#88. Kyle Hegarty: The Business Nomad
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What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. Check out the episode description for more details. I'm Justin. Our guest today is the author of a new award-winning book called The Accidental Business Nomad, A Survival Guide for Working Across a Shrinking Planet.

It's a book about the funny, tragic, and expensive mistakes almost everyone makes when working across foreign markets. He's also the managing director at Leadership Nomad, where he helps organizations grow globally by helping leaders and teams work more effectively, both internally and externally. This includes new changes in the way we communicate, the way we think, how we lead, how we collaborate, how we build teams, how we build trust, and how we build trust.

and how we overcome barriers brought on by changes in culture, diversity, geography, globalization, and hierarchy. This has never been more relevant than it is today. The pandemic, video conferencing, I mean, we're all accessible at a touch of a button no matter where we are. The world has never been smaller than it is today.

right now. So today we talk about the book and hear some really interesting insights and stories he has to tell. It was a real pleasure talking to him and it's only fitting we did this one over Zoom. This was hosted by Howie, Eric, and myself. So without further ado, please give it up for Kyle Hagerty.

Okay. Cheers. Everyone have a drink. Cheers, guys. Cheers. Cheers.

It's good to have a drink. Kyle, honestly, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. You know, I find great pleasure in talking to people like you. And I really kind of want to dive into all the stories you have to share. So welcome to the show.

Thank you, guys. So good to be here. I've been keeping an eye on you all for the last year or so as you've been pumping out these great programs. So happy to be here. Really? Well, I'm flattered. I'm very flattered. I got to say, okay, I'm going to jump right into it. I got to say, I really love the premise of your book. And I think, you know, with all that's going on and the way the world is shrinking, largely due to technology,

I feel like as much as we try to be open-minded and tolerant and inclusive, I find that most people are still pretty ill-equipped to deal with just other people who are different. And I love how that kind of just highlights that.

the complexity of the human condition. And I think that underpins almost everything we talk about on the show is just like, what is it to be human? And really how we communicate and how we interact with each other is really, I think, at the center of all of that. So I really enjoy your book in terms of talking about it from a business and work setting. Yeah, thank you. No, I, you know, just take a quick step back. So I had this, I kind of

It's a first person narrative. The stories have all been scrambled to protect the guilty. But what I what I was looking at was just having having lived and worked outside of the United States for 15 years now.

All of the goofy, dumb, expensive mistakes that keep happening and seem to be not only happening in repeat, but almost in multiples as things become more digital. It's just happening more frequently. And you could argue that the pandemic has accelerated that as well, because now we're

You can't even take 24 hours of flying from New York to Shanghai to do something stupid. You can do it in five seconds at the click of a Zoom button. And so what I what I found, what I wanted to dig into was just callbacks.

some of this stuff out and trying to do it in a comfortable way to say, look, everybody's guilty of it. When I'm having these conversations with managers and people who have tons of overseas experience, they're like, oh, yeah, you know, yeah, my guys really need this. And it's like, bullshit, man. Like, you're the problem here. You know, like, we're all... No matter how long we've all been playing this game, especially working globally, like, we're all screwing this stuff up still. So it's worth...

I think just taking a step back and trying to have some fun with it, see if we can learn from it. Yeah, I think it's definitely a practice of self-awareness too, like you're saying. And to your point, I really appreciate the tone of your book as well, because you portray characters in this book that for many may come off as pretty offensive, especially in today's climate.

This is Joe. Yeah, so I love how you weren't afraid to do that. And you're doing it intentionally, I guess, to prove a point. Because as I see it, you bring a certain realism to it because you're telling real accounts of real experiences that I guess you've seen. And if you travel the world enough, you're going to get offended. You're going to get embarrassed. You're going to commit faux pas.

And that's going to happen. And I like how you don't avoid that and you kind of take that head on in the stories you tell.

I sold the idea to the publisher as, if you're familiar, so in the cross-cultural world, there's all these cross-cultural communication books. And some of them are actually pretty helpful. Some of them are good. The thing that pissed me off about them was that I felt like almost every example was contrived. Most of the people that write the books, I have a lot of respect for, but a lot of them come from academics. Again, not a problem. Great. That's where we need the data.

But then they apply it into and then, you know, Joe is a project manager and he does this and it doesn't work. And then he applies our cross-cultural framework and now it's good. And it's just like that's not what I saw in the last couple of years. So what I said was the way I sold it was to the publisher.

This is Geert Hofstede, one of the, you know, the cross-cultural researcher, very academic type. He said, Geert Hofstede meets Hunter S. Thompson and they just have one too many drinks at a bar. And that was the tone that I wanted to go through because...

I felt like a lot of people who should be reading those cross-cultural books simply aren't going to. They're just not. The hope was to get it in an exec's hands as they were hopping onto a flight to be able to at least have something to have some fun with and hopefully pick up some ideas. Yeah. So what does it mean? If we talk about culture now, and a lot of, I think, big companies or just companies all over

are really kind of pushing this agenda of having a strong and healthy company culture. But what does that mean in a global work setting when the world is shrinking and you are kind of bumping up against people from all different societies, all different cultures, all different mentalities? So what does that mean? Can there be a one company culture or is that kind of a myth now?

So the word, you know, when you look up the word culture, nobody can even agree on what the definition means. There's like a hundred different definitions of culture. So you talk about company culture. There's culture between groups. So there would be office culture. So the Singapore office has a vibe, a culture that's different than the Shanghai office, that's different than the London office. You talk about different groups of different ages. Yeah.

I'm not a huge into pointing out the millennial Gen X stuff, but age, I guess bands do have a level of culture to them.

Yeah, do you want a giant company where the culture is homogenous and everybody kind of looks and acts the same? And it's interesting because I think immediately to the big tech companies. And you could go into some of the big companies in the headquarters in San Francisco, and the office looks exactly the same as it does here in Singapore or Malaysia. And the

Accents and the colors of people, the way people look are wildly different, but there's this kind of similarity in terms of how they think. So you so so you in many ways, what some of these companies have have achieved is a pretty diverse group on paper. But the cognitive diversity is practically non-existent.

I was at a VC office here in Singapore months ago, and I mean, it's just, they were very clear. They were just, they wanted to bring Silicon Valley best practices to Southeast Asia. And it's like, it just sounded, it just rang so, it just seemed like such a bad idea to me in that like bringing, essentially what he was like, this works in the US, we'll make it work here.

And that's actually one of the core themes of my book, which is like, you know, you can't really fight the last war or you can't bring the playbook that worked in one part of the world and try and just cut and paste it somewhere else because there is this diversity that's out there. There's differences that are out there. But it's a tricky one, right? So then, so what do you do? Do you do the opposite where it's like free form where, okay, you know, we're not going to

focus on the core values of the headquarters over across the other world, well, then what's the company? What is the thread that ties everybody together? You don't want to lose control. You don't want to lose that feeling of brand and actually some of the real reasons why companies go global, which is to make more money, right? And to have economies of scale.

