Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands by Terri Morrison, Wayne A. Conaway, and George A. Borden — book cover

Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands

Terri Morrison, Wayne A. Conaway, and George A. Borden · 1994

Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (1994) is a book by Terri Morrison, Wayne A. Conaway, and George A. Borden on Cross-Cultural Communication. A country-by-country business travel reference organized around the Cultural Orientation Model, cognitive styles, negotiation strategies, and value systems, with per-country sections on greetings, gestures, gifts, dress, and business protocol.

11 min read · 9 chapters · Communication

Why it’s on the shelf

Not an argument book but a reference almanac, sixty country entries sitting on one compact framework for reading how a culture thinks, decides, and closes deals.

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

  1. This is a reference almanac, not a thesis. The 1994 edition by Morrison, Conaway, and Borden runs sixty country entries, each grouped under the same headings. Country Background; Cultural Orientation (Cognitive Styles, Negotiation Strategies, Value Systems); Business Practices (Appointments, Negotiating, Business Entertaining, Time); and Protocol (Greeting, Titles and Forms of Address, Gestures, Dress, Gifts), sitting on a short front-matter framework.
  2. That framework is the Cultural Orientation Model: three readable layers. Cognitive Styles (how information is gathered and organized), Negotiation Strategies (what actually persuades), and Value Systems (who decides, what reduces anxiety, how equality and inequality are handled).

The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

  1. What This Book Actually Is
  2. The Cultural Orientation Model
  3. Cognitive Styles: Abstractive and Associative
  4. Negotiation Strategies: Three Ways a Case Gets Built
  5. Value Systems: Who Decides, What Calms, Who Ranks
  6. Time and Punctuality
  7. Greetings: The Section Behind the Title
  8. Gestures, Gifts, Dress, and the Table
  9. Reading Generalizations Responsibly

Finish Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands tonight.

Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.

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