Category: Living, Working, Retiring

Doing Business in Mexico 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 conflict. Depending on how they take it, this apparent difficulty in dealing directly with conflict is interpreted as insincerity or insecurity. This […]

Doing Business in Mexico In the past, the term “customer” always meant the external public, those clients that justify the very existence of a corporation. It was a term especially important in service organizations, since the customers were the business’ raison d’être, and ultimately the principal revenue source. In order to satisfy its customers, a […]

Doing Business in Mexico Is culture shock, as experienced by many ex-pats and their families, a psychological or a cultural issue? I was recently involved in a discussion group where this issue was debated. All of us agreed that being a foreigner, at first, is usually associated with a variety of strong emotions, often reflected […]

Doing Business in Mexico Making teams more productive is a constant issue for most managers. Productivity is, of course, the essence of what makes businesses competitive, but it is particularly important in times of economic slowdown such as the one we are currently experiencing. A common pitfall seen in business organizations is the confusion between […]

Doing Business in Mexico It has been said by many non-Mexicans such as Americans, Germans, French, among many others, that Mexicans are much too touchy: They don’t seem to handle criticism very well, and are too easily hurt. Stated bluntly, too touchy. It is interesting to note that within many cultures, people often say the […]

Doing Business in Mexico In Mexico, when you go to a traditional marketplace, or a store around the corner, it is not unusual that a number of things will be packaged in small plastic bags with a close-knit knot, and not a shoe-like knot that is easy to untie. This may include a sandwich to […]

Doing Business in Mexico Cultural specialists, such as myself, often will tell you that Mexicans (and Latinos in general) do not respond well to impersonal technologically-oriented means of communication or of selling. Latinos prefer to speak to a human being. It is a culture that is defined by almost everyone as strongly interpersonally oriented. Thus […]

Doing Business in Mexico I always tell my students and seminar participants that Mexico is a complex culture. In some ways is much like the rest of Latin America. Yet in other ways it is more similar to South and East Asian cultures, such as Japan. Various authors have pointed out that in countries such […]