Greg Mortenson embodies something I have been feeling all my life but I have had trouble articulating.

The former mountaineer and founder of the Central Asian Institute (CAI) has dedicated his life to building schools and promoting education in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since 1993, CAI has established 131 schools serving more than 58,000 students, most of them girls.
Before embarking on a project, Greg works with the local communities, including their tribal and religious leaders, to gain their friendship and to make sure that their hopes and expectations are respected.

He writes in his new book Stones into Schools: “When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn.”

This sentence is the best lesson in cross-cultural communication I have ever come across.

Greg and his colleagues have built schools in some of the most troubled regions of Afghanistan like the Wakhan Corridor and the notorious Kunar and Nuristan.
They believe in the Afghans’ hunger for peace after 30 years of war. They want to support their dream of educating their children.

More and more people are waking up to the importance of Greg’s message. I was delighted to read that his previous book Three Cups of  Tea, has been made required reading for all officers enrolled in counterinsurgency courses at the Pentagon.

There is something special about Greg. And again…  something I can’t describe.
Stones into Schools is a journey into the realm of hope. I keep it on my desk now…. will some of Greg’s incredible ability to bond with people in the darkest places rub off on me…?

I spent an entire evening reading this book that took me back to Central Asia.

That night I went to sleep with a deep sense of peace. As long as there are people like Greg around, I know the world is in safe hands.

The fact that I speak different languages and I have not used my mother tongue on a daily basis in  over 20 years is such an integral part of who I am. I don’t think much of it any more.

But sometimes statements like that of EU Commissioner Leonard Orban make me stop and think.
I was delighted to read on his blog that “languages are crucial bridges between cultures. To learn a new language is to explore new ways of thinking, new value-systems and to open our horizons to the richness of other cultures and ideas.”

But I was even more ecstatic about this part :
“Each of the many national, regional, minority and migrant languages adds a facet to our common cultural background.”

And I was so happy to hear Benedict XVI mention in his New Year address that Italy should get used to having classes with pupils of different nationalities in its schools.

Finally!!!
Is something changing? Is a new wind blowing?

Having learned four languages over the years has certainly helped me to relate to other people’s realities and ways of looking at the world.

If I think of it… If I were only speaking Italian, I would not be able to communicate with some of the most important people in my life.
I am so grateful to my father for drilling English into me at an early age and to my German teacher in high school… Where would I be without them?

Audrey is the one who saved me from a total meltdown when I almost lost control of this site a month ago.

I am very grateful and… thrilled to have contributed to her report on Intranet Strategy and Governance published by Ark Group.

Audrey Scarff has researched the use of intranets by corporations. These platforms often fail to reach their potential because companies struggle to articulate their purpose.

Intranets also require a certain degree of flexibility in order to adapt to unstable business climates – like the current one! Their strategy is not cast in stone. It has to be flexible enough to mutate and reflect corporate changes like downsizing and mergers.

The publication contains case studies from organisations like BT, McDonald’s and Cancer Council New South Wales.

My part deals with the challenge of harnessing cross-cultural intelligence through team building. I guess its main point is that, while in the past teams were mainly treated as vehicles for the exchange of knowledge, they are now becoming a tool for making the most of the different nationalities working for a company and their expertise.

Intranet Strategy and Governance is featured this month on simply-communicate.com.

If you work in cross-cultural communications, what you want to avoid at all cost is the cookie cutter.

Koushik Chatterjee, CFO of Tata Steel, gave a great definition of it in a recent interview with McKinsey: “We do these five things, and therefore these five things must be done by everyone.”

His approach to international M&A is different: “we quite genuinely tend to look at an acquisition as a partnership rather than an acquisition”.

“We don’t send planeloads of people into a new company. Instead, we only send a few integrators. That’s been the key interface.”

I particularly like his way of engaging employees from the acquired company, a process he calls “shared change”: “we share and adopt good practices across the organisation through performance-improvement teams…This gives employees in the acquired organisation a sense of confidence that they too have good things that the parent company is absorbing”.

Chatterjee admits that “it takes time to positively influence a large organisation”. But the secret is to build “trust in the sincerity of the shared vision”.

Trust might take longer to establish but once you are there, “things move faster; you don’t have to go around reassuring people”.

I had my first Twinterview the other day.

Angelo Fernando of Hoi Polloi interviewed me and Yang-May on Twitter about the book.

What an interesting experience…. You feel suspended in cyberspace. You know there are people out there following you… but all you can see are your interviewer’s Tweets.

The fact that you have to limit your answers to 140 characters is a great discipline. It helps to organise your thoughts.

I have been converted…. I believe Twinterviews are great training for podcast and video interviews. Think of a 140-character answer first and then elaborate on that.

