Chapter 19 — Exercises

These exercises take the chapter off the page and into the actual decisions you'll make as someone who hires, manages, or gets hired across cultures. Some ask you to read a candidate; some ask you to redesign a policy; some ask you to catch your own talent assumptions in the act of pretending to be "best practice." Work them with a pen and, where you can, with a real role or a real person in mind.

Selected answers and sample responses appear in Appendix: Answers to Selected Exercises. Exercises marked with ✍️ feed directly into your Cultural Intelligence Portfolio.

Part A — Check Your Understanding

Short answers in your own words. If you can't answer one, reread the matching section before moving on.

  1. Why does an Eastern CV often include a photo, date of birth, and marital status — and why does leaving them off sometimes read as evasive rather than professional?
  2. Restate the legal-versus-cultural tension in one sentence: what should a Western employer adapt to in an Eastern CV, and what should they hold firm on?
  3. In a modesty culture, why might the self-effacing candidate be the stronger hire and the polished self-promoter the weaker one? What is the panel's "gut feel for confidence" actually measuring?
  4. The chapter says cultural adaptation takes six to twelve months. Name the four "lanes" of onboarding and identify which one most Western companies skip.
  5. Give three Western "perks" (autonomy, flat structure, etc.) and, for each, how it can read as an anxiety rather than a benefit to some Eastern employees.
  6. Contrast "up or out" and "long-term loyalty" in terms of what loyalty runs to in each model.
  7. Why is it cruel, specifically, for an up-or-out company to tell employees from a loyalty culture that "we're like a family"?
  8. The chapter warns against two opposite over-corrections: "in Asia, always prefer the quiet candidate" and "Koreans want hierarchy, so offer hierarchy." Explain in two or three sentences why both are just new stereotypes — and what the real underlying skill is.

Part B — Check Your Assumptions

The core skill: catching your own talent system pretending to be neutral. For each statement, decide whether it states a universal best practice or a WEIRD/Western cultural preference. Then write one sentence describing a culture or context that would see it differently.

  1. "Putting your photo and age on a CV is unprofessional."
  2. "A strong candidate sells themselves confidently in the interview."
  3. "Changing jobs every few years shows healthy ambition."
  4. "Flat, non-hierarchical organizations are more motivating to work in."
  5. "Staying twenty years at one company suggests a lack of drive."
  6. "The best way to keep top talent is to give them autonomy and freedom."

The point is not that the Western view is wrong. Each statement is a reasonable position inside its own system — and each feels like obvious good sense until you meet a system optimized for something else. Noticing the feeling of "but that's just true" is the whole exercise.

Part C — Decode This

Each item is a real hiring or retention moment. Write what the Western reader probably assumes it means, then a plausible alternative meaning inside a different operating system.

  1. You ask a Japanese candidate about their proudest achievement and they spend most of the answer crediting their manager and team, mentioning their own role only when pressed.
  2. A CV from a Gulf applicant lists nationality and religion near the top, before work history.
  3. Your excellent Korean employee, in a stay-or-go conversation, mentions that her parents keep asking whether her company is "stable."
  4. A candidate's résumé shows fourteen years at a single Japanese employer, with slow, steady title changes and no job-hopping.
  5. You offer a high-performing Chinese engineer a "lead your own initiative, total autonomy" role and they seem hesitant and ask who they'll be reporting to.
  6. A recruiter in Mumbai tells you a strong candidate "can join immediately" — but a candidate in Tokyo for the same role says they'll need three months before they can start.
  7. You praise one Eastern team member by name in an all-hands for outstanding work, and afterward that employee seems subdued and their teammates noticeably cooler toward them.

Part D — What Would You Do?

Real situations, each with several responses. There is no single correct answer — pick the one closest to your instinct, then write why a culturally intelligent person might choose differently.

1. The photo CV. You hire under EU/UK law. Your recruiter in Shanghai forwards a shortlist of CVs, all with photos, ages, and marital status. Do you (a) reject them as non-compliant and ask for re-submission without those fields; (b) accept them as the local norm, but instruct your panel to ignore the protected fields and document job-relevant criteria; (c) ask only the women to remove their photos; (d) quietly let the information influence you since "it's already there"? Which protects both the candidates and you legally — and which exposes you to a discrimination claim?

2. The modest star. Two finalists from Tokyo. Candidate A is fluent in Western-style self-promotion ("I drove this, I delivered that"); Candidate B keeps crediting the team and has to be coaxed to describe their own role. Your gut prefers A. Do you (a) hire A — confidence matters; (b) hire B on a hunch that modesty signals strength; (c) re-interview both with descriptive behavioral questions to see actual substance under the styles; (d) ask B to "be more confident" and see if they can? What does each choice reveal about whether you're assessing talent or cultural self-presentation?