Um, so it's like, I think that the best practice, the idea is that you want to globalize wherever you can and localize wherever you have to. And I think the same goes for when you talk about applying culture into that as well, uh, that's going to have a different look and feel to every single company. So I have, I have a quick question. Um, when you were writing your book, was it, we like, were you purely using your

actual experiences throughout these years, working with all these different companies and like that? Or is it more research, you know, or do they go hand in hand? Yeah. So what I wanted to do was what I started out in the first chapter really is people, a bunch of guys at a bar, a bunch of expats at a bar. And one of the things I found was

on a Friday or Monday after work, you know, you go in and it's like if it's an expat bar or whatever your go to, it's kind of turns into a bitch fest. But you pick up a lot of insights and you pick up a lot of these stories that come around and you actually learn a lot from that.

As I'm writing this, it's like, okay, you know what, though? That's a good start. And a lot of people don't get that anymore because we're all virtual and now we can't travel. I wrote this whole thing before the pandemic, but my belief was that even if we aren't traveling, we're still global from a working standpoint. So how do people who don't travel, how do they get those after work bar moments of insight?

So that's the first part of it. But then you go, well, you know, you can only listen to some half drunk guy so long before you go, well, that's kind of a that's kind of a tunnel vision way to think about things. It's also really honest, too, right? Because that's when they're being their most honest. The five o'clock the five o'clock conversations can be very interesting. Yeah. Some really good insight. But what I was looking at was let's let's see what the data says.

And so it was, let's try and find a balance between anecdotes and evidence. And there are a couple of chapters where I try to basically do a barroom toned explanation of some of what I found to be the most helpful research that's out there, whether it's the cross-cultural research that looks at different communication styles, different working styles in different parts of the world,

Where that research came from,

What are the big ideas about it? So when I talk about communication styles, it's the basic stuff from direct communicators to indirect communicating parts of the world. What does that look like? What are examples where people have made that, have those errors happen? Different working styles. How do people give feedback? How do we handle conflict? How do we think and react to hierarchies within groups? Some of the most classic examples will be

I'm working on a project or I'm working on a case right now with somebody where a group here in Singapore had an issue with another employee. They went to another Singaporean who was significantly senior because they weren't comfortable going to the UK manager to complain. And it was this and this is a very sophisticated company. This is not like, you know,

some backwater place. And so my point is like these weird hierarchy dances happen even at sophisticated places. And when you're doing it all remotely, it can very quickly escalate into some serious problems. Like this, this one woman might lose her job. There are

it causes all sorts of chaos just because people are interpreting hierarchy different and their communication styles are so different. These things matter. And I wanted to explain where that data came from and what it looked like and then go, okay, let's, let's go back to our friends at the bar. Does, does this research help explain the stuff that they and I am going through? So to answer your question in a very long winded way,

A lot of the examples are things that happened to me either directly or through other stories or through my clients. And this is mainly based in Singapore or were you also traveling around in different... I was traveling like crazy. Yeah, I was all over the place. Yeah, I'm looking at stuff from all over. I had a whole chapter on China I had to actually take out because...

It was the one story that was so specific about a real world situation. I couldn't scramble it enough to protect the individuals because I wanted to be very clear. Like, I'm not here to name and shame. I'm not here to say, you know, this company is terrible and look at what they did. And like, I just I didn't want to go down that. So I thought I could take a bunch of scenarios and kind of shuffle the deck a bit without

So the points get made without throwing anybody under a bus. I couldn't figure out how to do that particular one with the China story. So unfortunately, that was removed because he didn't want to give permission, which I get. And I just couldn't figure out a way to make it anonymous enough.

So I'm assuming you can't share it here now on this podcast? I'd love to. I'd love to. It's a music-related one. It was the chapter that I submitted as my sample to sell into the publishers. It won me the deal. It was arguably the better one, which I had to remove. Okay, well, maybe after a few more drinks, we'll get it out of you. A couple more, yeah. We'll see what happens.

But I think, you know, one of the things I got away from the premise of your book is really, I think what you're talking about is a lot of the biases that we all carry, right? Whether it's cultural biases, social biases, personal biases, and how that trickles down into the business and work setting.

The, um, you know how I know you, I know you have a story, um, that you call like the slap dragon. I found that hilarious by the way. Uh, can you share that story? Because I think that really highlights kind of what we're talking about. What I wanted to call the book. It was the book title was originally called slap dragons and they, they, uh,

They turned it down. I think they turned it down because it'll take me a couple minutes to explain the story. And, you know, it's kind of without context. It's a little bit weird. I also believe that there's a pretty inappropriate phrase on Urban Dictionary.

I'm not going to, you can look it up yourselves. I'm not going to. So I didn't want to have to compete against that. So I had to change the name. But what happened years ago is I had this client out of, he's based in Texas. It was a cloud computing company. And they had sold basically accidentally one deal into Southeast Asia through a partnership. And they were very excited. They, you know, they were, saw the growth, saw Asia as the growth story. Let's expand.

So they found me somehow. And the guy who I was in touch with, very successful sales sales guy, he crushed everything in North America. I don't know if he'd ever left. I don't know if he'd ever been outside of the States. He was not curious. You talk about biases. He didn't even know he had biases just because he just didn't know any other way other than his.

And so he was my point of contact. They sent me all their marketing material and they go, look, we want you to blast this out to every bank in Malaysia and Hong Kong and Singapore. And we want to, you know, advertise and get some leads going for our cloud company.

And all of his material had basically just all baseball imagery. It was like stuff, right? Everything was American spelling. Just the expressions were all baseball related. And I just immediately got it. And I just started laughing because it's like, you do not want to send this out to these markets because nobody here cares about baseball. This is just going to this is just going to.

make you look like a clueless American company that doesn't know what the hell's going on locally here. You're not, this isn't going to help. They said, well, what do you mean? You know, people don't play baseball. Yeah, they do. There's this Japanese guy. I'm like, Japan is, uh,

like, I don't know how I don't have seven, eight hour flight away. Like this, this is, this is not Japan. So I was like, look, you've got to change the spelling. We got to get rid of this stuff. And he just said, look, just, just slap a frigging dragon on it, make an Asian and we'll sell it. And I, and I remember just being so stunned and, and going, you know, I just started thinking about this slap dragon mindset and I,

There are so many examples of this, both literally, but also figuratively, where I'm just going to put my stereotype or whatever generalization I've got

I'll put that down and that will saw that'll localize enough and they'll, they'll believe it. And, uh, and it's this slap dragon mindset that I'm trying to point out and then just say, look, there's, you know, I think we can all agree. It's probably not going to be too effective. Um, as I started telling these stories over the years, I always kept my eyes open and people would then send me examples. Victoria's secret did this. They were going into China and they did a big, uh,

rollout and they just... All their models were just wearing...

dragons on their underwear. That'll do it. That'll do it. Do you remember this? I did plenty of online research to get to that story. Oh, I'm sure it was very difficult. Yeah, it was a difficult research project for me. But yeah, they were slapping dragons on everything and it did not go over well, not surprisingly. It was a tone deaf reception, right? It's just like,

These foreigners, what the hell are they doing? And by the way, it's a two-way street, or it's a multi-way street. This happens in every single direction. I keep mentioning China, but India companies, Chinese companies, everybody takes their last battle, their game plan, and they apply it. They try and slap their approach onto expanding into other markets.

