COLUMN ONE : A Clash of Corporate Cultures : For Americans and Mexicans doing business together, the difference in customs can be trying. The key to success, many executives find, is compromise.

When Steve Knaebel replaced his Mexican boss at the helm of Cummins motor company here, he converted the president’s luxury office into a meeting room and threw a wine and cheese party for employees who had never seen the top floor before.

Knaebel moved his own quarters down two stories, shunned the executive elevator and put on a work shirt to tour the plant once a week. He wanted to show employees of the newly privatized company that their U.S. boss would be an accessible and democratic leader; the old Mexican hierarchy was out.

But Knaebel has also adopted many Mexican business customs in the five years since Cummins bought out the government. Each Dec. 12, when Mexico honors the Virgin of Guadalupe, Cummins shuts down production to throw a party for workers and their families. A priest offers prayers to the Virgin at an altar in the company cafeteria.

“We’re adjusting our ways to the needs of workers and their culture,” Knaebel said.

For Americans working in Mexico and Mexicans doing business with Americans, the cultural adjustments are many. During decades of a closed economy, Mexico was a country in which company bosses were kings and employees were loyal subjects who did not speak out.

And customers, well, they were almost always wrong.

Today, open borders and the impending North American Free Trade Agreement are revolutionizing the way business is done in Mexico. Management is streamlining, computerizing and tearing down barriers inside the company to make their firms a better, more efficient place to work. In the newly competitive market, they are revamping strategy around that most novel concept--customer service.

The open economy has brought more Mexicans and Americans together in partnerships, forcing them to adapt their styles much as businessmen and factory owners along the U.S.-Mexico border learned to do decades ago. In the new global economy, business people are getting similar educations in Europe, Japan and the Middle East.

While many big companies are sending executives with international experience to Mexico, scores of small and mid-size U.S. firms have opened offices with representatives who have never worked abroad and are naive about the way things may be done in other countries.

New opportunities also have brought many Mexicans into contact with U.S. business people for the first time.

The adjustments are sometimes difficult. For attorney Cheryl Schecter, who arrived two years ago to work for a Mexican law firm, it meant the embarrassment of having to choose between using the downstairs secretaries’ restroom or the executive men’s room on her own floor. There was no restroom for women lawyers.

For Jose Maria Gonzalez, president of Black & Decker Latin America, it meant the indignity of having an unworldly U.S. businessman inquire if it was “safe” to bring his wife with him to Mexico.

The personnel director of a U.S. company describes the shock of receiving a manager’s request to hire a secretary that sounded more like a personal ad. He sought a single, attractive woman in her 20s.

“He wound up with a 59-year-old widow, overweight,” the personnel director said. “The woman was more than qualified and is still doing an excellent job.”

Americans often find Mexican business bureaucratic and slow, while Mexicans feel Americans do business so fast as to be rude. Mexicans stand too close when they talk to you and talk too long in meetings, Americans say; Americans call you by your first name and ask questions that are too personal, Mexicans say.

Often the differences are just a matter of viewpoint.

“Americans say those Mexicans go to lunch for two hours and don’t work,” said a member of one of Mexico’s most successful business families. “But the American closes up at 6 p.m. and the Mexican is still in his office at 8. So who’s more productive?”

Americans learn Spanish and Mexicans learn English. And yet communication problems arise. One of the bigger stumbling blocks for Americans seems to be that small Spanish word, ahorita. Literally it means right now. In reality, its many meanings have driven otherwise rational men to the brink of madness.

When are those photocopies going to be ready?

“ Ahorita ,” answers the secretary who knows the copy machine is broken.

When will that delivery be made?

“ Ahorita ,” answers the salesman who has no truck.

One U.S. financial officer sheepishly admits he finally prohibited his Mexican staff from giving him ahorita as an answer.

“To you and me ahorita means now. To them it could mean two minutes or two hours. I tell them it doesn’t matter if it’s not going to be ready for an hour but I need to know. What I’m asking for is an estimate of how long it’s going to take,” he said.

