Mind The Gap

2Prepare to Be Unprepared: In a Culture New to You, Expect the Unexpected

When Marco Polo first encountered paper money in the court of Kublai Khan, he could hardly believe what he was seeing. In Europe, value lived in metal: gold and silver coins you could hold in your hand. In China, value flowed on ink and paper, backed not by weight, but by the authority of the Khan. To Polo’s eyes, it felt strange, almost like a magic trick. Yet it worked. People accepted the notes, trade moved, wealth accumulated.

That is what entering a new culture often feels like. You walk in with one mental model of how the world should work and then discover a completely different system that functions just as well, or even better, than your own.

As we’ve said, a basic fact about doing business across borders is that there will be surprises. Even if you study up on your target country in advance, the cultural traits you’ve read or heard about will pop up in surprising forms or in situations where you weren’t expecting them. And the culture is liable to have traits you didn’t expect at all.

The question then is how to prepare. Although “Expect the unexpected” may seem like an empty cliche, it’s genuinely helpful just to know that something will be coming at you and that you won’t know what the something is. Furthermore, there is a way to minimize the frequency of incoming surprises: spend time on the ground in a culture before starting a business there. Go there to get oriented. While books and reports ...