And it's a very expensive process for companies to go through. Yeah, I think this really, your whole kind of slapdragon metaphor really, I think, rings true. And we had talked about this in a previous podcast with a different guest, Ben Cavender. And this reminds me of an example he gave that I'm sure you'll really resonate with is when Gap, the US clothing company Gap, came into China and they came in

guns blazing with their 1969 campaign, with US sizing in 1969 on all their tags and logos and everything into China. And 1969 was in the middle of a very dark period in Chinese history. So that whole campaign fell completely flat, completely missed the mark, and is like, what are you doing? And a simple, just a really simple Google search would have told you that that was a bad idea.

Yeah, I love that. The other is just, I guess, that same company, the story that I heard when they came into Singapore on similar grounds was they had a, I don't know if it's a franchise model, but their playbook, which is here's how you set up a store, right? These guys have their own, you know, they have their own sense, everything has a look and feel to it. But one of the things was clothes hooks, right?

And the clothes hooks were required to be at a certain height in the dressing rooms. And it was based off of, you know, 1970s data from U.S. It was based on U.S. height.

And the local and regional owners weren't allowed to adjust the hooks to, to, to make things more, you know, comfortable and easy to use. We all, we see that also with the, with fashion here as well, Singapore and the equator, you know, we're they're getting ready for the fall season. So they'll be putting out the flannel and the, and the, and the winter sport coats soon. It's like,

It's the equator, man. I don't know. Think about where you're selling. In your experience, Kyle, do you see this more with larger companies versus smaller companies? Because I have a notion, I have a belief, it's not backed up by any real data, but

I have a belief that bigger companies have bigger egos. More established companies have bigger egos coming in. And it's that whole kind of cut and paste mentality. It's like, well, we've dominated this market. We're established. We're big. So obviously, what we're going to do is going to work in any other market. And I feel like bigger companies are very used to

they're kind of like the bulldozer, right? Like the landscape usually in their own native markets, usually like parts and moves for them because they are so big, because they have so much power and establishment.

But when they go into a completely new and foreign market, they expect that landscape to part, like the sea to part for them as well. And when it doesn't, they get into a lot of big trouble. Whereas I feel maybe smaller companies are more used to having to be nimble, having to be adaptable because they have to survive amongst all these other giants. Do you feel that's true? I

I do. And I think it just goes down to market forces and sizings, because to your point at the end, it's just like the small companies have to adapt or they're done. They don't have the luxury of that type of runway. Very big companies, well-funded companies where the stock price is going crazy, for years, they were able to make some really ugly mistakes. So yeah, I mean, some of the

The worst stories, I suppose, I would say that I've heard would come from some of the companies with the best or well-known, most powerful brands that are out there, and they can get away with it. I kind of allude to it at the end of the book, which is that one of the problems is that we're just hiding these stories. So I went into...

I started looking around at some of the old consumer facing companies because they've been around longest. So the Coca-Cola's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, whoever owns those conglomerates, those types of things, because these are organizations that have been around for, in some cases, over a century, right, globally. And so my hypothesis was, OK, 100 years of experience. These guys have it figured out.

And when I was poking around, especially in the HR departments, the global mobility departments, they're pulling people from headquarters. They're giving them a half a day workshop on, uh, you know, here's how you hold a business card. Uh, basically slap a dragon on this one and get, get to work. And that's like holding the business card with like two hands, right? Like when, like in China. Yeah. Right. Like, like that's there. Here's, here's your localization training. You know, here's how things are different over here. Uh,

And that's the end of it. And I think that that intro training, that whole stuff, the kiss, bow, shake hands stuff, I think is really, really important. What that doesn't get into is what happens on week two or week four when you've got your new team, you've given them your pep talk that you gave them in UK or Sydney or wherever. Yeah.

And they're staring at you with blank faces. And two weeks later, nothing's getting done. And four weeks later, things are looking really bad. And you've got no idea what the hell's going on. You've done nothing different than before. There's nobody, as far as I can tell, who is helping those executives, managers navigate that. That's where I try and take over the story.

What's the biggest takeaway in terms of, sorry, just curious, what's the biggest takeaway in terms of, you know, once we've established all these issues and these sort of examples that you've shared, you know, if I'm reading a book for the listeners out there, like what's the biggest takeaway in terms of like a general summary, like you think?

You can guess. And the frustrating thing is that some of these answers are common sense and basic, but it's the stuff that people tend to ignore. The big idea is if you want to get stuff done faster, you've got to slow way the hell down. You've got to focus more on the individuals and build relationships rather than drive home a plan, right?

And I'll give you some more examples of that because even when I say it, it sounds frustrating to me because it sounds so high level. A company this year hired a head of a US company. They hired a head of marketing for the region, local person here. He comes from a very big company, good resume, good CV. And he reports to a guy back in the US. So everything's virtual now, right? It's the pandemic. Right.

Um, the first two months is a disaster. So I'm, I'm an outside consultant. I'm getting these notes that are flying around from headquarters going, we made the wrong, we hired the wrong guy. This guy hasn't done anything. He's not responding. He's like totally passive. He's not come up with any ideas. And what happened was they, they hired him for the strategic role and they basically just kind of threw him into the deep end. They said, look, figure it out. If you've got a problem, reach out to us.

Now, that's just not what this guy was used to. He was coming from a larger company. There was a little bit more of a structure in place. Things were a little bit more, I don't know, padded or protected. This was like a more of a startup type of vibe. The question then was, well,

what do you do in that situation? Do you fire this guy and hire again? And now we're looking at a probably six month added process of not having a key person in this place. Do you just kind of put your head down and let things go? Like what's going on? And we looked at it and we said, let's adjust how the manager in US, let's adjust his plan of attack. So what did you want? What did you, what was his style? His style was,

Here's the goal, guy in Singapore, go do it and tell me when you're done. And if you have any questions, I'm here to help. Well, that style didn't work in this example.

What did work instead was let's give this guy, let's give the Singapore guy some more tactical based projects to get him comfortable with the company. It's all remote. He doesn't know anybody. Let's spend a little bit. This was around Chinese New Year time. Can you can you have him, you know, as a marketing guy, set up an event that focuses on on Chinese New Year just so people can get to know everybody. Everybody was positive. Everybody's intent was good.

