Values and expectations are key concepts to be kept in mind when dealing with Arab business colleagues. In part two of this two-part feature Hans Straub deals with business meetings, office culture, and negotiations that are often different from what Westerners expect.

It is often repeated that Arabs have a different sense of time than we do. Our Western conception of it comes from the mechanical clock. We have chopped time into seconds and even milliseconds. This is well known to Arabs and to a great extent they have adopted some of our obsessive listening to the ticking of the clock. However, this does not mean that you will not be kept waiting for an appointment, or that once you are in a meeting, the allotted half hour will be devoted exclusively to you.

In fact, the reverse is true. The length of time you are kept sitting in the secretary’s room depends on how important you are, how busy the man is, and a variety of factors that for us remain mysterious. While you are waiting, though, expect to be scrutinized by the secretary, and by those who come and go through the waiting room.

In Arabia, as elsewhere, others will be asked their impressions of you. Should you display undue impatience, insistence, or impoliteness, you will not be getting a good review. It is best to make use of the wait to get to know the secretary (often male) to smooth future access to the inner sanctums of the company. It never hurts to establish personal contact with those who guard the higher-ups because in the Arab world everything depends on who you know.

Once you are in the executive office, the time allotted for you is not yours. You will probably be annoyed at this because there will likely be little of the privacy in meetings that you are used to. Expect a constant coming and going as you are interrupted by telephone calls, people bringing you and your Arab counterpart coffee or tea, handing him papers to sign, and so on.

The Arab businessman is a 'multi-tasker', doing many things at once while you remain single-minded and intent on completing your business according to a preset schedule. Your patience will be put to the test. It is no use saying “I’ll come back when you have more time.” The next visit will be a rerun of the first. So, be flexible.

Personal contacts

Get used to the fact that what you have to offer will not sell itself. Personal contacts are important and you need to understand the role that wasta (influence) plays in everything from getting a traffic ticket fixed to obtaining the appropriate license to carry on business in Arabia.

And, the reverse is true. You will find that people cultivate your “friendship” for the purpose of accessing whatever “pull” you may have in your own country to oil the wheels of bureaucracy. I remember Arabs who collected telephone numbers of almost everyone they met who might be of practical use in obtaining advice, jobs, contracts, visas, education for their kids.

Arabic culture is a tightly knit web of relationships that takes time to establish and maintain, but once it is there, it will work for you too.

Negotiation

Negotiations can be demanding. When walking into the meeting room, in which you are to give a presentation, expect to shake hands with each and every participant. Also expect the more senior and more important people to arrive last, or even to arrive late. You will have prepared statistics, studies, charts and graphs to make your point, but quite possibly none of this will have much initial effect. So keep it short.

When it's time for the Arab negotiators to announce what they want from you, an order for merchandise for example, expect inflated figures. In other words, they may well ask you to quote a price for a thousand units of what you have come to sell rather than the one-hundred they actually intend to buy.

Impressed by the size of the order, you may drop your price to “sweeten the deal” when you ought to begin with the maximum you think you can ask for. Thereafter allow the Arabs to “get you down” to what will make it a win-win deal.

Arabs learn early to wheel and deal for everything. You will find this when you go shopping in Arabia. Note that in most stores, almost nothing has a price tag. Everything has a “best price” lower than the one first cited.

 There is a lot to learn when doing business outside your own culture, even though the business world is internationalizing at a rapid rate. At odds are timeless values and expectations that account for the world’s great diversity of cultures.

May 2004

Intercultural trainer Hans Straub has worked in Canada, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan and Saudi Arabia. He also teaches English for academic purposes (EAP) and English as a second language (ESL).