A WINNING DEAL: How Biculturals Can Supercharge Your International Business Negotiations

nternational business negotiations can be immensely challenging, but your efforts don’t have to be lost in translation. You can effectively unlock the many hidden powers of the biculturals on your team to navigate the choppy cross-cultural waters and better seal the deal. Biculturals are individuals who have internalised two or more cultures and they shouldn’t be confused with multiculturals, who accept cultural differences in society. Given the spike in migrants across the globe with people moving countries for brighter prospects, biculturals aren’t rare, so the chances of your already having some on your team are rather decent. In the article “Biculturals in international business negotiations: moving away from a single culture paradigm”, published in the , Priyan Khakhar, Hussain Gulzar Rammal, and Vijay Pereria study for the first time the role that biculturals play specifically in international business negotiations, sharing new findings. To uncover these findings, senior managers in Lebanon across diverse public and private sectors (from real estate to marketing consulting, food export and import, and NGOs) were interviewed. Their cultures spanned fusions from Lebanon, the UK, France, Australia, Canada, the USA, Armenia, and even Brazil. What makes this interesting is that, while Lebanon is not necessarily a multicultural society, it has high levels and the rich mix of religions, languages, and cultural influences from the East and West. Even Hofstede wanted to treat Lebanon differently from neighbouring countries while developing his famous cultural dimensions, but the data he received had already been merged with other Arab countries. All this not only made Lebanon an ideal place to focus exclusively on biculturals, it makes the findings about biculturals relevant to any country and applicable to organisations and businesses in any sector. And these takeaways will change how you think about and approach your international business negotiations game with negotiators who have internalised more than one culture.