Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFilippo.

One set of lessons I feel I've learned in my life over and over again is how to reinvent myself in a new place.

I've lived in a double-digit number of countries and in the United States

I've lived in Detroit, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and in each place

there's a different set of values. There's a different type of person there and a different set of norms. In other words

there's a different culture and I realize that many of us work on distributed teams. We manage and work with people from different countries or cultures

or perhaps we're an expat living in another culture ourselves

even if we're an expat from Detroit living in LA as opposed to an American living in China.

Today we're talking with my friend Andy Milinski. He's a professor of international business and organizational behavior over at Brandeis Business School

and one of his many specialties is that he's a trainer for cross-cultural adaptation.

In this episode we'll hear about common intercultural trip wires. We'll learn how to diagnose our cultural differences and assess situations and cultural context

so that we know how to generate rapport with people from other places and from other cultures.

We'll also uncover some processes and practicals to avoid common miscommunications or crossing the streams as it were

when it comes to communication types. For example, do we tell someone directly what we're thinking or do we need to ease into things a little?

There's a whole lot more in this episode so if you're working internationally, you're working with people from another culture

moving to another country or even another town, this episode is worth a listen.

All right, here's Andy Milinski.

Andy you've been on the show before and you've got kind of an interesting background for what we're going to discuss today.

I would love to know how you got into becoming so to speak some kind of cultural adaptation expert, right?

Because everybody works globally now. It's hard to not work globally.

I suppose if you're on a retail sales floor that might be one thing but how did you become interested in this area so early on?

I was born and raised in Boston. I did not live a multicultural existence. I never went out of the country.

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