Month: January 2019

Shaun Bythell “The Diary of a Bookseller”

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I’ve loved reading since childhood and have almost always held books in reverence. My parents had a fairly large library, and I enjoyed browsing through the books, cataloging them, and even keeping track of everything I’d read. Later, I started buying books myself and often felt pleasure simply from owning them, even if I hadn’t yet had time to read them. Just having a book on the shelf was wonderful in itself. At one point, I even seriously considered getting into the book business but eventually limited myself to making good acquaintances in that world.

Then, out of the blue, someone recommended The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell to me, saying, “If you love books so much, you absolutely must read it.”

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Trust and Loyalty

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Working in an international company, I’ve experienced cultural differences firsthand between various nationalities. A year ago, I wrote a review of The Culture Map, a book I constantly recommend to colleagues. However, this topic is so broad and fascinating that it keeps resurfacing, especially as the understanding of these differences allows me to notice them in the behavior of those around me almost daily.

Today, I’d like to delve deeper into differences in trust and loyalty. Instead of comparing everyone, let’s focus on the typical American and the typical Russian. By “Russians,” I mean people from the former USSR, as this is how we are often viewed abroad. Of course, this is a diverse mix, and we’re not all the same (for example, I can clearly see differences between Russians and Belarusians, and within Russia itself, there are plenty of distinctions due to the sheer size of the country).

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