Just The Facts Ma'am, Or Will My Hunch Do?
I get many inquiries from non-Mexicans interested in investing in or starting a new business in Mexico. The inquiries usually ask the normal "administrative" curiosities: What are the numbers for the i...
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Mexican Business Lunches
Business people in Mexico will tell you, as most business people will, that business meals are important rituals considered well-spent perks, since often business people work long hours and are away fr...
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Racism And Business In Mexico 2
In July, I wrote about racism and how this affects business in Mexico. The article provoked a
huge reaction. I got love mail and hate mail. This month I'll share some of the most thoughtful response...
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The Importance Of Team Building
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 s...
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The Heavy Toll Of Culture Shock
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 th...
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Internal Customers
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...
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¡Ni Modo! - Commentary On Business In Mexico
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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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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Building Trust
Like many other authors, I have often commented about the "trust" issue in business. According to author Francis Fukuyama, "trust" is a human capital that determines the way society develops business. ...
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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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Racism And Business In Mexico
Although denied officially and, personally by many Mexicans, racism in Mexico is so evident that most foreigners notice it right away. All you have to do is look at Mexican-produced television programs...
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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...
read more
Inner And Outside Circles
One thing that often puzzles observers from the U.S. about Mexico is the apparent dichotomy between how Mexicans behave at the personal level, and how they manifest themselves in anonymity. Thus, your ...
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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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Just The Facts Ma'am, Or Will My Hunch Do?
I get many inquiries from non-Mexicans interested in investing in or starting a new business in Mexico. The inquiries usually ask the normal "administrative" curiosities: What are the numbers for the i...
read more
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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