training course—and offers a new approach that transcends a focus on specific cultures or limit to training or teaching environments. As such, it is an approach synonymous with and symbolic of the intercultural work of the future.

Kate Berardo is an intercultural consultant and trainer based in California. She is the co-author of Putting Diversity to Work and the founder of Culturosity.

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