The Overeducated but Inexperienced Americans.
In 2009 I sat down for a scheduled lunch meeting in Istanbul with a Russian businessman I had never met. This lunch was at the Four Seasons hotel right alongside the Bosphorus exactly in the spot you see in the above photo. From where we were sitting you could look across the river to see Asia in the distance.
This Russian business man was a tall guy with a strong build who wore a sky blue dress shirt and tan suit. His hair was silver and he wore square black sunglasses. He was right out of a James Bond movie. When I arrived at the outdoor lunch table where he was waiting for me he was eating a club sandwich with a fork and knife.
While we sat and talked, my role in this was to discuss manufacturing in Turkey and getting supplies (textiles in this case) produced in Turkey for buyers in the USA and Europe. It was a discussion about factories and production.
At the end of our conversation the well dressed Russian put his fork and knife down, wiped his mouth with his white cloth napkin and said “if you want to produce product in Turkey, you have to invest in Turkey”.
I knew what he meant. We didn’t end up doing business.
The world is a rough and tough place full of rough and tough people. The majority of Americans have no idea how the world works.
