I’ve been doing offshore business for all my work-life.

I don’t intend to bore you with my curriculum vitae.  And I don’t intend to lead any of you into numerical analyses such as budget, investments, ROI, and so on.

I want instead to draw your attention on an important element of offshore business that I seldom found tackled in the marketing and sales manuals that I read and still read: that is culture, or, cultural similarities and cultural differences.

I will not enter into details, save for some striking examples that are meaningful to me to highlight that doing business – especially abroad – is not only a question of making money: one has first to tune in with your partners’ culture.

And this does not only happen offshore: I’m also thinking of Italy.

Northern Italy borders France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia: four countries with four different cultures.  And when Italians move from North to South they come into contact with a myriad of populations, therefore different cultures.

DIFFERENCES IN ITALIAN CULTURES
In northern Italy itself, from west to the east, we move from the industrial, conservative Piedmont, where Turin is, to the highly commercial, finance and fashion oriented Milan, that leads the economy of probably the most economically important Italian eegion, that is Lombardy.  Moving further east, our traveling businessman has to confront himself with Veneto region, that still resents the past glories of the Venice maritime Republic.

From west to east there’s a maximum distance of some 350 miles; but just think of traveling 1,000 miles from Bolzano, a German-speaking city, south to Trapani, the most west and south city of Sicily, that’s less than 100 miles far from Cape Bon, in Tunisia.

Italy is a historical and cultural cocktail, and you have to drink it all, if you want to make business.  The main islands, that is Sicily and Sardinia, speak their own Italian dialects only: when they don’t want to understand, or made them understood, they are very well armed at that.

MY NAPLES EXPERIENCE
It happened to me in Naples, when I was auditing a waste-disposal company for ISO 14001 registration.  I was assigned a company trucker to help me audit and collect data.   In a whole morning, I only understood just one word, that is “coffee”.  When we went back for lunch, I asked the quality system manager that, unless I was provided with an interpreter for the afternoon, I would have to stop the audit.  For your information, Naples is less than 500 miles far from Milan where I live.  And by the way, I’m Italian and speak the language fluently, but not Neapolitan Italian.

In 2004, Giuseppe Pisi, an italian business, published a book titled In China For Business.  This is the first business book I ever read that somewhat satisfactorily addresses historical and cultural matters.

I don’t mean that doing business abroad, offshore, or with the town next to yours is a “mission impossible”.  And I don’t also mean that using the services of a consultancy or agents, or governmental organizations that advice how and help companies to move abroad, or all-risk insurers, is useless.

But I would like to hear of and meet managers who start their voyage not simply and only lured by visions of profit.

History is a long series of events in which colonizers almost annihilated the populations they came in contact with; both humans, animals and plants.

As I said, any country is a cocktail of history and culture.  my advice is that if we want to make business, we have to drink to glass bottom the cocktail that’s given us, and maybe also eat some  unusual food.  Or take off our shoes when visiting a church.

And we have to exchange invitations, too: because, if they are strangers to us, we are strangers to them.

In a world going more and more “global”, doing business has also been “globalized”, too.