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Things You Can Learn From International Business

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Embarking on an international business endeavor can be an exciting new adventure. Whether you are an independent investor or joining colleagues for an international trip, there are a number of things you will likely learn from the experience, and it is sure to be both professionally and personally enriching. You can get the most out of it if you make it your mission to learn. Rather than simply focusing on your business prospects, consider what knowledge can be gained from your time spent abroad. This can make the trip an even more meaningful experience

The following are six examples of what you can learn when you go abroad on business. You might be surprised by just how much there is to take in, and when you shift your focus beyond the professional, you are likely to see things differently. Focus on these potential sources of knowledge when you are conducting business internationally.

A New Language

Depending on how long you will be in another country, it is unlikely that you will achieve fluency in the span of your trip. It is very likely, however, that you will be able to pick up certain aspects of a new language when you are abroad. Being multilingual—or even just bilingual—can be an invaluable asset to any businessperson looking to boost their profile. Take an interest in the language being spoken, and make every effort to learn as much as you can. You will rarely have the opportunity to be so immersed in another language

Cultural Knowledge

In addition to the potential of learning a new language, you should focus on learning as much as possible about the culture of the country you are visiting. This is not just for your own personal enrichment—it is a responsible move for any entrepreneur who wants to avoid cultural faux-pas when they are abroad. Understanding the culture you are doing business in is an absolute must for any responsible businessperson. Entrepreneurs such as Timur Tillyaev can confirm this. Do a little bit of research before you touch down, and continue paying attention to customs once you have arrived.

Interpersonal Skills

Doing business abroad can do wonders for your interpersonal skills. Whether you are a social butterfly or feel awkward in crowds, you can learn some fantastic new social skills simply by going abroad with your business. International business gives you the opportunity to talk to new people, experience new things and learn in new settings. All of this makes it a great experience for people looking to improve their interpersonal skills. In addition to boosting your confidence in your own interpersonal skills, international business trips can help you learn interpersonal skills that are intercultural, and this is a true asset

Laws and Customs

You might not think that going abroad for business would help you learn about laws and customs, but in many cases, this is a valuable set of knowledge that comes with the territory. If you are doing business that involves any kind of retail or trading, you are likely to learn all about the laws governing such transactions. This is valuable knowledge for any entrepreneur who is interested in doing business abroad consistently. Timur Tillyaev, for example, found success in international business after years of traveling and investing. This experience can build the knowledge you need to eventually branch out.

Economic Knowledge

In addition to understanding the laws and customs that govern the country you are doing business in, you should make efforts to learn about the local economy, too. Understand the international economy is essential for any entrepreneur who aspires to succeed in global business. Make note of what kind of businesses succeed, who their target demographic is, how they attract clients and what portion of the market they dominate. All of these factors can provide meaningful information and help you understand the economy on a global scale. Going abroad is the most effective way to understand these factors.

Global Perspectives

One of the greatest things you can take away from an international business trip is the ability to think on a global scale. Too often, we get stuck thinking about everything in our immediate surroundings, and it is difficult to realize that there is a bigger world surrounding us. Going abroad makes it impossible to forget this, though, and make the context of the world much more real. Take the time to build your perspective as you are abroad and learn about everything new around you. This is important both for your personal betterment and your professional enrichment.

Doing business abroad should never just be a transaction. It should be an experience, a lesson and an opportunity to broaden your horizons. Take these tips if you want to get the most out of your trip and learn while you are abroad. You will likely enjoy the trip more when you focus on learning.

Today’s banner image:
Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarkand. April 2013
By Bobyrr – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35322840

Poor Li’l Dog

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So I’m on my way over to meet my friends, to join them for a Costco junket. It’s almost 9:30 a.m. Hotter than the Hubs of Hades, cruising up Main Feeder Street EW.

And what should come trotting up the road but a beautiful young dog, all black, overheated looking. I stopped. He jumped in my car: a smallish lab mix. My guess would be part pit bull, part lab. I thought he was a pup.

He parked himself in the driver’s seat well, seated conveniently on the gas pedal and the brake pedal. And refused to budge.

Rousted one of the gay guys from the corner house. He’s kind of an old fella and pretty gimpy. Asked if he thought he could help me get the dog into a more practical place inside the car. By the time we got back to the car, the dog had climbed over to the front passenger seat well…which was good, because when the old guy saw the pooch, he said there was no way he could’ve helped to personhandle it.

Brought the hound back here so I could call the folks and put them off.

Get him into the backyard with a bowl of water, which he inhales. But once he gets back into the garage that dog is NOT goin’ back out.

I try to slip into the house around him, but Ruby dodges out.

