Differences and Strategies in Cross-Cultural Video Negotiations

After each short video, choose one of these answers. This person's experience is similar to my culture. This person's experience is different from my culture. If you don't know, choose I'm not sure. I noticed that in the US, the contract is everything. They cover every little tiny detail and they worry about every possible thing that could happen. We have contracts in our country, of course. In fact, I worked with lawyers to go through the contracts, but the contract doesn't have to be so long and cover every single little thing. In the US, as they say, time is money. It surprised me the first time I sat in on a negotiation in America. Everything seemed to go really quickly.

In my country, we would get to know each other first. Things go more slowly so we can build a relationship. The relationship is more important and we spend a lot of time building that. I don't know much about negotiating in other countries, but in my country, our goal is win-win. It's better for everyone. If you want to do business with someone again, why would you want to have a win-lose situation? I don't know if other countries are like this or not. When I went to the first negotiation meeting, the team leader from other companies said, call me Jason. He also called my boss by his first name. I was really shocked. I kept calling him Mr. Raynodes, which is really hard for me to say. But by the end of the second meeting, it was a little easier. We just never do that when we first meet someone in a business situation.

The American law is pretty direct. You never have to ask what they are thinking. They'll tell you. It's kind of helpful. But I sometimes wonder if they misunderstand me because I don't do that. We are more indirect. When we are sitting at the table, sometimes people from other countries make eye contact for a long time, longer than I do. It makes me a little uncomfortable. An American friend said it's a sign of trust when someone looked in the eye. But that's a little aggressive, in my opinion.

Business interactions are very formal. In my culture, that is the case. The language is more formal and interactions are formal. That's how it should be when you are negotiating. In my country, we are very friendly people with a very festive culture. We are not afraid of having physical contact. We might even hug our business associates. I don't think this is very common in other cultures. Now, we must have coffee at our business meetings. In our culture, the relationship is developed before the negotiation. It might seem more like a friendship than a business relationship. We prefer to do business with people that we know, and that can take time.

We've heard from a number of people from around the world about some possible cultural differences in negotiating. I'm sure some are familiar to you. Now we're going to follow up with the discussion forum. After you submit comments to the questions, please respond to the comments of three others.