One of the comments you often hear from travelers to foreign countries is, "They may talk (dress, eat, etc.) differently, but underneath they're just like us." But this is profoundly mistaken and potentially dangerous romanticism. People underneath are not alike. People begin with different operating environments and run different software. People have different databases and process information differently. As a result, they arrive at different results. As we saw earlier, culture is the whole view of the universe from which people assess the meaning of life and their appropriate response to it.
To assume you know how someone else is thinking based on how you see things is called projected cognitive similarity. It occurs when you think you know someone else's perceptions, judgments, attitudes, and values because you assume they are like your own. This can lead to disrupted communication and even conflict. After all, people may have different goals. Even when people may agree on goals—say, for example, the corporate goals of an organization—they may expect to reach those goals by different methods.
Business is multicultural; business is worldwide No organization can afford to go along believing that members of different cultures are all seeking to conform to one culture, or that one day differences will cease to exist. Therefore, the key for business is to find ways for people who think differently to work together.
