Table Of ContentGLOBAL COSMOPOLITANS
INSEAD Business Press Series
Roland Berger, Soumitra Dutta, Tobias Raffel & Geoffrey Samuels
INNOVATING AT THE TOP
How Global CEOs Drive Innovation for Growth and Profit
J. Stewart Black & Allen J. Morrison
SUNSET IN THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN
Why Japanese Multinational Corporations Will Struggle in the Global Future
Linda Brimm
GLOBAL COSMOPOLITANS
The Creative Edge of Difference
J. Frank Brown
THE GLOBAL BUSINESS LEADER
Practical Advice for Success in a Transcultural Marketplace
Lourdes Casanova
GLOBAL LATINAS
Latin America’s Emerging Multinationals
David Fubini, Colin Price & Maurizio Zollo
MERGERS
Leadership, Performance and Corporate Health
Manfred Kets de Vries, Konstantin Korotov & Elizabeth Florent Treacy
COACH AND COUCH
The Psychology of Making Better Leaders
Manfred Kets de Vries
SEX, MONEY, HAPPINESS & DEATH
The Quest for Authenticity
Michael McGannon & Juliette McGannon
THE BUSINESS LEADER’S HEALTH MANUAL
Tips and Strategies for Getting to the Top and Staying There
Renato J. Orsato
SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES
When Does It Pay to Be Green?
James Teboul
SERVICE IS FRONT STAGE
Positioning Services for Value Advantage
Jean-Claude Thoenig & Charles Waldman
THE MARKING ENTERPRISE
Business Success and Societal Embedding
Rolando Tomasini & Luk Van Wassenhove
HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS
GLOBAL
COSMOPOLITANS
The Creative Edge of Difference
Linda Brimm
Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD, France
© Linda Brimm 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-23078-1
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-31173-6 ISBN 978-0-230-28979-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230289796
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Outline xv
Part I Global Cosmopolitans: Meeting
the Masters of Complexity
1 Introducing Global Cosmopolitans 3
2 Inside the New Global Cosmopolitan Generation 17
3 Learning from a Global Life: Developing
the Creative Edge of Difference 35
Part II The Invisible Journey: The Roots of
Strength and Resilience
4 Life Challenges and the Road to Identity 57
5 Relationship Challenges: Invisible Rules, Silent Voices 76
6 Relationship Challenges: Connection and Disconnection 95
Part III The Invisible Journey: New Pathways to Growth
7 Paradoxical Needs: Finding the Roots of Challenges 115
8 Two-Edged Swords of Mobility: When Strengths Create
New Challenges 129
Part IV Moving Forward: Bringing the
Invisible Journey out of the Dark
9 Moving Forward: A Portrait of Two Crucial Decades 147
v
CONTENTS
10 Global Cosmopolitans: Unlocking
the Power of Stories 167
The Global Cosmopolitan Workbook 189
Notes 239
Bibliography 243
Index 247
vi
PREFACE
THE PATHWAY TO MY LIFE’S WORK
Benjamin grew up in France. But both his parents are American, so he con-
sidered himself a typical American kid.
To prove the point, he learned everything he could about the sport that’s
called the Great American Pastime: baseball.
He was determined to know every rule, every statistic, every player. He
was a baseball expert, a walking baseball trivia machine.
At age eight, he went to summer camp in the United States. The children
put together a baseball game and asked him to play.
At first, he said no. But the children persuaded the baseball expert to join
them on the playing field.
When Benjamin’s turn came to hit the ball, he stood at the plate in the
traditional position with the bat over his shoulder. And then the first pitch
came in his direction.
“Swing!” the crowd shouted. “Hit the ball!”
He hit the ball hard, and it was sailing, heading for a home run. But
Benjamin just stood there.
He didn’t know what to do. People were cheering and yelling “Run,” but he
knew that he did not know what to do.
Because he’d learned everything there was to know about baseball except
the one thing an American kid would know: how to play.
Benjamin is my son.
When I left Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973 for a six-month adven-
ture in the south of France, I never imagined where this decision
would take me. Nor did I envision how that decision would affect my
identity. Leaving the United States would become a critical moment, a
major turning point in my life.
