Page 14 - Cultures and Organizations

Preface xiii

ing for structure in their combined results. The name of this researcher
was Michael Minkov, and we learned to call him Misho. In 2007 Misho
published his analyses in a book, What Makes Us Different and Similar:
A New Interpretation of the World Values Survey and Other Cross-Cultural
Data, bringing the kind of progress in insight we had been hoping for. In
addition, Misho, as an East European, brought insider knowledge about a
group of nations missing in Geert’s original database and of great impor-
tance in the future of the continent.
For this new, 2010, third edition of Cultures and Organizations: Soft-
ware of the Mind, Misho has joined Gert Jan and Geert as a third coauthor.
The division of labor in our team is that Gert Jan has substantially contrib-
uted to Chapter 1 and entirely written Chapter 12. Misho has contributed
to Chapters 2, 4, and especially 7 and has entirely written Chapter 8. In
addition, each of us has commented on the work of his colleagues. Geert
takes responsibility for the fi nal text.
On a trip around the world several years ago, Geert bought three

world maps. All three are of the flat kind, projecting the surface of the

globe on a plane. The first shows Europe and Africa in the middle, the
Americas to the west, and Asia to the east. The terms the West and the East
were products of a Euro-centered worldview. The second map, bought in
Hawaii, shows the Pacifi c Ocean in the center, Asia and Africa on the left
(and Europe, tiny, in the far upper left-hand corner), and the Americas to
the right. From Hawaii, the East lies west and the West lies east! The third
map, bought in New Zealand, was like the second but upside down: south
on top and north at the bottom. Now Europe is in the far lower right-hand
corner. Which of these maps is right? All three, of course; Earth is round,
and any place on the surface is as much the center as any other. All peoples
have considered their country the center of the world; the Chinese call
China the “Middle Kingdom” (zhongguo), and the ancient Scandinavians

called their country by a similar name (midgardr). We believe that even
today most citizens, politicians, and academics in any country feel in their
hearts that their country is the middle one, and they act correspondingly.
These feelings are so powerful that it is almost always possible, when
reading a book, to determine the nationality of the author from the content
alone. The same, of course, applies to our own work—Geert and Gert Jan
are from Holland, and even when we write in English, the Dutch soft-
ware of our minds will remain evident to the careful reader. Misho’s East
European mind-set can also be detected. This makes reading the book by