Wear a white tie to a meeting in China and people will think you are in mourning (and don’t ask how many children your interlocutor has because the answer is always one). Pat someone on the head in Thailand and you end up walking with a limp. Give someone a “thumbs-up” sign to mean “youbetcha” in the Middle East and you could end up not being able to walk at all.It is the ultimate business nightmare to show up in a foreign country and find yourself offending your hosts so egregiously that you are obliged to leave for the airport, never to return. Does this ever happen in Turkey? I set out investigate.
Plowing through the literature on doing business abroad, I discovered only the banal. “Do not expect to get right down to business in a meeting with a Turkish businessperson. Some preliminary ‘small talk’ allows him or her to get to know you.” It’s true a lawyer friend advises her American clients not to arrive at a meeting in “time-is-money” mode and say “I only have an hour.” “It just doesn’t go down well,” she said but added that this was probably the case for half the countries on the globe. Indeed, so much of what passes for “advice” to the foreign businessman coming to Turkey is little more than expensively packaged common sense.
One foreign trade attaché tells visiting businessmen from his country that they will probably be offered a cup of tepid Nescafe. “It’s impolite not to drink some of it, but don’t finish it or they’ll offer you another.” By contrast I have heard a Turkish executive complain that no one took him seriously in New York -- the proof being that he wasn’t offered a cup of coffee. Eventually it was explained to him that in America even the president of the United States and the CEO stood up to help himself from the pot brewing on the sideboard.
There are other classic examples of misunderstanding. The Turkish side -- particularly if it’s the head of a family firm -- doesn’t always grasp that the executive sitting on the opposite side of the table, despite his grey hair and air of experience, doesn’t always have the unlimited authority to make decisions without consulting lawyers, accountants, other tiers of managements -- and sometimes even shareholders.
My favorite story of culture clash has nothing to do with commerce but concerns the Besiktaş football coach, Gordon Milne. His first-ever match in Turkey was an away game with Antalya Spor, and he watched with a gentle smile as a cuddly little lamb with a pink ribbon around its throat was led onto the field. “How sweet,” he said. “The team’s mascot!” Then they cut the lamb’s throat, a sacrifice to the new season. Gordon Milne, always the wise man, told me, “I thought to myself, I’m the foreigner, I’m the one that has to adjust.”
The truth of the matter is that most foreigners, far from finding Turkey strange and forbidding, find it enticingly exotic. One American banker tells his clients, “Never lend anyone $500 million while cruising down the Bosporus on their powerboat.” His point was that doing business in Turkey can be so pleasant, a Turkish host so charming, that visiting investors can sometimes leave their better judgment back in the hotel room closet. So foreign clients are always advised to be that little bit suspicious -- to make sure that what exists on paper also exists on the ground, to do due diligence. But frankly, that is the same advice they would receive if they were doing business in Barcelona or Detroit.
