(FORTUNE Magazine) – McDonald's took 13 months to realize that Hindus in India don't eat beef. When the company finally caught on and started making hamburgers out of lamb, sales sizzled. The unappetizing Chinese translation of Kentucky Fried Chicken's "Finger-lickin' good" slogan used to be "Eat your fingers off," until someone at the company got a clue. "Fresca" means "lesbian" in Mexican slang--odd name for a soda pop.

Blunders like these are hilarious only if you aren't the one summoned upstairs to explain why sales in your part of the world have fallen off a cliff. Partly to forestall recurrences, Robert Rosen (and his three co-authors, Patricia Digh, Marshall Singer, and Carl Phillips) wrote Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures (Simon & Schuster, $27). But Rosen, the head of consulting firm Healthy Companies International--and, intriguingly, a psychiatrist on the faculty of George Washington University School of Medicine--wants to do more than just spare hapless marketing people from embarrassment. His ambitious goal here: to set forth a new style of management, aimed at preparing U.S. business for an avalanche of global competition. He bases his musings on an exhaustive survey of more than 1,000 executives around the world, including detailed interviews with 75 CEOs who have mastered the art of thinking globally. A few of them are American. Most are not.

Why is that? Simple. American CEOs don't fret much about overseas markets, even the ones they're already in. The survey shows that just 28% of U.S. executives think multicultural knowledge is important. (Only Canadian and Australian CEOs care less.) How to fix that? Not so simple. Rosen takes 376 pages to propose some steps toward true citizenship in the global village. What makes them surprisingly readable are short, vivid portraits of the 75 CEOs. When Shelly Lazarus, head of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, tells her employees to get a life outside the office, she means it. That's because she sees outside interests and commitments as a sine qua non of O&M's chief asset: creativity. Lazarus once skipped a board meeting in Paris to go on a ski trip with her family. "People were horrified...[but] you must keep your perspective," she says. "It's only business."

--Anne Fisher