UK/US Business Etiquette & Small Talk
Excerpt from Chapter 4 of “Pond Business: How to Succeed Across the Atlantic” by Mark Sutherland, available from Dunrobin Publishing on Amazon and Amazon UK and in bookstores in the UK and the US.
As we have already established, American and British ways of communicating and doing business are different. Business people, and especially lawyers, in the UK like to abide by a process and are quite methodical and intentional in terms of next steps. You will find the need for a lot of communication back and forth on the process and until there is an agreement on process, an American company should not expect to move forward to the substance of any particular deal.
Going the other way, British companies should not take the American desire to get working on the deal the wrong way. There is a high level of optimism and building something together from the American perspective. America has always been the land of dreams, and the sky is the limit for a lot of businesses. The reality is always somewhere between the aspirations and the worst-case scenario, but the optimism and vision of American companies can be somewhat disconcerting to British business people.
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