The toughest question, as ever, was about the reasons that lead me to write the book: “Was there a book inside your head?”

In order to answer that, you need to put your life in perspective.

Luckily, I am reading a book that has helped me to do just that.

If you began your career in journalism, you have to read Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

It’s a wonderful example of how journalism and writing helps you to understand complex realities and relate to people in cultures so different from your own.

It was a sentence in the book that brought it all home to me. Hessler describes his years in Beijing like a “floating life in a floating city”.

When I lived in Prague in the early 1990s, I often had the feeling of floating…. Oracle Bones made me realise that I wasn’t lost… Prague was floating towards a new future and was taking me along. While doing this, it was also writing my future book in my head.

Never underestimate the power of floating…

“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing … how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

I used to find index charts soothing.

You might think I’m strange. But when I worked as a financial journalist, they would stimulate my thinking….

Like a mandala, I would look at them and they would give me a sense of clarity…. After a while, sentences would start flowing in my mind.

I haven’t found financial charts soothing lately.

But yesterday, I was glad to hear at a seminar that markets are showing signs of normalisation. Which doesn’t mean that the recession is over. But markets have at least stopped to be out of control and are experiencing some sort of stabilisation.

However, analysts believe that the UK and Europe will not be able to attract significant investment for a while.

The spotlight has moved to the East.

Most Asian countries already had their financial crisis in 1998. It enabled them to clean house and left their banks with strong balance sheets. On top of this, they were able to create high levels of self-generating demand.

China and India are continuing to grow, and most importantly, their middle-classes are growing. International capital is being lured by the prospect of huge sales volumes.

Communications and marketing are right at the core of this trend.

With little growth to be expected in the West, many of the companies we are working for are increasingly looking at China and India.

One of the first tasks they will have to master is reaching out to audiences and engaging with consumers in these markets.

My co-author Yang-May and I talked to podcasting guru Neville Hobson on Friday about the story behind our book.

I was asked how I came up with the original idea behind International Communications Strategy. To answer that, I had to dig quite deep into my memory.

It all happened when I was living in Prague 20 years ago. What they used to call the Golden City was such a great cultural centre before WWII thanks of the different ethnic groups represented there. The war and the madness that followed did away with all that.

I could never understand this terrible loss. When I left Prague in the mid 1990s, I embarked on a quest. I wanted to find a way that would help people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate and bond.

After that came my passion for understanding emerging economies and their communication models.

If you’d like to find out more about how Yang-May and I got to write the book, you can listen to the podcast .

Thanks, Neville. And we hope we’ll get to meet your cat some day…

I’ve always believed that passions make people bond beyond cultural and ideological barriers.

The story I tell in our book about my encounter with a Kazakh immigration officer only a few years after the end of the Cold War is an example.

Last weekend, I found another one.

I was reading an article in The New York Times about the anniversary of Isaac Stern’s trip to China.

The famous violinist toured the country in 1979 giving concerts. People travelled miles by train to see him perform. This happened at a crucial time. China was emerging from a long period of isolation from the rest of the world.

Stern is credited not only with spreading the love for classical music but also with enabling cultural exchanges between the West and a country everybody had learned to fear.

You have to watch the video about Stern teaching young Ho Hongying to play the violin. It contains one of the best lessons in cross-cultural communications I have ever come across.

Without knowing a word of Mandarin, Stern manages to tap into Hongying’s passion for music and, instantly, her performance improves.

What would be the equivalent of this in corporate communication?

Our spirit cannot travel as fast as our body. That’s how someone explained jet lag to me.

I just got back from San Francisco and my spirit is all over the place. Although I have been desperately trying to tie it to the cup of Ghirardelli coffee on my desk, my mind keeps replaying many of the conversations I heard last week in California.

One bit keeps coming back again and again.

Sir Ken Robinson, the innovation expert, was talking at IABC’s conference about the ability of human beings to learn foreign languages.

His take is pretty much that if you don’t learn a foreign language at an early age, your chance to be able to do it in your 20s is slim.

What a sad and elitist view…

And this coming from an otherwise inspiring speaker.

If Sir Ken is right, this would mean that only those children who have the fortune to travel or live abroad or grow up in a multicultural household, will be able to speak other languages and function in a multicultural setting.

Luckily, this is not how the world of tomorrow is likely to turn out.

China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. I believe not all the Chinese who are studying English today have learned it from their parents or by travelling abroad.

The ability to develop a passion for communicating with other cultures and learning foreign languages is not a prerogative of the more fortunate and has never been.

Take the example of Billy Wilder who grew up in Austria-Hungary speaking German, had to escape first to France and then to America in the 1930s, learned French and English in his 20s and went on to write the screenplay of what is considered an icon of American film making.

Thank God for “Some Like It Hot”!