Description: Each day thousands of Americans, after traveling abroad, experience relief from enormous cross-cultural stress as they return to the safety of their own culture.

Others too often view us as ugly Americans because of our inability to understand their culture. We can greatly improve our knowledge of others, which translates into better cross-cultural relationships. Knowledge is usually all that stands between success and failure in any human endeavor. It is power. How many times have we stood silently weeping as we contemplated the broken pieces of a business deal or an important relationship and whispered. "... If I had only known". How many wars are the result of cross-cultural ignorance? This need not continue.

Beautifying the Ugly American empowers one to successfully work in other cultures. One is able to organize all those strange sounds and behaviors into a meaningful profile of another culture. To say, "Aha ... so that's what the means ... that's what they act that way!" That other culture becomes more transparent, more "in focus". As a result, foreign travel is more fun, work overseas is more profitable and even international political diplomacy is more successful.

The tools also have great applicability within our own country. We are tremendously culturally diverse nation. Relationships within our own communities would improve if we knew how to understand each other! These tools provide the key to understanding the culturally different in our own towns and cities.

In Beautifying the Ugly American, Don E. Post applies his anthropological training and more than thirty years as an international business consultant to share his method of sketching cultural portraits of otherpeople. He provides a cultural model that emphasizes the inter-relatedness of a people's environment, technology, polity, religion, economy, and space/time frame of reference. Cases are drawn and experiences cited to support the utility of the model.

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