Who is RPCV Erin Meyer (Botswana)?

Erin Meyer

Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, one of the leading international business schools. Her work focuses on how the world’s most successful managers navigate the complexities of cultural differences in a global environment. She helps companies to develop organizational cultures that breed both flexibility and innovation and offers cutting-edge strategies to improve the effectiveness of projects that span the globe.

Living and working in Africa, Europe, and the United States prompted Erin’s study of the communication patterns and business systems of different parts of the world. Her Culture Map framework allows international executives to pinpoint their leadership preferences, and compare their methods to the management styles of other cultures. Erin has taught thousands of executives from five continents to decode cross-cultural complexities impacting their success, and to work more effectively across these differences.

More recently Erin conducted an in-depth study with Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO of Netflix, investigating the underlying principles necessary for building a corporate culture that is inventive, fast, and flexible. The results of that research will be published in their new book No Rules Rules (Penguin Press, September 2020).

Erin publishes frequently in Harvard Business Review. Her December 2015 HBR article “Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da” was the most read HBR article of 2015. She has also published in the New York Times Sunday paper, Forbes.com, and The Times of India. She has been interviewed on CNN, Bloomberg TV, the BBC, and NPR. Her case, “Leading Across Cultures at Michelin,” won the ECCH 2010 European case award for best human resources management case of the year.

Erin’s work at INSEAD includes directing the Leading Across Borders and Cultures program.

In 2019 Erin was listed by the Thinkers50 for the second time as one of the fifty most impactful business writers in the world and in 2018 she was selected by HR magazines as one of the top 30 most influential HR thinkers of the year.

Prior to INSEAD Erin was a Director of Training and Development at HBOC and a Director of Business Operations at McKesson Corporation.

An American living in Paris, Erin began her career teaching English students in Botswana (1993-95) as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later working with Asian immigrants in the United States. She frequently gives keynote speeches and runs seminars for organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Toshiba, Twitter, Sinopec, Gerdau, KPMG, Michelin, Deutsche Bank, Heineken, L’Oréal, ExxonMobil, Novo Nordisk, and BNP Paribas.

In 2014 she published The Culture Map: Breaking Through The Invisible Boundaries of Global Business.

Read the review published on our site in 2018  of The Culture Map.