Entrepreneurs in developing countries who assume they will have the same legal, governmental, and institutional protections as their counterparts in the West will fail. To succeed, they need to build trust within the existing structures--and this book shows how it's done.


Western countries have created layers of laws, regulations and other kinds of structural protections to enable entrepreneurs to build businesses. These don't necessarily exist, or aren't consistently enforced, in developing countries. But there is a solution and that solution is trust. This book, by an eminent business scholar and developing world entrepreneur, shows how to build trust in three crucial ways:
1. Change Your Mindset: Let go of your expectations and realize that you have to understand and trust the rules of the society you're operating in, not fight against or go around them.
2. Work with the Pre-existing Social Fabric: You can't change customs and practices that have been in place for hundreds, even thousands of years. Work with what already exists and build on top of it (while communicating and acting transparently every step of the way).
3. Partner with and work with existing governmental structures: You can only scale your venture with their help--find change agents within the government and ally with them.