Three items. Tight. Time-boxed. One page attached to the calendar invite so everyone could come prepared.
They confirmed attendance. Nobody pushed back. You walked in with a deck for each point and ten minutes to spare.
By 11:15, you were still on item one.
The Situation
The meeting didn't collapse. Something else happened.
A question opened up a conversation none of you had planned. Someone stepped out and came back with a colleague who turned out to be exactly the right person to have in the room. The conversation went somewhere genuinely useful. Just not to items two and three in the agenda.
You left with a full page of notes and a quiet knot in your stomach about everything you hadn't covered.
Your counterpart left the room glowing. You both attended the same meeting.
Your British counterpart did his homework. He knew Latin Americans build trust over the table, not just across it, so instead of squeezing in a second meeting before your flight home, he cleared two hours for lunch. No slides, no agenda, just food and conversation.
You talked about your kids, his weekend rugby, the flight in. He laughed at your jokes and asked good follow-up questions. Two hour...
I built the Slot System™ first. The harder question was what shape the other side would take.
I kept coming back to something small: the difference between my Oyster card in London and my SUBE card back when I lived in Buenos Aires.
Back then, topping up a SUBE was never a sure thing. You never knew which machine would work, or where. So, I'd take a longer route to the train station, one with a...
A Mexican corporate affairs manager spends the weekend before a big London pitch working through a business masterclass online. Lesson four says that holding eye contact is the single biggest signal of trust one can send.
He walks into the meeting and does exactly that. Steady gaze, no breaking away, right through the whole pitch.
Twenty minutes in, his British counterpart has shifted in his se...
THE BRITISH-LATAM FRICTION SCORECARD™
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Find out exactly where your friction is.
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A personalised read of where your British-LatAm friction actually lives. The kind of specific information that changes how you walk into your next meeting. Used by British and LatAm professionals. Takes 4 minutes.
