When working with Italians, understand that your relationship with them is the channel through which your arguments travel. Before your ideas can land, there needs to be personal trust.
This means investing time in getting to know people, sharing meals, building rapport, and demonstrating reliability before you push for decisions. Proposals that come through trusted personal connections carry far more weight than those arriving cold, no matter how strong the substance.
If you skip the relationship-building phase and lead with your pitch, you will encounter polite resistance that has nothing to do with the quality of your argument. The relationship does not merely support the persuasion—it enables it. Without trust, even excellent arguments go unheard. With trust, even modest arguments receive serious consideration.
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