You present the project to the board, you get careful questions, and nobody decides anything. The meeting did not go wrong. The decision was already being built somewhere else, before that room.
In this article I share what I heard from senior Brazilian executives working at Chinese multinationals, during my master’s research: decisions that move in a spiral, a “no” that is almost never spoken, and guanxi, the network of trust where things actually get settled. With Chinese capital reaching more and more sectors in Brazil, this is no longer a question for the few.