All over the world senior managers are faced over and over again with the challenge of bridging over the 'troubled waters' of organizational life. The troubled waters are the gaps caused by differences between groups that are required to cooperated closely with one another. In order to best expose the dynamics of bridging, this article has chosen to focus on a particularly challenging area of interaction, namely the interaction between western investors and/or managers and their counterparts in the nascent market economies of transition countries.