Raymond Saner, “Effective Business Diplomacy”
Governments use economic and commercial diplomacy to represent their interests abroad and at home1. However, Indian companies are less aware that they need to develop their own diplomatic competencies in order to be successful abroad and to be less dependent on information and guidelines provided by their Embassies abroad.
As nuclear negotiations conclude and an opening to Iran’s market looms, Western companies with interests in investing in Iran need to prepare their entry strategies carefully. Beyond normal business considerations, Western companies may face challenges with obstacles emanating from outside of their direct sphere of control. To plan beyond “business as usual,” this article proposes that they consider applying thecompetencies of Business Diplomacy Management. After so many years of strained international relations, foreign companies need to understand that Iran comes with a history fraught with political tensions that may impede business as usual. A British and American backed coup forcefully removed the democratically elected Mossadegh in 1953 to reinstall the Pahlavi Shah, who was himself subsequently removed in the Islamic revolution in 1979. Since then relations between the new Islamic Republic of Iran and Western countries have been frosty. The recent JCPOA agreement must be understood within this context.
Welcome to this edition of Interconnections. We hope our theme of international management practice provides interesting and stimulating reading and is successful in provoking thought and debate. As with the two earlier editions of Interconnections, our contributors are connecting the insights provided by academic theory into the challenges and issues facing international management practitioners, just as the experience of practitioners feeds back into academic theory.
Non state actors like Business Diplomats and Transnational Economic NGO Diplomats with their multitude of transborder alliances and pressure groups have added to the traditional domain of economic diplomacy a "supraterritorial relations" component and are thereby partially undermining sovereignty of states in conducting international economic relations. At the same time, faced with globalisation and competition for foreign direct investment as well as with the growing influence of international economic standard setting organisations (WTO, ITU,ILO etc), ...
Saner, R., & Yiu, L. 2005. Swiss Executives as Business Diplomats in the New Europe: Evidence from Swiss Pharmaceutical and Agro-Industrial Global Companies. Organizational Dynamics, 34 (3).
