The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.

Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.

Listen to The Closer, Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. I'm talking today with

Amy Bernstein, the editor of HBO, about the feature articles in our September 2014 issue.

Amy, thanks so much for talking with us today. Happy to be here. I am so

excited about the spotlight topic for this issue, managing across borders, because this is something

that we really see a lot of traction

for instance whenever we publish something online this is a problem managers are

really grappling with. So tell me a little bit about what's in the spotlight

package to help people with the

challenge of managing companies across borders. What we have this month is a

couple of views of strategy across borders and it really deals with some of the misperceptions about

running a multinational company.

The first article is Tarun Khan's contextual intelligence.

And what he said that was so intriguing is that best practices don't translate from country

to country. That many managers of global companies assume that all

they need to do to take a business from country A to country B is a couple of tweaks, right? Not true at all. They've done very deep

analysis and what the data show is that more often than not you really have to do a radical rethink of your business in order to succeed from one country to another.

They looked at the example of Metro Cash and Carry, which I believe is a German big box supplier of fresh groceries and office supplies to businesses.

And Metro Cash and Carry had over the years

expanded across Western Europe and into Eastern Europe and Russia with very few problems.

But when it went into China, bam, it just hit wall after wall it knew for example from all that of its experience

...