Comment on ‘Culture and business, related or not?’ (Ken Merckaert)

When you negotiate with other cultured people, training could be very useful. I agree with that but what type of training do you need and what if cross-cultural negotiations fail? Is this failure always a consequence of poor knowledge of the other culture? I don’t think so. There are so many aspects that can lead to misunderstandings, poor relationships, etc. I would like to give an example. When a person doesn’t succeed in arranging agreements in his own country, he probably won’t be capable of settling international contracts either. It would be better to teach him some negotiation skills first. As you can see, so many factors have their influence on cross-cultural negotiations. That’s why it isn’t always easy to see where negotiations went wrong.

Nils Meul