Early in my career, a mentor in Toronto gave me advice that seemed perfectly sound at the time: “A good deal is a good deal anywhere in the world. Just get the numbers right and the rest follows.”
I understood the logic. In the financial world I was being trained in, rigor was rigor and the model was the model. Numbers were supposed to be the universal language — clean, portable, culture-neutral.
Three decades of leading teams across eight markets taught me something very different.
In much of the West, relationships often emerge from successful transactions. Across much of Asia, successful transactions often emerge from relationships. If you don’t understand that shift — not as a cultural footnote, but as a fundamental business reality — even the most sophisticated financial model in the world may not save your deal.
Let me be clear about something first. I have learned a tremendous amount from Western leadership culture: accountability, directness, the discipline to challenge assumptions, the willingness to execute decisively even when things are uncomfortable. Those strengths matter enormously, and I have tried to carry them with me across every market I have worked in.
But one of the most consistent mistakes I watched global leaders make — and that I made myself in the early years — was assuming that what worked exceptionally well at home could be carried across time zones and applied without adjustment to a different room, a different culture, and a very different set of unwritten rules.
I watched this play out many times during my years with multinational banks. Senior executives would arrive in a regional market, take command of the boardroom, deliver an impressive presentation, and walk away convinced they had achieved alignment. The local team had listened carefully, nodded at the right moments, and asked very few difficult questions. The visitors often left feeling that things had gone well.
But silence is not always agreement. Sometimes it is respect. Sometimes it is caution. Sometimes it is simply good manners. And sometimes — in my experience — it is all three at once.
I still remember a CFO in Hanoi pulling me aside after one particularly energetic meeting. He smiled politely and said, without any apparent frustration: “Your colleague talks too much.”
The deal, unsurprisingly, went nowhere.
Over the years I came to understand that succeeding across cultures had far less to do with intelligence and far more to do with observation — specifically, the willingness to slow down and pay attention to the room you were actually in, rather than the room you expected to be in.
Three things became clear to me, not as rules I was taught but as lessons I learned by getting them wrong.
The first is that silence rarely means what Western leaders assume it means. In many parts of Asia, open disagreement — particularly with a senior visitor — is not the instinctive response. People reflect differently, preserve harmony differently, and communicate hesitation differently. Walking out of a meeting convinced you have secured commitment when you have only secured quiet is a very common and very costly mistake.
The second is that relationships are not a by-product of the transaction. In many markets across Asia, trust is not something you build after the deal is signed. It is the precondition for the deal ever being taken seriously. Showing up with a compelling pitch before you have invested in the relationship — before the other side has had the chance to understand who you are and what you stand for — can close doors before you even realize they were open.
The third lesson I learned in Bangkok, and it has stayed with me the longest.
When I stepped into my first significant leadership role in the city, I inherited a senior leader who had openly aspired to the very position I had just been given. The more conventional corporate response might have been to gradually manage him out — reduce his scope quietly, signal that the transition had been decided, and let time do the rest.
I sensed that was the wrong approach. If he lost face publicly, I wasn’t simply managing a difficult personality. I was risking the confidence of the entire team and the culture I was trying to build. In that context, how I treated him was a signal about how I would treat everyone.
I expanded his responsibilities instead. I built a more visible platform around him and positioned him as a critical leader within the organization. It was not simply a calculation about one individual. It was a decision about trust — about what kind of leader I intended to be in that room.
Over time, I earned not only his loyalty but the confidence of the broader team. That outcome did not come from any framework I had studied. It came from understanding that protecting dignity, in many parts of Asia, is not a soft leadership consideration. It is one of the most strategic moves available to you.
As the economic center of gravity continues shifting toward Asia, I think cross-cultural intelligence can no longer be treated as a sensitivity that thoughtful leaders carry as a secondary skill. For leaders operating across borders, it may be one of the most important strategic capabilities they can develop.
The goal is not to abandon the leadership instincts that have served you well. It is to hold them more lightly — and to stay curious enough about the room you are actually in to understand what it requires of you.
Because the next time you step into a boardroom in Bangkok, Hanoi, or anywhere outside your own cultural comfort zone, the most valuable thing you may be able to do is slow down, listen carefully, and pay close attention to what is not being said.
In many parts of the world, the relationship is not separate from the deal.
It is the deal.