In other words, my advice to this in this situation was slow the hell down, get this guy feeling more comfortable, build the relationship with him first, start with some smaller projects. Don't throw a giant strategic ask at him in the first month and see what he comes back at. And this is not a reflection of like any culture or anything else. It's just like adjusting to different individuals working styles.

And within two or three months later, he came back with his plan. And as far as I know, as of now, he's still crushing it. Like we kind of we kind of saved this guy from getting fired, which was this move fast and break things mindset coming from headquarters.

And that style just doesn't work in other parts of the world necessarily. So I don't know if that helps as a deep dive example, but these are the moments that I spend trying to talk some of these clients off the ledge of that rapid hire and fire if they don't like exactly what they're seeing because this guy doesn't seem to fit the culture of our headquarters the way we expected him to, going back to the culture comment earlier. Yeah.

Well, does it make sense then? I mean, does it make sense to hire people based off of that culture then? I mean, is it does that mean that you can't find that right person with the right culture mindset in different territories? The the somebody had said it better than I've been able to figure it out. But they kind of said that you want to find somebody that adds to the culture that doesn't fit the culture.

And it's a very big difference. So culture fit, to me, is a very dangerous path because then you're looking for somebody that essentially is just like you. Right. I mean, it's what's being like tribal, like it plays into the whole tribalism. And there's and you know, you want people that fit some parts of that because you need believers. You need people that are on the on board.

But I like the idea of looking for somebody that adds to a culture rather than fits a culture. And that's a messier journey because it does take a little bit more time, a little bit more patience. From the companies that I've seen that I think the Western companies that have done a good job adapting and figuring out this region specifically, right?

They have been able to slow down some of the tactical-driven expectations that were norms in headquarters. So what I mean by that is, all right, we got this campaign. We piloted it in California. We rolled it out to North America. It worked. Boom, it's gone global. And so there are some companies that will ram that campaign globally, right?

You know, they'll do the gap approach, right? Just everything's got to be the same. There are others that will say, here's what we did. Break it and rebuild it into something that's going to work for your territory. And that and like those are two very different mindsets to have. Two very different. It's almost like like kind of if I can boil down what you're saying is like it's don't hit the ground running with like this big picture approach.

And instead kind of focus and take the time to work on the smaller picture to progress to the bigger picture. I look at Uber. It's a really good example. It's funny. I got a lead. Uber called me and then they canceled. I think they read my book because I did call them out. I call out like two companies in the book. I think Uber was one of them. They canceled.

They had their approach that worked and they tried to ram it down the throats around the world as quickly as possible in the most uniform way as possible. And I don't want to pick on these guys, but talking to some of the ex people from there, the people running Southeast Asia were all.

white American dudes who, you know, were flown in. And that was how and I've got to be careful because I'm not I don't want to, you know, completely stereotype here. But there was not a lot of questions being asked to say, what's this market need? What's already here? What is it that's really going to work here? And, you know, China's such a good example of this

market, if you want to even call it a market, but where they've been developing these kind of super apps and this entire ecosystem where so many different moving things are interconnected. And if you're not a part of that, man, you are in the app space, you're in a heck of a lot of trouble. The fact that the Ubers of the world weren't doing that

They were dead in the water. A place like Indonesia, they lost the whole region, right? Well, what do you think that is? Do you think that's just a certain type of, I mean, it's a harsh word to say arrogance, but is that a certain type of arrogance or is it just...

What is it? So I don't, I, and I let's, let's not talk about specifically that particular example, but I will say in the past, I've definitely heard, and I'm picking on Americans. I'm American, so I can, it's easier to pick on us, but there's an arrogance in terms of the U S market is one of the hardest markets in the planets to succeed in. And so the mindset is, Hey,

dude, I just ran this marathon at altitude. This little piss-ass market is going to be easy. Don't tell me what to do. I think that that exists. And I've heard that in varying forms. The other one is that I think people also just don't know. A lot of the business models, a lot of the training, the

business education assumes growth at using certain frameworks. So here's the growth strategy. And I don't think that a lot of times the cross-cultural piece or the global piece fits into some of those equations. It's more about, okay, here's how you bring this to scale rather than is scale even going to work in this example? Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of...

And when it comes to international brands trying to break, in particular, the Chinese market, since we're based in China and I was in marketing before, so I've had a little bit of experience in seeing it firsthand. When you have, let's say, fashion or anything that's a little bit more

cultural in terms of like spreading culture out, let's say from America or whatever, then maybe some of the arrogance comes in because then you're like, well, you know, we started this trend. So obviously we're pushing this ideology out and you're going to buy us because of who we are, not because we're, you know, we're going to localize who we are to you. Does that make sense? Is that something that

- In fact, it's probably a very big asterisk. Maybe the way I would say it is that high-end, especially luxury products,

Their selling point is the fact that, screw you, this is who we are. This is why you're going to want it. It's exactly the opposite of localization. I don't think Tesla's cars are any different. I don't think Apple products are any different. If I think about some of the Louis Vuitton stuff and some of the luxury products across markets, you're buying that because that's what it is.

Now, when you go away from high-end luxury, that's where I think the game changes. So it's probably a really important point to differentiate those two.

Yeah, totally. You can even from, I mean, if I'm going to be more specific, you just said Apple, like Apple for sure. I mean, globally, there is that tonality that, you know, it's pretty much the same, right? And it's just maybe you have local faces or whatever, but in general, the design sense, everything, the packaging, it is what it is. But then it's funny if you look at certain Chinese, let's say cell phone brands, and if you look at how they are abroad,

as opposed to local, there's a little bit of a difference. Only because I've had to create advertisements for different markets. And literally, it's like, this is for the Indian market. So we're doing it this way. Oh, this is for the European market slash US market. So we do it this way. And Chinese market is this way. But literally, it's adapted. What would be some examples of that? Because that's a good point.

Okay. So for example, casting. Okay. So I'm a director. So I do a lot of television commercials. Now, casting is a very big thing. So if we're doing, for example, I've done stuff for the Indian market and I'm not even joking.

They want everyone to be light-skinned as much as possible for the market, right? And even if we use Indian or black light-skinned, it gets to that point, right? HR nightmare. Oh, the HR audience is just, their heads are exploding. Yeah, it's just like, that's why I'm not naming names. I'm just saying they do that. Stepping into a landmine here. Yeah.

Yeah, but then if you go to the American market, it's like, yeah, you could do black, you could do white. It's flexible because it's a more diverse crowd. You know what I mean? I always think about airports where you fly into Shanghai or you fly into Dubai and it's guys with these $50,000 watch advertisements and high-end liquor and all this stuff, right? That's very much deliberate and that's very specific to that market.

But when you fly into, I don't know, the UK, it's, you know, this old dude with a bee feeder. Oh, hello. Some chips. It's like totally different. Totally different directions of the bee.

