TimeZone Voices Blog

It is easy to look at international business problems from the wrong perspective. The decision is slow? Cultural. The feedback is blunt? Cultural. The meeting ended without a clear outcome? Definitely cultural. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't. The danger of over-attributing behaviour to culture is that it stops you from asking the questions that would actually help. When a partner keeps delaying a decision, culture may be part of the picture, but so might an unresolved commer

There has never been more information available about how to work across cultures. Books. Frameworks. Training programmes. Online courses. Country guides. TED talks. Academic research. Entire consultancies are built around the subject. The volume of material on cross-cultural business has grown enormously over the past twenty years and is now saturated with ‘experts’. And yet. The same problems keep appearing. The same frustrations. The same misunderstandings. Deals that stal

There’s a habit in international teams of using follow-up emails to tidy up conversations that were never clear in the first place. A meeting ends with polite agreement. Nobody openly disagrees. Nobody really tests what’s being said. It feels productive. Afterwards, someone sends: “𝙅𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙢 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙚 𝙖𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙙...” But in many cases, that email is doing something else; it’s turning a vague, untested and unquestioned discussion into something that loo

Meetings often end with agreement. Heads nod Notes are taken Next steps are discussed Everyone leaves feeling positive, confident that things will move forward. And then… nothing happens. Weeks pass. Emails are exchanged. Follow-ups are sent. Progress feels slow, or completely absent. What felt settled suddenly feels uncertain. This is one of the most common frustrations in international business. The problem is not usually dishonesty. It is misunderstanding what agreement ac

Aside from the feeling that we might not survive the journey, discovering the fare is far higher than expected, realising the driver has no idea where he is going because he is the brother “helping out for a few hours”, or wondering whether this is even a real taxi… We can actually learn quite a lot from a taxi ride. Some of the most informative conversations you can have in another country are with taxi drivers. In a short journey, you can pick up insights that would otherwi

Also called the curse of expertise, I like to think of it as a problem that has solutions, as opposed to a curse. Once we know something, it is very difficult for us to imagine not knowing it or to take the perspective of someone who doesn’t know it. So, we just assume that others know what we know; how could they possibly not know that? We are all guilty at least some of the time of falling into this trap. A simplistic example is the game of charades; you act out the perfect