Culture Training Doing Business in Foreign Countries

Culture Training Doing business in foreign countries inevitably means exposure for foreign cultures and customs. How business reacts to these cultures often dictates whether or not that business is going to succeed in the foreign market. International business trainers face cultural issues when teaching American business skills and practices to foreign audiences. Often, things that are taken for granted when dealing with an American audience can be challenging for a foreign audience.

The trainer needs to be able to understand what the cultural differences are that they will be dealing with and how to handle those differences so that no offense is caused and the objectives of the activity are met. This paper will outline some of the different cultural pitfalls that can occur when doing business internationally and will present a case of how to business can deal with these challenges.

Hunt (n.d.) describes cultures as being comprised of values, beliefs and attitudes, and these attributes all contribute to cultural differences. International managers need to understand not only the surface-level differences but the differences in the underlying values, beliefs and attitudes that define the culture. Cultural Mistakes and Challenges Wade (2004) highlights a number of different cultural mistakes that can be made by people traveling to different cultures. One type of mistake that can be made is with symbols and gestures.

Wade notes the famous case of Richard Nixon giving the "ok" sign when landing in Brazil, something that is considered to be an obscene gesture in that country. He also notes the Muslim taboo with respect to the bottoms of feet, in particular as it relates to sitting positions Westerns often adopt. Another category of cultural mistake the Wade discusses is with respect to eating and drinking customs. Drinking alcohol in particular is considered an essential component of doing business in many cultures.

Americans who do not normally drink as part of doing business might find some drinking customs -- such as loud, raucous drinking dinners in Asia or toasts early in the morning in Eastern Europe -- a bit challenging. Wade also notes that punctuality is an area where offense can be taken, especially when one party is waiting for the other party. He notes that in Germanic cultures, punctuality is usually quite strict while in Latin cultures punctuality is not something taken seriously.

Americans doing business need to understand what the local customs so as not to be late in Germany and not to expect meetings to start on time in Italy. One of the central points that Wade gets across is that these surface-level differences often have deeper roots. He highlights individuality as a key cultural trait that results in differences of attitudes between countries.

The United States is one of the most individualistic countries in the world, which can result in surprises for Americans doing business abroad when they do business in cultures where decisions are made by consensus. In other cultures, hierarchy is an important trait. While American managers are usually empowered to make decisions, this is not the case in many other countries.

In addition, in hierarchical countries it can cause offense if an American company sends a lower level manager to meet with a CEO -- the CEO in that culture would expect to deal with someone of equivalent rank within the organization, even if the lower level manager is actually better suited to the task. Directness in communication is another pitfall that Wade describes. Americans are often very direct in communication, something that can cause offense in other countries.

Conversely, people from indirect countries are often frustrating to Americans because they do not say exactly what they mean, and the American is entirely unequipped to deal with the cultural nuances of the high-context communication. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) must deal with the challenges faced by cultural differences and barriers when operating overseas. Gibson (2006) notes that the franchise operations can have difficulty when operating overseas.

They build their business model on consistency across the entire brand, but sometimes find that their brand strengths in the domestic market simply do not translate internationally. He cites the case of Domino's, which failed miserably in Italy because it did not tailor its product to the Italian market. Italians found the pizza "too American" -- which is undoubtedly the point, but it was not something that they found attractive.

An MNE that has succeeded as a franchise by utilizing Gibson's idea of tailoring product and service offerings, and marketing emphasis, is Starbucks. That company took coffee shops to Asian markets like Japan and China, and with a few adjustments has been incredibly successful in those tea-drinking cultures. The company did this by changing the product offerings to suit local tastes. It sells, for example, red bean Frappuccinos in the Chinese market (Burkitt, 2012). It also emphasizes the "third place" element of its in-store experience in the marketing campaigns more than.