A modicum of cultural intelligence would have helped the American realize he was mistakenly equating the merit of an idea with the merit of the person presenting it and that the Germans were able to make a sharp distinctionreaction between the two. A manager with even subtler powers of discernment might have tried to determine how much of the two Germans' behavior was arguably German and how much was explained by the fact that they were engineers. An expatriate manager who was merely emotionally intelligent would probably have empathized with the team members whose ideas were being criticized, modulated his or her spontaneous