Forthwith they get into it. Ruby, the little twit, will try to dominate any dog…even if it weighs 30 pounds more than she does. Even if it’s likely part pit bull. Which evidently it is….

Had a time rescuing her. Finally the stray shot into the house, allowing me to fish the now cowering corgi out from behind the car’s exhaust pipe.

That distraction delayed the phone call long enough that the folks were outside waiting for me to show up and didn’t get the call, so I had to drive to their place to tell them what was going on.

Catch them as they’re about to leave for my house. Explain what’s going on. They agree that leaving the dog in the house is impossible and outside in the heat is unwise.

Return to the Funny Farm, by which time I’ve decided to take the dog to the Humane Society.

Unfortunately it’s a kill shelter.

Dog is somebody’s pet. It’s very well cared for, well fed, shiny coat, clean teeth, more or less heels on a leash, sits on command, shakes paws.

I would like to steal him. Probably would, if I thought I could get away with it. Which I don’t.

Often you can find the owner on NextDoor, but I didn’t feel I could risk keeping him even for a few days, since there’s no sane way to keep them separated. Obviously, I can’t keep a dog that’s going to fight with Ruby, even for a short time

Got the dog up to the Humane Society. Yes, he had a chip, but the idiot owner hadn’t registered him! They had no way of finding out who he belonged to. And their shelter was full. They wanted me to drive him down to the county pound, WAY down in South Phoenix — half a tank of gasoline’s worth of driving. And that place is a zoo.

They ended up taking him in and saying the pound would come pick him up from their facility, within 24 hours.

Felt extremely guilty.

Got home to find Ruby in a frenzy. She was SO upset. She ran around and around the backyard and the house baying (did you know a corgi can actually bay?) and barking at the top of her little doggy lungs.

Still felt guilty, but was forced to acknowledge that my first instinct was right: NO WAY could I keep that dog while searching for its owner…or permanently.

I thought, briefly, about seeing if M’jito like to have this dog foisted on him. But in the first place, he’s not a golden retriever (the preferred beast). In the second, he’s very active. And in the third, somebody is no doubt searching for him…or will be, whenever they get home from work.

Mercifully, Ruby doesn’t seem to have gotten hurt. Thank god. Just what I needed: another vet bill!

She’s still batsh!t, though.

Boss dog and recumbent underling

She breathes…she moves…she…writes?

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A day late and a whole lotta dollars short…finally got around to typing up and posting this week’s chapter of Ella’s Story.

The other two books I’ve been giving away as * FREE READS * at Plain & Simple Press — If You’d Asked Me… and The Complete Writer — were finished long before I dreamed up this idea. But Ella’s Story was a work in progress. A lot of progress: quite a few chapters were in hand at the time I started this project.

But a few weeks ago the completed chapters ran out, leaving me to keep up with the publishing schedule by writing a new chapter a week. Talk about draftig!

So now we know how if felt to be Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fyodor Dostoyevski and Alexandre Dumas and Herman Melville Henry James and Gustave Flaubert and Harriet Beecher Stowe and … if only we were one of them! 😀

The blog format, it seems to me, naturally lends itself to serializing novels. But…

How exactly you would make any money on it escapes me. I suppose you could sell advertising around such a thing. Or ask people to pay to subscribe. Or donate to your cause.

I knew writing a chapter a week would be a challenge. When you study late 19th- and early 20th-century lit, you occasionally come across some writer’s complaint about what a struggle it was to crank out fiction, week in and week out, for serial publication. Alas, though…I’ve never anything but overconfident.

Things That Go Bump in the Night…

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Well. Not “bump” so much as “rustle rustle rustle” or “munch munch munch.” It’s three in the morning — what most of us would call the middle of the freaking night — the hour that my internal alarm clock has, of late, designated as the dawn of a bright new day. The dogs are conkered out, they being vulnerable to no such metabolic failings. I’m laying there thinking about my best friend in junior high school, Sandy.

Sandy. What an eccentric! We were perfectly matched.

Sandy loved horse racing. Every Saturday morning we would meet at my house to watch the races on TV. Yes. In those days, Saturday morning television (at least in San Francisco) went not to the cartoons but to the races. We loved to watch the races.

Sandy’s hero was not Elvis but Eddie Arcaro, probably the greatest thoroughbred jockey who ever mounted a horse. So I’m laying there thinking — what else? — whatever happened to Eddie Arcaro? Naturally, I have to roll out of the sack (why waste time at three in the morning, eh?) and look him up. Now I’m sitting here, reading up on Eddie, when…comes from the roof (attic???) this weird little sound. At first I think it’s a light rain: could be tapping on the skylights. A sprinkle hitting the glassoid?

