Overview about dimensions of culture

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to recap Hofstede’s theory about culture. It does not point out only the weakness point of this hypothesis but also show how it is applied into a real business world.
Introduction
Together with globalization, the world is getting smaller and boundaries are fading away. As some scholars say, we are now living in a “global village”. We are now living in multicultural societies, living close to people who have different cultural backgrounds, working with people who have culturally difference from us, communicating with people who may speak different languages.
As business executives and managers, we have to deal with employees, customers, suppliers and business partners from other cultures these days. Most of us, though, have difficulty in understanding the behavior of others from different cultural backgrounds. Until then we have started thinking of culture intelligence. We realize that it is vital to define culture and understand the basic elements of culture in order to survive and to become a leader.
Nevertheless, how can we obtain these skills? Perhaps the most widely used tool for reading culture was proposed by Hofstede (1980).