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, […]
Continue ReadingDoing Business in Mexico 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 viable partnership? While this question has been answered in a variety of ways, few have analyzed the process as a […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing Business in Mexico 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 competition for Mexican firms, as the country’s borders open more and more to imports and direct investment. On the other hand, globalization […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
Continue ReadingDoing 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 […]
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