Interestingly enough, I felt that my intercultural fluency in week 2 was developed more through my interaction with my diverse classmates than the Danes in our group. This begs the question of “Why go as far as Denmark to learn the lesson?”. And I don’t know the answer to that. Furthermore, I felt I learned more regarding inter-age differences from the Danes, than specific cultural lessons. But, staying on task, I do have some observations regarding cultures and my personal growth in working with diverse people.

Stereotypes are difficult to overcome and I could sense that our group needed to ground itself to get past appearances in order to focus on each of our strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we needed to trust each other early on and this was not a foregone conclusion. Since we’ve all been trained at various schools, in a variety of countries, I felt that I leveled different standards on people depending on where they were from. I began to realize that focusing on the person and trusting not only was the easier way to work, but gave for better results. This seems like a simple proposition, but when feelings and previous experiences are so deeply routed, it is difficult to overcome what comes naturally.

The evolution of my intercultural fluency has come to a point where I can work well with many different cultures in an efficient manner, without wasting time on making assumptions one way or the other.

The CSR lecture covered a number of interesting points. What came to the forefront for me in the potential inconsistency in reporting CSR across cultures/countries. Although standards might mandate CSR, we must be cognoscente of the source of the information. For example, as pointed out by one of the CBS MBAs, volunteering in the US has a completely different connotation that in Scandinavia. And it was interesting to see how philanthropy in the Nordics entails more cultural pursuits, and this is largely due to the governments’ taking on most social aspects of aid. So, as previously mentioned, CSR across borders is difficult to assess.