Building international business: a matter of trust
Reading time: 6 minutes

by Olga Annushkina
SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management
In general, people do not trust foreigners.
How many times while embarking on a taxi journey in a foreign country you brace yourself for yet another delusion in the human kind. High probabilities are, you think, that your trip will be intentionally longer than it should have been, the driver won’t accept credit cards or will not have any change so that your tip will be approaching the value of your kids’ annual pocket money allowance or that you will have to pay for extra charges as highway tolls, festivities, luggage or weather. If you have time and a certain attitude, you may take precautions by asking a local acquaintance or a hotel concierge to arrange your trip, by checking Google maps for the directions or by consulting travellers websites for a “normal” city-airport taxi fare. Quite a bit of fuss for only one transaction, isn’t it?
On a much larger scale the deficit of cross-cultural trust is daily translated into the exponential insurgence of additional costs, unnecessary activities and simply personal worries in large multinational organizations.
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