Earlier, at the beginning of 2000, the question ‘why India now?’ was difficult to answer. But now, several years later, the question does not arise any longer. It had been replaced with the new mantra ‘You can not afford not to be in India any longer’.

But India has traditionally been considered as a difficult place for business. While China has been able to fully connect to the foreign business world, India still remains a widely unknown territory when it comes to understanding business culture and business ethics.

One reason is, that the “old” picture of India as being a third world, developing country, that has nothing to offer, could not be effectively replaced by a realistic picture of today’s world. Information about an IT- specialized elite of the country that made its way into America’s Silicon Valley did neither match the “old” picture of India nor did it replace it with an effective “new” one.

That leaves the outside businessman alone with a number of questions like how to set up one’s business, how and where to enter the Indian market and how to analyze one’s potential in the current market scenario.

But not only that, once started in India, life does not become easier when it comes to dealing with daily obstacles that leave a western observer widely stunned. What seams to be an easy run at the beginning turns out to be a journey full of unplanned surprises. Only later the real India reveals its face as a country full of diversity and contrast.

Only than it becomes clear that there is a wide gap between western and Indian business culture and mainly between western and Indian communication patterns. The real challenge for a western company is to understand that only 1% of Indian business culture is visible to the outside world but it is critical for long term business relationships to make a sincere effort to understand the rest.

The book ‘Business Guide Indien” is a book for modern India. It is a tool for long-term business success by naming the key factors of cultural differences and different behavioural patterns. It helps the reader to reach the necessary comfort level to integrate into the business world of India.

By naming 10 specific business rules it enables the reader to clearly understand how to prepare oneself for a country with a middle class of 300 million people, out of which 54% are younger than 25 years. It gives the inside story of how family businesses operate and are interconnected in a business world that is widely dominated by personal relationships. It explains that the more linear way of carrying out business in the west is replaced by a lateral and concentric patter in India.

The author herself has personally gone through all the steps of setting up a business in India. She has developed her intercultural competence by a 19 year long experience with the country and her marriage to an Indian citizen. New Delhi has become her permanent home in the year 2000 where at the present she works as a trainer and business consultant for foreign companies.

She is educated in law and was the head of the legal department and the department for Quality Management in a leading Austrian bank for 17 years. But apart from all her studies that also led her to a deeper understanding of psychological and social factors, her real teachers were common Indian people like rikshaw and taxi drivers, traders and businessmen.

The idea to write this book came at a time when she discovered that her clients – foreign business men and women – kept on asking the same questions about ‘how to deal with Indian business partners’ over and over again. She understood that enough literature covering economical factors is already available in the market, but saw the need of a business guide that gives an insight into intercultural factors and practical advice on how to set up a business. To cover that, she wrote a 120 page long business guide that originated out of her own and personal experience with setting up a business in India.