I think the conversation is kind of touched on a lot of different levels. And just, I think as you were sharing some of this stuff, some of these examples then become, you know, really relevant, but it was, I was, I was thinking of this a little bit earlier, you know, in terms of your book and some of these lessons, you know, the lessons for an organization, a lesson for a manager or even lessons for,

you know, at the employee level. And I'm curious, as companies start localizing their workforces and, you know, in the region. Yeah. And our own perspective, the four people on this Zoom is from this sort of Western perspective. How does the kind of the localization of the local workforces and then having more and more

people from the region itself representing the company? How is that kind of shifting the dynamic and how do you incorporate that into some of your thinking? So that's definitely the trend that's happening and it's probably been accelerated recently. I think that we're right in the middle of another expat exodus here in Singapore, for example. And the pressure both from a government level, but also from a business level is

These businesses don't come to Asia just to throw a bunch of Westerners in place, to spend huge amounts on expensive expat packages. It's not smart business. The plan for the most part is you come over, you set up, you then just replace yourself and go home. That's kind of the idea, right? I think the pandemic in some ways accelerated that to a degree.

I would probably give it low marks in terms of how it's been going, because typically what happens is you promote people without, I think, giving them the right training. And one of the big gaps that I think that they get is that they never get the chance to figure each other out. And it goes back to the core part of our conversation from the first minute we started, which is like, this is a very big, diverse world.

Companies have rapidly gone global, but people have not. And when the... I'm working with this company right now. It's a British company. They're desperately trying to get all their expensive expats home to the UK. And they're saying that there's this massive talent gap. And they're saying it's because we just can't find the people here to do it. And I'm just saying, that's a load of horseshit. You screwed up.

you're not understanding that there are these differences and that you've got to spend time to be able to figure out ways to bridge those gaps. I mean, again, let's not make the local team fit your headquarter culture. Let's make the global company fit

expand the culture so that this stuff all works together. So to get to your question of what am I doing, I'm trying to work with these teams to figure out what that future looks like. How do you get leaders who might be more prone to being quiet

who may have different working styles in terms of solving problems or bringing up difficult conversations, how do you get them working well enough with a part of the world or a company headquarters where their expectation is the opposite? Their expectation is that if you're in charge of this office, this region, this country,

you sure as hell better be standing up, banging the table if you need something, defending your position, bragging about what worked, fixing all this stuff, right? Very kind of outgoing, extroversion tactics and mindsets. And in this example, well, what if that's not the style that is this next generation? How are they going to work together? I don't have a...

there's not a silver bullet answer here. This is more, I think for companies and teams to be able to figure out together. I think, you know, what, what, what I've seen kind of working, you know, in Asia for a while and working in different places is that, you know, it's really that like we're all human beings and, um,

you know we we have to build those individual relationships and understand those dynamics whether it's like a head office in the us versus a local office you know in another state you still have some of those differences and so when you're trying to implement business strategy um when

Without sort of consideration of the people involved, you're always going to fail. And I think that's probably quite universal, that it really goes down to some really core principles of just how people engage, because ultimately your customers at some level are going to be other human beings. So the whole COVID thing has been horrendous, but it's also been really eye-opening to see

I was one of the big things that I focus on and think about a lot is hierarchy and power distance. And one thing that I've seen for my clients is that when everybody got distributed, when everybody went work from home, it was in some cases a pretty massive, in other cases, a more subtle shift in power. The headquarters where there's this center of power

started losing some of that power when people weren't physically in that office. That might sound a little bit strange, but it shows itself in a couple of ways. So take a Zoom call where in the past, it would have been one of us calling into headquarters and we're the little box and we're staring at a conference room. And I don't care how good the conference technology is.

teleco technology is, it's still not that good, right? You've still got a room full of people. You've got weird ambient noises. You've got people having one-on-one conversations. You know when some of them aren't paying attention to you. You can't see subtle body language going on. You are an outsider from the person calling into that room. There is a power shift or there is a power differential there that is very difficult to do anything about.

That gets shattered, in this case, literally, because now all of a sudden, everybody's at home and everybody's just their own little box. The CEO, CMO, the head of Asia, we're all in the same equal box now. And what I've seen actually is that there are a couple of companies, we've done surveys, they've said that cross-office communication has increased in the last year and a half, or improved rather.

the silo aspect of an office where you go, okay, okay, okay, Howie, we'll see you later. Just hang up now. We're all just going to talk. We're going to keep talking, you know, hang up from Howie and go.

Well, that guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. You know what I mean? You get all that and you're sitting there and you're not dumb. You know that there's some other chatter going on. It might not be about you, but we all tell our own stories in our heads. And so it creates an even bigger divide between dispersed groups. So if everybody's actually equally dispersed and they're all stuck in their own little, you know, made up third bedroom here, it levels the playing field a little bit.

And so if it's handled the right way, it can actually be really beneficial. So what we're trying to do now is say, as companies are like trying to figure out going back to the office, okay, but how do we prevent some of these benefits from being lost? Because it's very easy to actually go back and have some of these old problems come up again. What you just described is I've kind of lived through it. Like I've completely, we've been in these environments where like I'm working remotely and

And let's say like, and not even a headquarter situation, right? Because all of this stuff is sort of relative. So imagine that you have a more powerful office in another region and everyone's in the same room, right? They can just press the mute button and have all these sidebar conversations. And then the people sort of dialing in just have to listen. And there becomes this sort of like locker room, you know, kind of environment in there. And you have to be very strategic because there's loss of context. And what you share then is

is limited. So you're, you know, being on the dialing in, you're not really able to fully contribute. And so I think what I've seen in some scenarios is that, okay, so let's say we have this meeting where 80% of the people are in the same office and 20% are dialing in.

What we've done is that then every other week, we just turn it into a WebEx where everyone dials in from remote to just kind of level the playing field and then give people that sense. Because I think it's a lot of it's just like empathy, right? Just being in someone else's shoes then kind of helps you change some of your behavior so that you don't get into this sort of like very narrow mindset. Do you guys do training like that where it's sort of like,

you know, helping people step out a bit and think of things a little bit differently? So my, probably my, the thing I'm spending most of my time on right now is working to design hybrid teams and what those are going to look like with different groups. And I'm looking at my notes here. I'm beginning the horrendously painful process of thinking about book number two. That's going to be looking at this and the argument that I've made up until this point, which is that

So hybrid, there's an argument that hybrid is a bad idea. I either go full remote or or go all back. Hybrid is difficult. I think that's every majority of companies are going hybrid. The Apple example of where they've now tried to mandate people coming back for three days out of out of five. And they've stated which days they want them back. People aren't happy about that.

It's going to be really tricky. There are plenty of studies. There's data out there that says that a hybrid team, women fare worse than men. The reason is because women are more likely to stay home to also sort out family stuff with kids and other components.

