“Global Talent Unleashed” by Nicole M. Sahin

Nicole M. Sahin’s new book title, like any good piece of nonfiction, is essentially an encapsulation of what the book covers from A to Z. Like a thesis statement, or opening sentence of a formalized position paper, Sahin keeps word choice and sentence structure concise, making her concurrently able to let the ideas themselves bloom to increasingly complex and heady statures. What Sahin focuses on is how Covid-19 regulations have essentially redefined workplace norms and mores, in the process making the development of remote work, overseas industry, and globally varied employee bases far more commonly applicable than before.

While clearly biased to the statistically demonstrated positives of such an evolution, Sahin does retain a core point of objectivity. She speaks both from the data and from a place of personal experience, being one of the business leaders taking advantage of such a new and innovative form of workplace institution. “Finding workers has been a major obstacle for many organizations to overcome,” she states in Global Talent Unleashed: An Executive’s Guide to Conquering the World. “Even the idea of putting up a job posting in a country halfway around the world has made companies pause and confirm whether this is really what they want to do. The reality, however, is that the employee recruitment process is much the same across the world, from Poland to Portugal to the U.S…

Although many companies fear the inability to monitor workers in person, there is a significant advantage to having customer-facing employees in another country. That close customer proximity, regardless of distance to the home office, reduces the incidence of miscommunication and misunderstanding that can occur through other means of communication, such as email, text, and even phone.”

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Global-Talent-Unleashed-Executives-Conquering-ebook/dp/B09KMF8T53

From the introduction of this idea, Sahin then is able to address smaller, more nuanced, and more interesting implications of these kinds of communications. In many ways, the globalization of a company is a simultaneous opportunity to learn and adapt to the ways, needs, and necessities of other cultures. A core building block as far as she is concerned seems to be a plea for pragmatic empathy. “…in some Asian countries, there is a strong preference for use of the phone or video call to communicate, more so than email, especially if there’s anything nuanced to discuss—if you have a question or concern, they generally prefer a phone call,” she states. “In North Asia, face-to-face meetings are preferred, as these are high-context countries, where nonverbal communications are absolutely critical to workplace interactions.

Americans rely heavily on email, but the truth is that, in Asia, it takes so much longer to type out information in English in an email that they would much prefer to receive a phone call in their native language. Like in most countries, this is much more efficient, and it reduces the chance of miscommunication.”

By being able to engage the reader on both an intellectual and emotional set of levels, Sahin succeeds in what I believe she has set out to do. The book is not exclusive to the particular choir it’s preaching to. It’s a genuinely fascinating, objective look at a burgeoning new branch of industry, complete with scintillating detail and a sense of warm enthusiasm.

Nicole Killian