3. The six-month wall. Your Indian hire, relocated to your London office, was warm and eager at first but has gone quiet in month three — less forthcoming in meetings, seeming less happy. Do you (a) worry you mis-hired and start documenting performance concerns; (b) recognize the classic months-two-to-four adaptation dip and increase support, mentorship, and check-ins; (c) tell them to "speak up more, that's how we do things here" and leave it at that; (d) assume they'll sort it out alone? Which reading reflects what the chapter says about adaptation timelines?

4. The retention offer. Your loyal eight-year employee in Seoul, a quiet high performer, has a competing offer from a startup. Do you (a) match the money and offer maximum autonomy and remote freedom; (b) ask what actually matters to them, while keeping in mind stability, a clear ladder, and senior mentorship may outweigh "freedom"; (c) tell them job-hopping looks bad and they should be loyal; (d) let them go, assuming anyone leaving wasn't committed? Which approach calibrates to their definition of a good job rather than yours?

5. The blanket policy. Your global head of HR, trying to be efficient, proposes a single worldwide rule: "All CVs reviewed by our company must be anonymized — no photos, no ages, no marital status, full stop — to ensure fairness everywhere." Do you (a) endorse it as clean and consistent; (b) push back that a blanket rule built on one region's law and norms may confuse candidates and recruiters elsewhere, and propose a structured, fields-controlled application form instead so everyone is assessed on the same job-relevant data without rejecting locally normal CVs; (c) apply it only in the West and ignore it in Asia; (d) leave each office to do whatever it wants? What does each option get right and wrong about balancing your legal exposure against local norms — and which best reflects "adapt to the candidate's norms, hold firm to your law"?

6. The "us versus them" team. You manage a mixed team: two Western engineers who've each had three jobs in five years and are openly eyeing their next move, and two East Asian engineers who've been with the company eight and ten years respectively. The Western pair privately call the long-tenured pair "lifers with no ambition"; the long-tenured pair privately call the Western pair "mercenaries who'll bolt the second it's hard." Do you (a) side with whichever group matches your own instinct; (b) name to the team that both are reading the other's loyalty through their own career model, and reframe each as a legitimate strength; (c) tell the long-tenured pair to be more ambitious and the Western pair to be more committed; (d) ignore it as office gossip? Which response treats both career models as rational rather than as a character flaw in the other side?

Part E — Cultural Translation / Try This

Part 1 — Rewrite the interview question. Each question below is phrased to demand self-promotion, which a modesty-culture candidate will find hard to answer well. Rewrite each as a descriptive or behavioral question that lets them show substance without boasting.

  1. "Why are you the best person for this job?"
  2. "What's your greatest accomplishment?"
  3. "Tell me about a time you were a leader."

Part 2 — Rewrite the retention pitch. You're trying to keep a stability-and-mentorship-oriented Eastern employee. Each line below is a standard Western retention pitch that may land flat or backfire. Rewrite each so it speaks to stability, a clear path, or mentorship instead.

  1. "We're super flat here — no hierarchy, just do your thing."
  2. "We won't hold you back; grow here or grow elsewhere, no hard feelings."
  3. "You'll have total autonomy — you won't have anyone breathing down your neck."

Part F — Reflection & Extension

  1. Your own loyalty model. Which career model is yours — up-or-out, long-term loyalty, or some blend? Write a page on where it came from (family, industry, generation, country) and on one situation where the other model would actually serve you or your team better.
  2. A reverse mirror. The Western "thin" CV — no photo, no age, no family — would strike a relationship-first professional as oddly cold and incomplete, as if you're hiding who you are. Describe the Western CV the way an anthropologist would: what is it optimizing for, what does its absence of personal detail communicate, and what does that absence cost?
  3. The honesty box, applied to you. The chapter is even-handed: each model carries real costs. Up-or-out buys dynamism but pays in anxiety, short-termism, and weak institutional memory; long-term loyalty buys deep trust and firm knowledge but pays in slow advancement for stars, difficulty removing weak performers, and a brutal shock when layoffs finally come. Pick the model your own organization runs on and write honestly about the bill it is paying — the cost you'd rather not look at — and one thing you could borrow from the other model to soften it.

✍️ Portfolio Builder. In your Cultural Intelligence Portfolio, create a section titled "Hiring & Keeping People in [my culture]." Build a one-page hiring-and-retention brief for your chosen Eastern culture with four parts: (1) CV norms — what's expected, and what's legally off-limits for you to use; (2) Interview style — modesty or self-promotion, plus two questions you'd adapt; (3) Retention levers — the top three that actually move people there, and one of your company's perks that might fall flat; (4) Career model — up-or-out, loyalty, or shifting, and one management change you'd make to support someone on the opposite model. You'll use this brief directly the next time you hire across this gap — and revisit it at Chapter 40 to see how much sharper your reads have become.