Put Your Best Foot Forward Russia: A Fearless Guide to International Communication & Behavior

by Mary Bosrock,

Craig J. MacIntosh (Illustrator)

4th in the Put Your Best Foot Forward series

(January 1995)

International Education Systems

This book is a guide for foreigners — particularly Americans — to travelling and/or doing business in Russia. (While Americans as a whole possess many good qualities, conversance with foreign cultures is not one of them.) The fourth in the Put Your Best Step Forward series of travel and foreign-business guides, it lays out in a humorous way aspects of Russian culture that might befuddle a foreigner encountering them for the first time and unprepared. One thing about the book that is either a plus or a minus, depending on your point of view, is its brevity — at just 75 pages, it's either a brisk read or a too-superficial gloss, depending on one's expectations.

Two additional points: First is the book's old publication date. Russian culture has changed since then, and budding writers out there might want to take notice. Second, it might well be of interest to Russian readers interested in seeing how people in the West view them.



Russian Etiquette & Ethics in Business

by Drew Wilson (Contributor), Lloyd Donaldson

Paperback

(February 1996)

O'Reilly and Associates



Doing business in Russia is often bewildering for people from cultures where other habits of conducting commerce prevail. It is not so much that ways of doing business in Russia are better or worse than those practiced in, say, France, Germany or the United States, but simply that they are different and so often baffling to the uninitiated. (For instance, the common Western perception that forming close personal bonds in commerce amounts to nothing more than a disguised form of nepotism.) This book aims to rectify this common problem. It serves as a guide to Russian business culture and norms for the prospective or real Western businessperson trying to work productively in this country, explaining the basics and elucidating what might at first glance seem incomprehensible or different from what it really is. All in all a book worth reading.