My clinical and academic interest in understanding the impact of
living internationally has its roots in my personal journey. Living
vii
PREFACE
and working outside the United States, along with my husband and
children, and traveling to many corners of the world for work and
study have given me the opportunity to develop a global perspec-
tive and to observe and interact with other people traveling a similar
road.
Although my life story, what I call in this book a personal narrative,
is rooted in the stories I heard from and about my immigrant grand-
parents, the pieces of my life puzzle since 1973 have allowed me to
experience and observe what it means to become what I have called in
this book a Global Cosmopolitan.
My personal narrative includes many opportunities for confronting
the challenges and reaping the benefits of international mobility. The
story begins in the United States, where I remained through univer-
sity and my initial professional activities. Later chapters of my story
include life in a farming village in the south of France; studying, coun-
seling and consulting in Jerusalem; then continued studying, teach-
ing and working in Fontainebleau and Paris. To this has been added
two months a year working in Singapore, as well as creating a summer
home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and innumerable travels interna-
tionally for work and leisure.
The invisibility of aspects of my journey has been one of the key
motivators for my research. The external facts give one story, while my
internal journey has been a relatively silent story. It is the subtle, but
important, differences between the two that I would like to address in
this book. Along with the wonderful experiences, which I never could
have imagined as a child, I have accumulated painful moments of feel-
ing alone and misunderstood by the people I know from my different
worlds.
As a clinical psychologist, I have been trained to be aware of my
own experience and life perspective and its impact on my relation-
ships; this awareness has become an integral part of my life. As a pro-
fessor and as a researcher, I try to understand what lessons one can
learn from the stories that my students tell about their lives, as well
as to reflect upon how my evolving point of view and analysis change
the way I listen and learn.
This book is a mixture of the stories, ideas and pedagogical approaches
that have helped me understand, teach and work with people I call
Global Cosmopolitans. It is my goal to help Global Cosmopolitans ver-
balize their personal stories, their identities, and contribute to bring-
ing the silence of the uniqueness that they experience into a satisfying
dialogue with themselves and others.
viii
PREFACE
However, my interest is broader. Global Cosmopolitans are a
cutting-e dge population with a great deal to contribute to the global
landscape and our understanding of it. The challenges they face, the
unique perspectives they develop and the skills they learn can be par-
ticularly important in a world that is becoming increasingly global.
My second goal is to give voice to the internal, silent story of Global
Cosmopolitans, so that the people who live and work with them
understand the richness of their conflicts, their challenges and, most
importantly, their capabilities.
An increasing number of people resonate with an identity as a Global
Cosmopolitan. The starting points are almost as varied as the people
are. Some followed the global pathway as a result of their parents’
mixed backgrounds and lifestyle choices, while others either initiated
a global lifestyle or are now considering the pathway for themselves
or their children.
The lack of shared memory or shared culture can leave a Global
Cosmopolitan feeling very alone in reconstructing the intricacies of
memory that carry the threads of identity. There is not one culture or
one language that adequately clarifies or defines the identity of people
who carry different pieces of the world inside them.
On the plus side, global mobility provides ample opportunities for
experimentation and reinvention. But over time, questions often arise
about identity. Who am I really? How can I describe who I am? What
constant sides of my personality can I describe, and what is still in
the process of change or evolution? Which pieces of my identity are
core to my identity and travel everywhere with me, and which pieces
appear only as situations and relationships and pull me forward?
Stories are core to telling the tale of Global Cosmopolitans and
revealing their invisibility. The anecdotes in this book are based on life
stories written by Global Cosmopolitans using a technique called the
personal narrative. These stories were collected in classes, interviews
and therapeutic contexts where individuals had the opportunity to
write or recount their life stories and, in doing so, to give shape to their
identities. The insights they gain allow them to articulate to them-
selves and others the value of their challenging yet fascinating jour-
ney. Almost everyone who appears in these pages is real, the quotes
often word for word from personal narratives they prepared in my
class or from interviews. But to maintain privacy, I have often changed
names and either obscured or changed details.
This book looks at identities as personal constructions that are
made up of the way we put together our partial identities into a single
ix