If you stay home more frequently, does your chance of getting noticed and promoted get reduced? The data suggests that it does. So in other words, the people that go back to the office will have a step up.

versus those who choose not to or really get to themselves to the point where they can't work from remotely. So there's all sorts of potential pitfalls here. What I'm doing is saying, okay, let's treat this almost like a startup. Let's put on our entrepreneur's hat

And let's come in with the assumption that there's no rules as a starting point. So I'm a child of the 90s. So I use Fight Club. So the first rule of Hybrid Club is that there's no rules.

it's up to us to rewrite or write these rules. And if headquarters comes in and tells us something differently, that's fine. But if you're sitting around waiting for somebody else to tell you what those rules are going to be, you're probably not going to like those rules. So you may as well get ahead of it and do it yourself. And I was on a workshop this week, no, last week. And I got a little bit pissed off at a guy. He,

It's a big-ish company. And he started complaining that the company wasn't helping them up. One of my points was, if you want to do it well, fix your office up. Invest in it. I say that as my lighting's totally screwed up here. But sort yourself out. Upgrade yourself. Get yourself a little bit of a better camera and sound system. And he was like, well, the company, they were going to get me better lighting, and they haven't.

I'm just like, you know, you're a 40 year old man, like you're, and you're complaining that company hasn't sent you a lamp. Like the hell's wrong with you, dude, put on your entrepreneur's hat, get your own, get your ass up and buy yourself a chair and a lamp and, you know, stop complaining. Right. Like, yeah, should they do it? Maybe, but it's not going to happen. So, you know, the thing about remote work, the thing about autonomous teams is that you've got to own it. And if there's a problem, it's up to you to fix it. So,

I probably don't win awards for sensitivity training. Probably don't hire me for that. But I have been having some good conversations with people just to say, let's actually take a step back. Let's be entrepreneurial about this. And let's write our own set of rules, norms, expectations, taboos, what's not acceptable. And let's codify that. And that's been a really good starting point to get people...

I think adjusted so that this turns into more of an ongoing norm that works for people. I love that. I love that mentality of, you know, having accountability and taking ownership over something like being proactive about it. And instead of being like reactive and being like, well, they didn't give me it, so I can't do it. It's like, well, what are you going to do about it? Take ownership over your job, over your responsibilities. Yeah.

And it's different. And I, and I, you know, these are, some people have been in some of these roles, 15, 20 plus years, whatever, even if it's two years and there's norms, there's expectations. Well, that's not my, that's not my responsibility.

Well, in remote, in hybrid club, if you don't know who's responsible for solving something, look in the bloody mirror because it's going to be you, right? And if you want to exceed and succeed in that, that's the answer, nine times out of 10. I'd rather get in trouble for being proactive than sitting back waiting for somebody else to solve all my problems. But this goes back to a point you brought up earlier and going back to the idea of different cultures, right? Yeah.

You know, the idea of being proactive and being, I think, what you referred to before as being kind of having a more extroverted approach and kind of like calling out what you want, calling out what you need in many cultures. And I think, you know, China could be an example of that is a little bit kind of frowned upon or it's it's it's.

And it's scarier, it's more daunting for an employee to do that because the respect for like the line and barriers of hierarchy are higher here. And it's like, oh, well, I would never call out my boss like that. I would never, you know, if they don't tell me to do something, I'm not going to do it. Or if it's not my responsibility, I don't want to be stepping on anybody else's toes by kind of owning that responsibility myself proactively. Yep.

It's a massive factor in all of this. One of the things, if you were purely looking at the cross-cultural data before the pandemic, the data would probably suggest that hierarchical parts of the world will not fare as well in a work-from-home setting as others. So in other words, the data that looks at... So let me say this, a flatter company culture

does better working remotely. - Yeah, like on that idea, I'm curious, like, and, you know, historically, when you look at, we talked about culture and we talked about, you know, organizations that are trying to expand globally. - Yeah. - And if you look at like the, I don't know, the Romans or, you know, the Mongolians, you know, different cultures historically,

and how they try to expand to other parts of the world and then the different systems they implemented and then even more recently, like the colonial powers, the British, the Spanish, you know, etc. I'm just wondering,

if there are parallels at all. Have you looked into it or are there people that try to connect this idea with some of the stuff that's happened historically? Yeah. In fact, the argument is that it's all interconnected. If you think about going back to the definition of culture, where does even culture come from? Where do these norms get established? This is where

cross-cultural psychology and behavioral psychology start blending with almost like geography, anthropology, history, philosophy, religion. We can go down a rabbit hole real fast here. There's a chapter at the end of the book called When Confucius Skyped Socrates. I should have changed it to Zooms, but that's okay. Skype still works. But the argument is that

four X thousands of years ago, you know, where did these like cultures start splitting? Where do you, because there is sort of a general East West historical, there's some cultural generalizations that we can make. Where does that even start from? And the anthropologists would argue it comes down to environment.

And one example that's often cited is rice farming versus wheat farming. And rice farming, you've got, I'm not a rice farming expert, so forgive me for your rice farming contingent listening in, but you've got rice paddies and they're all in the same row. They have to be worked the same way at the same time. The flooding has to be done the same time. It is a communal process.

activity where everybody has to work together and they have to do it the same way. Whereas in northern climates or different parts of the world where there's more wheat and other types of staple crops, you can grow your stuff however the hell you want it. And so the argument is that it's the anthropology argument, which is that

individualism versus collectivism has sprung from these types of behaviors that go back thousands and thousands of years. And you can look at

geographical components of different parts of the planet. And in some ways, it maps to the modern working style behavior that gets measured. That's a conversation I like to have at a bar. I'm not going to bring that into a daily work environment scenario. I don't think we need to talk about rice farming as a way to solve our problems here. But like,

But to answer your question, yeah, I mean, the studies that I've read go back. One of the books that I leaned heavily on when I wrote this thing was a fun book called The Geography of Thought.

Nisbet, I think is the professor's name, Professor Nisbet. Basically, I took a whole chapter of what he was writing. And I had a character from Taiwan drunkenly explain it in the chapter form. So that was kind of how I framed it. But as I said earlier, I kind of wanted everybody to have a couple of drinks in them as they explain this cross-cultural world that we live in.

We definitely understand that.

That's why I wanted to get onto this podcast so badly. It sounds like you make me really want to read the book as soon as we finish this call. And it sounds like part of the appeal of your book is that you've built some humor and some edginess and you've taken a subject that can be very academic and then you've infused it with kind of life and energy.

I'll give you another mini case study that popped out. This is another accidental one. So this went through a traditional publisher and part of the deal was that they had audio book rights. So they found a professional narrator to do it. He does Jack Reacher books. You're familiar with... Yeah. So they got like a legitimate guy to do it. One of the reasons they got him is because he does accents. Now,

I'm kind of on the fence with some of the accents and some of the audio books that I've listened to. But I've got characters from all over the world. So, you know, okay, he's doing his East London accent. He's got his Australian accent. This is an American guy doing it, but now he's doing a Chinese accent. I got to listen to that. I got to listen to that. Yeah, it was like...