But it’s not quite like rain. It doesn’t sound like Ratty dancing across the attic beams. Quite. WTF? Scritch scritch scritch scritch… Something digging in the leaves that have blown onto the roof in the summer’s winds? Something gnawing on the drywall?

The skylights appear to be dry, but it’s hard to tell, because of course it’s mighty dark outside.

I get up and go look out the back door. The motion-sensitive lights have not come on. I can’t see a thing out there.

Open the door and hear rassle rassle rassle! The sound of something running away? I don’t hear anything more. I don’t see anything. And I sure as hell ain’t goin’ out there.

Probably Ratty, I figure. Though it could be a racoon. But I doubt if a raccoon would bother with climbing on the roof. Ratty can scamper up a block wall as easily as she can stroll across a field of grass. Yeah: almost certainly Ratty…

Or was it?

A couple hours pass. The dogs arise and demand a doggy walk. Along about 6:15 we get back, and eventually we wander out to police the backyard. Having performed the morning pool inspection, I amble back and find…

Ruby TRANSFIXED!

Did you know that a corgi can go on point?

Who’d’ve thunk it? That dog was pointing like a fine little vizsla…into the rocks filling a drainage ditch off the patio.

WTF?

So I approach cautiously (rattlesnake? wh-a-a?). She doesn’t budge. Literally: she does not wriggle, so fixed is she on whatever the target is.

From beneath the stones, we can hear the same sound: Scritch scritch scritch scritch….

What the heck? Whatever it is, it ain’t a raccoon and it ain’t Ratty!

I call Cassie, who’s smarter than either of us. She’s not the slightest bit interested.

I try lifting some of the stones, never having heard of a rattlesnake that could go scritch scritch scritch scritch.

This isn’t exactly a ditch: it’s actually a French well. So it’s several feet deep, and it holds a LOT of river rock. Under the first layer of rock, I find…nothing. Eventually the scritching stops.

Was the 3 a.m. scritcher inside the house? I doubt it. But…how could it scritch loudly enough to be heard through the roofing, through the attic insulation, through attic flooring, through the ceiling’s drywall? In both cases, the sound was rather soft. The volume seemed about the same. And in the wee hours, it distinctly sounded like it was on the roof or on a skylight.

The mystery has yet to be solved.

Hmh. Wonder if I could train this little dog to hunt Mearn’s quail? It appears they have, on occasion, been used as bird dogs. Innaresting.

Today’s header image: Preakness Stakes. By Maryland GovPics – Flickr: 139th Preakness Stakes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32879764

Report from Sauna Central

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Hot, wet, gray, and muggy.

We haven’t had a real summer “monsoon” season for several years — make that quite a few years. The so-called “heat island” effect creates a bubble over the ever-bloating urbanized area that acts like the Dome in the TV show of the same name. The daily afternoon showers of yore are bounced off, to pass by miles to the north or the south. This is the first time in probably close to a decade that we’ve had a system strong enough to overcome that phenomenon.

And strong it is: strongly wet. Took the dogs for a walk around 5:30 this morning and came back drenched. Parboiled, actually. Jumping in the pool doesn’t help much: the air is so wet, water won’t evaporate off your skin and hair, so you don’t get the cooling effect. My hair was still damp this morning — from yesterday afternoon’s dip!

One amazingly wonderful thing, though: despite the heat, the mustard algae has not returned to the pool!

It’s like some kind of freaking miracle!

What caused the little green critters to decide to vacate the pool? Beats me.

I’m not doing anything different. The only odd act was adding two pounds of non-chlorine shock treatment, an oxidizer that is known not to affect algae. The stuff disappeared within a day of that, and it hasn’t been back, except for a few small patches that I was able to wipe right off…and that did not just grow right back within a few hours.

So that makes me feel a lot better about the proposed replastering project. Really, I figured I was about to spend $10,000 to cover the pool with yet another fine substrate for the rampant algae. Of course, the stuff is in the filter and the pump by now, and so jackhammering off the old plaster and smearing on expensive new PebbleTec product is not gonna get rid of it. Its just going to create a very expensive algae-infested pond.

But nay! Apparently not!

Whatever is going on, something has killed it off, and it’s not readily coming back. This is the time of year, when the water is like bathwater, that it grows most exuberantly. So the fact that it’s not running amok now suggests it will refrain from covering the new surface with green slime.

It’s so gray and murky out there…I”m surprised it’s not raining right now. It is, however, only about 90 degrees, rather cool. “Feels like”: ohh, about 110… Chance of rain is only about 24% (so we’re told), dropping to about 15% tomorrow. And that’s about it until next Saturday, when the chance of precip spikes to 15%…very, very briefly.

Oh well.

Plants singin’ in the rain