Strategic Action Competency
Strategic action competency helps to think and act more strategically in order to become more proactive and effective at capitalizing on opportunities and minimizing threats. Strategic-action competent managers understand how to balance their daily work demands with longer-term strategic initiatives.
Understanding the Big Picture
The big picture that includes the company's overall mission, corporate shared values, company’s sustainable competitive advantage and competitive position in the market, relationships among departments or divisions within the organization, strategic partners and relationships with them.
Anticipating the Future
A key factor in strategic action is forecasting. A good strategic manager plans for contingencies and possibilities based on his/her perception of what the competition will do next and what the customer will want or need. Strategic simulation games, like INNOBALL, help anticipate and address. Futures thinking helps forecast future desires or target customers.
Taking Strategic Action
The ability to forecast the needs and actions of others helps a manager to get prepared to outmaneuver the competitors and to satisfy future customer needs. The key is to take strategic actions to optimize the chances of success based on the forecasts and to consider the long-term implications of any action taken.

Cross-Cultural Competency as a Key to Leveraging Diversity
A globally connected world is a key driver of structural change for the global workforce. Cross-cultural competency is the key enabling factor of working in diverse teams. The diversity of stakeholders is also an important point to consider. Employee, customers, partners, competitors are all made up of people of different ethnical backgrounds, who have different views, perceptions, beliefs, and values.
Creativity and Innovation
Innovation became a systemic phenomenon. It is achieved through synergizing diversities and is increasingly more dependent on the collaboration between actors from different cultural backgrounds who combine their own perceptions, thinking habits and expertise to create something new. This happens on all levels − individual, team, institutional. Diversity of thought increases creativity and, with it, the innovation potential of individuals, teams, corporations and joint ventures.
International Business
Business activities that take place abroad emphasize the importance of cultural intelligence and effective cross-cultural communication between the business and local people. Unless company representatives have good understanding of the local traditions and values, they might behave in such a way that is considered offensive or inappropriate in another culture and facilitate conflict, putting the whole local business at risk. In order to effectively perform business activities in a different cultural setting, company representatives must possess such soft skills, as sociocultural competence and empathy.

MANAGING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
Working together: challenges and synergy opportunities
Different approaches to life values, principles, truth, goals and success
Different approaches to doing business
Different communication styles
Different attitudes towards conflict and disclosure
Different approaches to performance and completing tasks
Different approaches to taking initiative and risk-taking
Different approaches to leadership
Different decision-making styles
Different approaches towards teamwork
Different approaches to learning and sharing knowledge
Respecting Cultural Differences and Working Together
Anthropologists discovered that, when faced by interaction that we do not understand, people tend to interpret the others involved as "abnormal", "weird" or "wrong". Awareness of cultural differences and recognizing where cultural differences are at work is the first step toward understanding each other, communicating more effectively, building trust across cultural boundaries, and establishing a positive working environment. Use these differences to challenge your own assumptions about the "right" way of doing things and as a chance to learn new ways to solve problems and synergize diversities.