Meet Mette Bjerrekær, Group Vice President at GRUNDFOS and Curious Cultural Investigator

In late October 2019, C3's book 'Global Perspectives: A Practical Guide to Navigating Across Cultures' came out.

The author of the book is C3's founder and CEO, Annette Dahl, who has since 2006 trained thousands of employees, executives, teams, and entire organizations to communicate and collaborate globally.

In 'Global Perspectives', she provides simple and effective tools that you can use to navigate cross-cultural situations along with powerful ways to gain new perspectives.

The book's foreword is written by one of C3's long-term customers, Mette Bjerrekær from Grundfos, and we're so happy and proud to share Mette's words with you here!

You'll find Mette's foreword below.

FOREWORD

In July 2012 I was just about to embark on what turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life. Being expatriated together with my husband and our two cats in exciting and different surroundings for, what was supposed to be three, but ended up being more than six wonderful years in China.

As part of our expatriation package, we were offered Cultural Training. A concept neither of us knew existed. Its purpose was to prepare us for living and working in a culture that’s just about the complete opposite of the Danish environment we had lived in all our lives. This was the first time I met Annette and C3 Consulting and we have stayed in contact ever since.

I still recall our first meeting when Annette mentioned that we’d be doing ourselves a big favor if from Day 1 we could manage to get into the habit of saying “This is interesting – I wonder why” instead of “That’s so strange – why on earth are they doing it like that?” It didn’t make much sense at the time, and to be honest neither my husband nor I fully understood what Annette was getting at. After all, how difficult could it be to live in China?

Knowing what I know today, 7 years on, I’m so happy that the ‘That’s interesting’ sentence somehow managed to stay in our minds. It made our (onboarding and) stay in China much easier and enlightening, compared to what we’d heard from some of the other expatriates we met out there. Being curious, instead of letting the default habits of our ‘reptile brain’ control us, saved us a lot of frustration and misunderstandings. We would encounter something we had never seen before at least once a week. Delightful or scary, each encounter became part of a continuous journey of gaining insights into the Chinese culture as well as meeting great new colleagues and friends.

If the book you’re holding in your hands right now affects you in the same way as it did me, you’re about to learn (or re-learn) what you can do to have more successful interactions with global teams – be it face-to-face or virtual. It will most likely trigger some reflections when reading through the examples (I actually smiled quite a lot and even laughed out loud a couple of times when reading the book, as it reminded me of my own mistakes – or ‘learning’ as I call it now :)). It will also provide you with some very easy-to-use yet high-impact tools that I have used with success in my professional as well as personal life. And, last but not least, you will be reminded that before you can be successful in any culture, you first need to get to know your own.

My copy of this book will be placed close to me on my office shelf – next to only a handful of other truly inspiring books I have read. It will definitely be read again, probably many times, and I will also eagerly lend it to anyone curious enough to ask what ‘Navigating across cultures’ is all about. In other words: Hurry up and read it! I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Bjerringbro October 2019

Mette Bjerrekær, Group Vice President at GRUNDFOS and Curious Cultural Investigator

The text above is the foreword for C3's new book 'Global Perspectives: A Practical Guide to Navigating Across Cultures'. The book is available on iMusic, WilliamDam.dk, Saxo, and various other online bookstores. Buy three books or more and get a discount of 10% – read more here.