Category: Living, Working, Retiring

Doing Business in Mexico 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 world: using measurements as a guide to decision-making, and ignoring anything that cannot be measured. There are specialists who […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 yourself regretting that you and your partner spent much of the time in silly fights. […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 problems between Mexicans and Americans. Recognizing that cultural differences exist and affect how we do business is an important […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 their employees. In Mexico, attention to ethics is increasingly viewed as an essential part of business success: If your employees are ethical, […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 tasks simultaneously. The United States and Canada tend to be fairly monochronic, while Mexico tends to be polychronic. Some […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 effective than others. The answer was easy for me: “They know what enjoying life is all about,” I […]

Doing Business in Mexico When you have the opportunity to work with different departments of a company, the opinions that employees give about the company’s strengths and weaknesses tend to be fairly similar. If the company is bureaucratic or less innovative than the competition, most employees will recognize that. So agreement tends to exist in […]

Doing Business in Mexico 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 deal with their problems. The appearance of these programs was certainly a challenge to the prevailing thinking of the times, and certainly […]