What? Wait a minute. This doesn't seem like a good idea at all. I'm trying to ask you for trouble. I'm like, isn't my book about not doing this? Well, Kyle, I want to I want to touch on a topic that you also cover is I think the idea of generalization versus stereotyping.

And I think you mentioned that generalizing with, you know, backed up by data is actually helpful, but stereotyping is where you cross that threshold, cross that line where it becomes hurtful.

It's a tricky topic and it's certainly a moving goalpost at the moment. I think that there's some people that you're not even allowed to have this conversation. I do talks at universities and so far, actually, I haven't been canceled yet. You always kind of feel like you haven't really made it until you've been canceled. There's that fear. Maybe I'm not being edgy enough, but...

But the idea is, and there are some cross-cultural books I think that miss the mark. Yeah, generalization is to try and understand what's the similarities and the differences in front of you, to try and figure out if it's possible to measure those differences with the objective of

of solving for it. Solving for it, meaning coming up with a way to be able to work together, to coexist, to understand each other. And you can insert whatever language there you want. Stereotyping is bundling, I believe, a group into a behavior to answer a question and to almost

solve a, solve a, an answer. In other words, like this is the way it is. And it's like the end. Uh, there's not, it's not done with the objective of understanding or overcoming or fixing. It's done with the understanding of excluding and almost pushing aside. I had to really wrestle with that. I think, I think I wrestled with that all the time anyway, because I,

My version of a generalization could be totally different than another person's version. And so that's why it's such a tricky topic to get into. But thanks for asking after I finished a couple of bourbons here. It's really helpful. No, I mean, it's a topic we cover on the show all the time. We like to explore that edge. And it's a discussion that should be had because if you almost avoid that discussion, you're

You know, you never get anywhere and you have to be willing to have an open discussion about these things. I think in the groups, the companies, in some cases, the groups, the individuals that dance around this topic, they ignore really important components. And it brings a level of naivete into a lot of discussions. And let's talk about bribery.

Bribery, there's probably universal agreements of certain levels of bribery that are wrong. But the question, there's a very big gray area there about gift giving and how that gets into expenses and dinners. And one part of the world's version of that is totally different. And so there was an American who,

They were like, oh, no, no, no. It's just black. They looked at the whole thing as a black and white. Oh, well, we're not going to talk about that because it's just it's. And so therefore, that company's rules was you weren't allowed to go out to dinner with a client unless you paid.

And that can cause a whole, like you, you can lose deals from, from that kind of a misunderstanding where it's like, you know, no, no, no, we're, we want to, we, we please don't insult us. Let us please buy you this dinner. Yeah. Uh,

I'm not allowed to do that. And so it's kind of like you could lose a very large account if that goes wrong. I've made that mistake personally before here in China. Yeah, I've inadvertently offended people by actually paying the bill without even... Oh, right. Yeah, because I thought I was being nice. Like, oh, I'm going to get the bill and I'm going to do it first without letting them know as a kind gesture.

But culturally, that did not translate at all. And it was extremely offensive for the hosting party that I went up and paid the bill and didn't allow them to buy the bill. So it was a huge misunderstanding, huge mistake on my part. But yeah, it kind of goes to what you're saying. Yeah.

To tie that back to the generalizations, I think that sometimes what you get is like without people even being comfortable talking about a topic, they're just going to come out with a black and white decision. And that's the end of it. It's very dangerous. I mean, you talk about it in kind of a bribery context, but the discussion kind of, it can be about diversity and inclusion, gender, all these things that are sensitive topics, of course. But I feel like in the context of our conversation today,

in terms of a globalizing world, it's more important than ever to have this conversation because exactly what you're saying, kind of like the wave and trends and climate of these conversations

differentiate drastically depending on what country you're in, what society you're talking about, what culture. And now that all this business, we're all like kind of bumping up against each other, whether it's through Zoom calls or through business dinners or whatever.

You're going to have points of conflict or points of intersection where these ideals and these conversations, if not had, might cause a lot of misunderstandings or a lot of problems and a lot of blunders, really. It goes back to what Eric was saying. It's just about human-to-human interaction. But I think it has to be...

forced to a degree. And that's probably not the right word. But in other words, I think it takes work. It takes more work than... Let me give you an example. I got connected to a... I don't remember what the deal was in some project. One of the guys is from Colorado. One of the guys is from India. And so I'm American, as you can tell. The Colorado guy and I

started bantering at the beginning of the call. And, you know, what does it go to? Sports, something. We were talking about NFL. And the Indian guy's being quiet because he doesn't know, he doesn't care. You know, we're not including him at all. We were falling into the very standard form of, you know, it's the easiest direction to go in. You find a commonality, let's go there. You find a tribe member.

find a tribe member and it was all accidentally but it became within two or three minutes two americans and an indian against not against but like this and and so when i say you've got to force it you've got to not allow that to happen without including everybody else so it's almost like okay just the second you find you're going down that path hold on a second you know

what's the big sporting event on this weekend in Hyderabad? Tell me about that. What is that even like? It's that empathy. It's that open question, sincere curiosity to get everybody involved. And I have this one list of just, it's just like, I think smarter questions that could be asked at the beginning of a conference call.

Some of it's basic, but I think sometimes you have to plan for it because we're all preconditioned to fall into the norms that we're used to. The relationship aspect underpins everything we do. And this conversation has been about

doing business and as the world sort of evolve, continues to evolve, borders and boundaries are getting broken down, but then other boundaries are being erected like COVID has created new boundaries. I think we're just experimenting and I very much agree with you that we need to start writing new rules.

and just experiment and try different things. Let me give you an example of the best work experience I've had recently with... I got a deal with LinkedIn Learning. So I did one of their training programs where they filmed it. I was supposed to go to California and film it, but it was the foundations course on expanding your business overseas. The first call that we had, never connected with any of them. She kicks off and...

She says very directly to me, how do you like to communicate? And this is like, this is such my, this is what I like to do. But it was, it kind of smacked me in the face because it was like, so it cut right to the core of everything. We talk about communication styles and working styles. And she had the audacity to just ask me.

Wow. Point blank. What a fantastic question to kick off a new business relationship. I can't recommend it enough to teams when they do this. If you have a new person coming on board, if you have a new project that you're taking on, a lot of companies have embraced this kind of agile approach where they shift teams around every couple of months to do a specific project.

But man, if you could take, I don't know, if it takes five minutes, 30 minutes, it's worth it to ask that question around the virtual room. Powerful. One. The second point, though, it's really hard to answer.

