Big Think

Jean-Francois Rischard: Things in the U.S., the contact between people and business is much more direct. It goes quickly on a first name basis. There are no barriers. I remember working in Wall Street and having immediate access to the Chairman or the Vice Chairman of the firm, which in Europe would not be the case at all. There is not only this informality, but there is a sort of culture of going down to business quickly and immediately zooming in on the issues. And as I think about it more systematically, what you have in the U.S. system is a system where money is . . . time is money. When you do business, you don’t use too much time in social chit chatting. On the other hand, you do have legal contract that runs several hundred pages and that foresees every possible contingency in the divorce clauses and so forth. Whereas in the European culture, and probably even in some other cultures including the Japanese, time is not money. Time is space for relationships. So you spend more time developing the relationship before you get down to concluding a contract. And then when the day of the contract comes, the legal agreement is very light – almost skinny. And those are two completely different ways of doing business, and I still don’t know which one is the better one; but I can operate in both.

Recorded on: 7/2/07