This reluctance to commit to a timetable may have its roots in Mexico’s old closed economy, when raw materials and spare parts were hard to come by. Mexicans learned to improvise, but that took time.

In the absence of competition, the idea was to employ as many people as possible, not to have them work as hard as possible. Few concerned themselves with punctuality. Deliveries, Knaebel says of the old government-controlled Cummins, “used to be pegged to the week but if we made it in the month everybody was happy.”

In the 1980s, Mexico also suffered an economic crisis, with triple-digit inflation and a cash and credit crunch. Companies could not keep big stocks or engage in long-term planning. Today they can’t afford not to.

With competition, companies have to move merchandise and satisfy the consumer. They have had to give up Mexican-style profit margins of 30% to 35% for American-style high sales volumes. Now, Knaebel said, “we deliver on the date the customer sets.”

Sears of Mexico President Thurmon Williams recently called in his 3,000 Mexican suppliers and presented them with an oversize mannequin of Uncle Sam. “Our goal is to supply quality merchandise on time at competitive prices,” he said, pointing to the doll. “As long as you do that, we’ll buy Mexican. If you give me 1963 styles or 1991 quality, forget it. We’ll call in Uncle Sam.”

Most of them have complied.

But while Mexican businessmen are impressed with how quickly their country is modernizing, Americans often are frustrated by the slow pace of change.

Americans are a product of the great open plains and Western frontier, a U.S. investment banker mused. They are used to starting from scratch. But in Mexico, “you’re not creating fabric but changing it. That can be a more complex task. Americans react overly negatively when things don’t work out in the time frame they want.”

“Americans,” said a Mexican businessman, “always want to apply U.S. formulas to something that in Mexico may not work. The American says, ‘I have a method, and I know it works.’ But maybe it is not going to work the same way. There is another velocity, another culture. There is no universal culture.”

This conviction has made some Americans slow to accept Mexican ways. Why do we have to give holidays for Easter Week and Mother’s Day, some ask. Why do we pay more for executives and provide middle management with a car? We don’t do that in the United States.

“It’s a function of a competitive marketplace,” headhunter Thurston Hamer of Korn/Ferry International tells his U.S. clients. “If you want the best, you do what the competition does.”

Mexicans view U.S. business people as direct, pragmatic and legalistic. Americans acknowledge they have to remember their manners in Mexico, to pay attention to social graces.

It is said that in the United States you do business before becoming friends, and in Mexico you become friends before doing business. But while Mexicans may be genteel, Americans find them very hard to read.

“In some ways, Europeans probably understand the mentality of Mexicans better than Americans do,” the banker said. “They understand nuances, subtlety and psychology. Americans are an open book. They say they want to open a plant and that’s what they want. Mexicans may have a slightly different agenda and this may be just the first step. Mexicans don’t say no. They find a way around. Or they say yes and they don’t say when. It takes a while to get the feel.”

Mexicans dislike confrontation and sometimes have to adjust to U.S. combativeness.

“You know, in a meeting Americans can argue, hit the table and leave as if nothing happened, while a Mexican might not forgive you for three months,” said Gonzalez of Black & Decker. “I have to make sure not to personalize things sometimes.”

“Here people look for consensus,” said the American financial officer. “I’ll argue until you tell me to sit down. You’re the boss, you decide. Here they want you to agree. They want you to say, ‘OK, you’re right.’ ”

This, Americans say, is a vestige of the old system of boss as king. You don’t challenge the patron of the hacienda.

But it may also be a question of social class. Not only do Mexican executives tend to come from the upper classes, but their salaries are enormously superior to those of their employees. If a U.S. executive earns 10 times minimum wage, his Mexican counterpart is earning about 100 times minimum wage.

Low-paid workers often have been treated like untrustworthy house servants, and bureaucratic systems were aimed at them. At Cummins, Knaebel said, expense accounts used to require the approval of seven managers. Now it is down to two.

Knaebel--who not only brought Cummins employees into the executive suite but plant workers into management decisions--says he has worked hard to close the gap between management and staff.

“Management has to learn to accept disagreement. It is not insubordination,” he said. “It is an attempt to work together.”