VIEW FROM PRACTICE Readers of Macunaíma and Martin Fierro are like two ships passing in the night: Bad for business Alfredo Behrens 1 | Ernesto R. Gantman 2 1 Winvest Management Consulting and FIA Business School, São Paulo, Brazil 2 Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Escuela de Posgrado en Negocios, Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina Correspondence Alfredo Behrens, Winvest Management Consulting, Rua João Gomes Xavier, 192. 05005-020 São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Email: ab@alfredobehrens.com This is an exploratory study about the knowledge of Brazilian managers about Argentina and vice versa. Expressing a deeper knowledge of the partner's culture corresponds to greater familiarity, which facilitates the construction of the confidence necessary to do business. We analyzed the academic literature on familiarity and trust, and suggest that the interrelationships of these coun- tries' economies could be enhanced by encouraging greater familiarity among business actors in the countries. The empirical data comes from surveys of MBA students from both countries, car- ried out in 2008, 2014, and 2015. The results suggest a significant lack of knowledge of the other and a relative stability of expressions of distrust over time, in the case of Brazilians. We conclude that it is advisable to encourage a greater intercultural understanding among business executives of both nations because this could accelerate mutually beneficial business and empower the executives' careers in the region. We also suggest that the demand for this type of intercultural skills should arise at corporations because the demand by executives is not suffi- ciently informed as to garner the necessary change and because the pay-as-you-go income model of business schools responds to clients' needs rather than to what should be done. KEYWORDS Argentina, Brazil, business, cross-border, familiarity, trust 1 | INTRODUCTION The purpose of this exploratory article is to reveal the knowledge that Argentine and Brazilian managers have about each other's coun- tries. The underlying assumption is that deeper knowledge is a proxy for familiarity, which reveals a smaller cultural distance, which in its turn could help improve the international business climate between both countries. There is an ample supply of studies on the internationalization styles of companies (Blomstermo & Dharma, 2003; Bürgel, 2000; Van Lente & Goey, 2008), but it is mostly offered by academics from developed countries. The present study focuses on Brazilian man- agers' knowledge about Argentina and vice versa. We chose this dyad because to businesspeople of both countries, the other offers a low- cost chance to test the waters when internationalizing. Developed countries, even on account of even their imperial phases, have more information about the outside world. This infor- mation is both official (agencies or ministries that obtain data on busi- ness opportunities abroad) and academic, as its main universities have a greater degree of international openness than its Latin Ameri- can counterparts. In addition, countries with more advanced economies have greater political, economic, and military power to defend their interests. Thus, companies headquartered in these countries have a lower perception of the risk of internationalization than do Brazilian or Argentine companies. The greater the perception of risk the less propensity to internationalize the business. This would be one of the reasons why large Brazilian com- panies such as Votorantim, Itaú, and Bradesco took so long to develop competencies to internationalize (Fleury & Fleury, 2012). In the next section, we will present a brief review of the litera- ture and some specific examples that support our argument, that familiarity with the other's culture nurtures trust and that the latter is conducive to more rapid growth in business interaction. We will then develop some considerations about the level of economic relationship between Brazil and Argentina, suggesting that a greater level of eco- nomic interaction should prove mutually beneficial. Subsequently, we present the methodology used and the results of the study. Finally, and by way of conclusion, we offer some recommendations for DOI: 10.1002/tie.21952 Thunderbird International Business Review. 2017;1–8. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tie © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1