You have to really think about it to answer it honestly. And so people would probably need to spend some more time thinking about that. So anyway, one big bit of advice right off the bat is to figure out a way to have some kickoff that just puts that level of direct, just get right to the heart of the matter and get people to discuss it.

That's one example. Second thing I saw that was cool. All of my stuff, I just steal ideas from everybody else. This is what I'm doing. Another client did a really good job. He ran the Japan team for a large group. And what he did was nobody asked him. He would just sneak in one slide at the beginning of his monthly updates. And the first slide was just fun facts, business-related stuff about Japan. And essentially what he was getting at was,

I think he would sit back and go, what's one thing that annoys me that most people don't understand about doing business here? And after like a couple of months, the whole team kind of, you know, he kind of like snuck in all of this Japan cultural training, you know, just with one slide, two, three minutes of information. But the questions that he was going at, which I think is really powerful is, you know, what is one thing you wish the rest of this team, this company,

whoever knew about doing business in my part of the world. That's pretty cool question to play around with. What's one book that you wish everyone could read that they would really understand my country? You can replace book with movie. You can replace it with social media, podcasts, right? You can do anything like that. And

This list of smarter questions that I've got, these are examples of those which are designed to, in more of a calibrated way, get smarter discussions going around a team. And I wouldn't recommend doing it all in one go, but you can kind of pepper these things along the way over a series of months. And I think what you do is you start conditioning people to be coming into a call ready to actually use their brains.

Because it's very common for, you know, it's very common to show up to a conference call and it's just, we're just in many cases, you know, playing along, right? Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, you know, people just want to be understood.

I mean, if you think about it, right, people just want to be understood. And then being able to ask these questions then allows you to build that rapport. So I think it's really powerful. And it really then just boils down to like one or two things that you can easily implement. And that one question will then change the entire conversation. I mean, literally, right, because you could just go through the motions. You can get on a call. Everybody presents their slides. And by the end of the call, nothing comes out of it.

But if you were to ask that one question, like, how do you like to communicate? Whatever answer comes out of that question actually probably changes the entire trajectory of the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we can avoid maybe maybe reduce the amount of slap dragons coming up in the next next generation or slap tigers. Slap tigers.

Yeah, whatever Urban Dictionary says, I don't know. I'm going to stay out of that one. But I love the, it's like going to what you and Eric have been saying. It's basically a muscle you have to exercise. Our tendency sometimes is to overcomplicate these issues.

We overcomplicate it and we think, oh, it's so messy. It's so nuanced. It's so layered. Oh, we can't have that conversation. But sometimes it's really simple and it's just asking a really simple yet really direct point blank question that cuts to the core of it all. And that's where you start.

I think a lot of what we're talking about is trying to find that common universal language, right? Whether it be a topic, whether it be through humor, whether it be through whatever kind of commonalities or overlaps there are between different societies and different people, it's trying to find a universal language. So kind of to me, like your research and your book and your experience kind of really dispels the whole notion of

like business or money being a universal language, right? A lot of people say money talks. Business is a universal language that everyone gets, but it's not at the end of the day because to Eric's point, you know, it's human to human relationships and all business is done by human to human relationships at some point.

So look, it was a pleasure talking to you. I don't want to take up any more of your time, but I would love to have you back on the show at some other point in time. Talk about other issues, because I feel like this is a topic that we really just scratched the surface of. Oh, no question. No question. We've got plenty more inappropriate stories for you. Actually, I didn't really give you any of the good, dirty ones. My editor, so I wrote it, and then my wife was my first kind of...

And she was like, this is just some of those stories are so you can't do this. And so I got rid of all of them. And the editor was like, and I was like, oh, here we go. This is the most like clean cut thing I can think of. And the editor was like, this is, this is really disgusting. It's really inappropriate. I feel like we need to do a second recording. Yeah. And just...

you know, call it the uncensored version and share some of these stories. Well, it's also different climates. I think in the U S the climate is a little more sensitive there right now versus let's say here in China. Yeah. Um, we, I mean, so just one weird example and you have to be really careful. And I, and I actually, I actually have my, my opinion on this has, has evolved and changed as well. Cause a lot of these stories were years old now. Um, but there were a couple of stories about, um,

Taking like one of the one of the things that would used to happen here still probably does or not right now, but you would take a Western, mostly male who shows up, who runs the region, but doesn't know anything. So the way you what you would do is you take him up to one of those bars where there's like a lot of ladyboys.

and you'd have you'd have him have a have a fun night at the bar and then at the end you'd be like by the way you know you think you understand this region like you don't you don't even know that that was that was a dude that was sitting on your lap you know like like so like next time you question when i ask you about stuff like and you tell me that you know what you're doing like i want you to remember this and this is a like this is this happens like this used to happen

And so I'm telling this story because, you know, I'm...

As a white American guy, it's very easy for this to turn into a frat party story. That was not the intention. It's not why I tell it here. It's just these are things that happen. The editors had lawyers and the lawyers are sending me emails. They're like, we don't know about Ladyboy. I don't think Ladyboy is a phrase that's elite that you're allowed to use anymore. And

I don't know. Like, I don't know. And it was just funny because like in some parts of the world, perfect example, like that's now kind of so taboo and inappropriate. But in other parts of the world, it's not only just it's just it's like not. Well, that's a normal thing. And it's a story that actually is done to.

teach somewhat of a lesson. Yeah. Right. Uh, and that's maybe it goes back to that, that word I used earlier with naivete. It's like, well, we're not going to tell these stories anymore because they're not appropriate. It's like, all right, you can not, you can, we can, we can close our eyes and our ears, but how's that going to help us when, when this happens in the real world? Anyway. Um, Kyle, thanks again so much for taking the time. Love to have you on. Where can people find your book?

Um, the audio that my racist audio book is available anywhere. And, um, I love it. The racist audio book, uh, the, uh, so it's, so you should be able to get it on Amazon. Uh, there's an ebook, there's a hardcover as well as the audio book. So it should, it should be. And then if you're not an Amazon person, it should be on some of the other ones, book depository and some of the other big, big sites.

Great. Do you have a website? Where can people find you? They want to connect. Leadershipnomad.com. Leadershipnomad.com is where I'm posting all of my stuff. The only social media I really use is LinkedIn.

So you could find me there. And I, after a bourbon or two, we'll post some thoughts on Twitter from time to time. Great. The book is called the accidental business nomad, a survival guide for working across a shrinking planet.

Thanks, Kyle. It was a pleasure talking to you. There's a lot of really funny but insightful, I think, stories you share and experiences you have. And I mean, this is what the show is all about. And, you know, I would love to talk to you again. Thanks. Much appreciated. Thanks, everybody. Cheers. Cheers. Virtual cheers. Virtual cheers. All right, everybody. Be good. Be well. I'm Justin. I'm Howie. This Zoom thing, this delay on this Zoom thing is a nightmare. I'm telling you. Anyway, guys, peace.

I'm a father.