To wear or not to wear... a suit to a business dinner in Myanmar

DURING one of our first customer dinners in Myanmar, my team and I had to grapple with a difficult question: what to wear. In many other places this would be an easy choice. Just your regular shirt and tie, and maybe a coat, would do. But we thought that in this case, it would be the right thing to do to don the longyi - which is a traditional sarong-like attire - to build rapport. Obviously, we had no idea how to wear it. We even resorted to using belts, artfully hidden within the folds of our longyi, to ensure that it wouldn't unravel.

We fully expected our guests to come in similar attire, so imagine our surprise when they turned up in - you guessed it - western style suits.

To this day, whenever anyone asks me about doing business overseas, I think about this story. Different countries have different business cultures and it is only with time that we will be able to grasp all the nuances. But as internationalisation becomes a national agenda for SMEs, I believe that this will be time well-spent.