With a name suggestive of seasonal good cheer, EDI's Gordon Jolley is also the perfect gent, with fresh flowers in his buttonhole, choosing salad ahead of steak for lunch, and picking up the bill afterward. There is also much well-practiced humor: "Executive Development International is a virtual company. It's virtually only me."
He has come from a meeting at a major telecom company's training center in Tokyo's Azabu. "I'm involved in a program that picks up domestic B-track managers trying to move up to A track and assesses them for international management capabilities."
Gordon opened EDI as a private consulting and human resources development firm in 1989 at the request of Japanese business associates after almost a decade of experience in Japan in the field of cross-cultural business communications. When he asks clients what they know about cross-cultural differences, they answer America/Japan, Christian/Muslim, communist/capitalist. But these are stereotypes, inaccurate and impractical in the real world.