Be Straight With Me!
In my experience as a cross-cultural consultant, the issue that seems to most bother non-Mexican businesspeople about their Mexican counterparts is their apparent lack of frankness in dealing with conf...
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No Trust
I recently attended a two-day seminar about the strategies Mexican companies should follow in order to compete successfully in a globalized economy. Economic globalization is creating new and stiffer c...
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El Buen Patron
In the 1980s, many companies in the United States, aware that their employees' personal problems were affecting their performance, began to create Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) to help workers dea...
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Team Work
- Is it "all for one and one for all" or "everyone for themselves" in your workplace?
Commentary by Ilya Adler © 2002
His e-mail: ilyaadler09@aol.com
When you have the oppor...
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Enjoying Life
Recently, during one of the seminars I give in the United States about Latin culture, someone asked me what I saw as the single most important characteristic that would make Latin managers more effecti...
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One At A Time?
Cultures considered to be monochronic are those that stress completing one task before embarking on the next. On the opposite end, there are polychronic cultures, in which people tend to do various tas...
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Mental Colonization
The Nafta partnership has always been a puzzling proposition: Could a free-trade agreement between two developed countries (the United States and Canada) and a developing one (Mexico) work out as a via...
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Walking The Walk
Not too long ago, the term "business ethics" was considered an oxymoron.
Fortunately, in recent years, companies have been paying more attention to developing and maintaining ethical standards among t...
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¡Ni Modo!
When I was in college, national development was a hot topic. We pondered over why some countries develop their economies faster than others. One popular notion was that for countries to develop quickly...
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Cultural Hybrid
Much has been written and discussed about the impact that cultural differences have on the way we conduct business and manage people. In this column, I have covered various aspects of cross-cultural pr...
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Office Diplomacy
Remember what your parents would tell you when you were a kid and had a fight with a friend? "Stop fighting! It's not nice to fight!" Later, when you had your first important relationship, you found yo...
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Measure Up!
Businesspeople love to measure things. We measure sales and profits, which is easy enough, but then we also want to measure everything else. This is called the 'administrative bias' of the business wor...
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Fearing Change?
These days, everyone is talking about "innovation." Companies and employees have to innovate or busi-ness will sink. I recently mentioned to a colleague that creativity is also important, but he quickl...
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Merger Mess
Are you working for a company that recently merged with another one, or was bought out?
You are not alone. The record number of mergers and acquisitions in the last five years has brought renewed...
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"El Que No Transa ..."
One of NAFTA's positive effects on Mexico has been the renewed attention given to an old problem: corruption. As Mexico attempts to attract more foreign investment, mounting pressure has been placed on...
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Culture Shock
In previous columns, I have argued that cultural diversity in organizations should be welcomed, rather than viewed as a problem to be avoided. Multinational companies in Mexico often have teams made up...
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Customer (lip) Service
One of the oldest clichés in business is "the customer is always right." And while this catchphrase might be repeated in every company training program, the reality is that most businesses fall short ...
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My Boss Is A Jerk!
There is an old movie starring Jack Lemmon in which a father (Lemmon) is frustrated that his less-than-motivated son has quit his job after one day. When he asks his son why, his son simply replies, "M...
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Train Of Thought
When it comes to professional training, Mexican managers and companies seem fascinated with anything that comes from more developed countries, especially the United States. From leadership courses (so ...
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Human resources in the Mexican company: Spotty training
Most of my activities in the area of consulting involve training managers from the United States and Mexico. The people I generally work with to organize and prepare these kinds of activities are Human...
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Email Inundation in your Mexico business
Over the last two years, working with different companies in both the United States and Mexico, I have heard time and again about a relatively new nagging problem for managers: handling their email. Ac...
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Between the lines: Writing business reports in Mexico
When I ask managers what they hate most about their jobs, writing and reading reports is usually on the top of their lists. Managers who have to write reports are often inadequately prepared: They were...
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Nothing personal: Diplomacy when doing business in Mexico
Perhaps the single largest cultural gap between Latin Americans and North Americans in the realm of business practices is the "personal" dimension. As I have explained in earlier articles, Latin Americ...
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Creative thinking when doing business in Mexico
There is no doubt that being a manager today is a different and more demanding challenge than it has been in the past. The much-talked-about globalization of business operations has forced managers to ...
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Standard procedure when doing business in Mexico?
In the early part of the 20th Century, American industrial engineer Fredrick Taylor revolutionized management practices through his famous concept of Scientific Management. His basic premise was that f...
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