If populist politics reveals a paradigm, in countries where populist politics are acceptable, effective paternalistic business leaders must offer unlimited protection in exchange for similarly unlimited allegiance from the workers. The reverse interview survey reported here suggests that, within knowledge‐based industries, the knowledgeable leader might override paternalistic considerations that nonetheless rule for the larger segment of Brazilian workers, who may shun the foreign‐appointed boss the most. Unfortunately, multinationals tend to expand abroad when they are mature businesses whose people‐oriented founders may be long gone. Their more technocratic successors are more likely to appoint the most despised leaders at subsidiaries. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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This article reviews the organizational values, recruitment, and reward policies of Brazilian samba schools and Indian dabbawalas to illustrate how their fi t to local cultures results in greater productivity, engagement, and low turnover. American-style management has spread worldwide, yet in emerging market countries such as India and Brazil, multinationals often struggle to motivate and engage their employees. The companies' top ranks in these countries are usually dominated by English-speaking, university-educated elites who are comfortable with Western management techniques. But these managers can be, as the Comprador class was in seventeenth-century China, strangers in their own land, implementing management techniques that feel foreign and inappropriate to their employees.The result is often low productivity, absenteeism, and unhappiness. However, there are organizations in both India and Brazil that achieve staggeringly high productivity and consistently strong engagement PRACTITIONER ARTICLE

To remain competitive, organizations must make sense of antecedent weak signals that might yield information on opportunities or threats. However, perceiving those signals requires psychological capabilities which are not evenly distributed over their workforce. Identifying who might effectively sense weak antecedent signals is the necessary first step in the staff selection and management process. To this effect, Human Resources Management processes at organizations rely on assessments. However, this study suggests that some self-assessments might be too context-sensitive to fit their purpose across cultures. In particular, the CEI-II evaluation applied to a small and convenience sample of Brazilian executives did not satisfy Brazilian respondents’ selection for curiosity.  The authors briefly discuss how the Brazilian context may differ, not least because of a considerably lower generalized trust level, and suggest relying alternatively on projective instruments.

The drivers for the internationalization of business teaching and research were multinational corporations, the Cold War, and the relative price advantage of non‐America business schools. Yet, the internationalization largely failed to reflect local contexts. The consequent paucity of original local business thought, international or not, exposes non‐American business schools to the raid of American‐based massive open online courses which will prune off the mainstay courses at emerging market business schools. Deprived of a substantial share of their fee‐paying students, the remaining docents at those schools will be less likely to publish altogether, including in fields that might sustain independent thought. Therefore, American‐like international business research is likely to have a longer life, more narrowly focused on English‐speaking countries and Europe, with even less of a contribution from emerging markets.

Brazilian software exports still do not match a relatively high local prowess in the matter. The negative country of origin image for technology products may only emphasize a tendency to avoid international exposure among entrepreneurs. I suggest that lack of self-esteem may play an important part in hindering Brazilian competitiveness and I point out to the roots of the negative portrayal of themselves, buying in to the negative image that gives place to the country of origin effect. Much of this interpretation may be relevant to other former colonies and are applicable to other creative industries. I draw on three cases in which Brazilian software companies awaited foreigners to invite them to export and I illustrate that a strong Brazilian reluctance to expose themselves abroad may be at play. I seek to explain the roots of that reluctance in a lack of worldliness as well as in an attitude that may have psychoanalytical foundations grounded in genesis of Brazil and in the way this development affected its institutions and the people's Weltanschauung. The policy implications are significant, as expecting Brazilians technology entrepreneurs to sell technology products at fairs, may be the wrong way to go. Instead, an export policy that allows for building partnerships capable of allowing for mitigating risks, building affective relationships, and better understanding of the other will require rebalancing policies, that is, less participation in fairs and more two-way internships, policies which are likely to render more palpable results among Brazilians and possibly among other former colonial nations. K E Y W O R D SBrazil, country of origin effect, serendipity, strategy, technology exports

Where there is little trust, can there be self-transcendence?  Can one strive for openness as well as closeness between tribes? Preference to trust own clan members is much higher among Mediterranean peoples than among Germanic ones. In both Germanic and Mediterranean clusters, trusting behaviours follow culturally determined kinship patterns that are slow to change, so much so that the different Mediterranean and Germanic trust patterns still show between Latin America and the USA. Germanic managerial techniques rest on Germanic trusting behaviours that are relatively lacking in the Mediterranean cluster, among whom Germanic managerial techniques lose efficacy and self-transcendence might be a riskier path to take. Clan-friendly management among Mediterranean peoples, including rewards more readily focused on needs, teamwork and citizenship behaviour, require less controls, bringing about faster alignment and more agile organizations. These reflections are relevant to manage North African migrants into Europe, as they are to manage Latin Americans into the USA.

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