Category: Living, Working, Retiring

Doing Business in Mexico 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 attention to the challenges that these kind of alliances present to both companies. Many mergers are […]

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 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 […]

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 […]