Our book

Kate Berardo
Founder of Culturosity®; author; intercultural consultant and trainer
Bay Area, California, U.S.A.
The book Personal Leadership serves as an introduction to the 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.

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.

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. (This is an excerpt of a review first published in dialogin The Delta Intercultural Academy, a virtual knowledge community on culture and communication in international business.)

Gussie Fauntleroy
Freelance writer
The PL book has many great ideas. One that has been really helpful is the importance of being open to not knowing, and not needing to know until you need to know. It is such a simple thing, but so easy for the mind to override.

Mitchell R. Hammer, PhD
Originator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI); President, IDI, LLC; author
U.S.A.
Personal Leadership is a valuable reminder that we can shut down or creatively embrace cultural differences—the choice is ours. In this book, the two principles and six practices are authentically explained, with vivid examples clearly showing how these principles and practices can be applied in everyday situations. Personal Leadership provides, as the authors state, "a pathway towards a peaceable world," helping individuals transform negative emotions and conflict into productive and creative action.

Linh Nguyen
Associate Director, Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs, University of Michigan
U.S.A.
Personal Leadership truly has helped me get through some of the most challenging months of my professional and personal life. I thank you—and your book—for teaching and being alongside me as I work through it all.

Jo Parfitt
Founder, Summertime Publishing; author; expat
This is a wonderful book, written by people with lots of intercultural experience, so its advice is even more appropriate for those of us who, like me, live abroad. I particularly like some of their ideas that can be incorporated into our daily lives, and that jolt us out of those moments when we are in danger of becoming automatons. They remind us to stop for a moment and think. Are we enjoying what we are doing at that moment? If we are, then what is it exactly we enjoy? What are the emotions attached to that task and how do they make us feel? If we are not enjoying it, then exactly what is it that we are not enjoying? And so on. The more practised you become at being mindful, the more easily you will learn to find and trust your instinct and to know if you are about to do the right or wrong thing. (This is an excerpt of a review first published in January 2008.)

Donna M. Stringer, PhD
Owner, Donna Stringer Consulting; author; international speaker and trainer
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
This book is a tremendous resource for those wishing to increase their personal effectiveness in both their own lives and in their interactions with others. Outlining two principles and six practices, the authors provide many examples of how their system works and offer exercises that help the reader internalize powerful ways of acting and "being" in the world.