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Why Do Smart Leaders Fail Abroad? · The Whigham School Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hello, welcome to the Whigham School.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Steve Whigham.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host for the day, and I also am the founder of the Whigham School, and we're going to talk about several things that are very important to the markets that we work in.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to talk about something very special for global companies and what they're facing, whether they have named it or not, it's the cost of sending people around the world without preparing them to understand it.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for decades, corporations have moved executives, teams, projects, operations even, across borders in the name of efficiency or expansion, innovation, and growth.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: But too often the human preparation has not kept pace with the business strategy.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many, many stories of and cautionary tales that have piled up around us.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: A company may prepare the contract or do the relocation, set the travel schedules, tax structures, visa requirements, all the all the back-end stuff to administrate someone working abroad.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the real question is, have they prepared the person themselves?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a really tough question.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I have talked to many people who have done expat assignments and have felt very frustrated and shackled by the their lack of preparation.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the companies, you need to ask yourselves this question.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Have you prepared that leader to understand the communications norms, the language barriers, how trust is built in different cultures, the hierarchy needs, power distance, family impact, local history, religious context, economic realities, and even just the deeper meaning of respect.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: How do they show respect for each other?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because global leadership is not simply the ability to work in another country.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is the ability to enter another culture with humility, wisdom, and discipline to learn before leading.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm joined with Dr.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Jeremy Patterson.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's our vice president of the Whigham School and an interculturalist of the Whigham School to discuss why cultural preparation is no longer optional for global leadership.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jeremy, we're glad to have you with us.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, Steve.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Good to be here.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is going to be a great conversation.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: You and I have burned many, many uh hours talking about this issue on many different levels.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna try to hit the highlights of this and talk about some things that are really we think are very important and very relevant to people who do international business.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I want to really kind of turn it back to you for a second.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: As someone who specializes in international programs for universities, why is this topic so important right now for company students and future global leaders?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the answer is is goes back to something you said in your intro because it's so easy for us to forget what things are about.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean is when you have a university, when you have a school like ours, when you have a company, when you have a culture, it's not really about the culture or the company or the institution.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's about people.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're going to be working with people.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: We should be working for people, or we have people working for us in a business.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to prepare them.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, humans are resilient.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'll figure my way around, but it'll be so much better if I have support and preparation from the administrative level all the way down to all the employees.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: If the company knows that I'm going to come up against cultural barriers or cultural shock, just simply cultural differences, and they are thoughtfully preparing me for that.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to be so much better as an employee and just even as a person.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: The reason we want to do that at the academic level, the reason we have an academic program for it, is that this is an essential skill, just like the other skills that corporations highly value.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Global fluency is one of the most highly valued skills across corporations and studies and surveys that they've done.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Other essential skills like global fluency would be things that seem basic, you know, communication skills, teamwork.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Those are essential skills highly valued by CEOs and other leaders.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you can learn that on the job.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Corporations try to teach some of those things or do seminars, but that's not the primary purpose of a corporation.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you have people coming into your business already with preparation of essential skills, it's gonna go so much better for everybody involved.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was uh actually talking to an executive for a large multinatural corporation, I won't use their name, but they have, you know, they're in 180 countries and they sell their products in 180 countries, and they have uh over a dozen different countries where they have significant manufacturing facilities.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they're trying to move people around.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: They have an Axpat program that is working, moving people from one market to the next, whether it's from the US to Europe, to Europe, to India, India to China, and they have this wonderful network.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that they're finding out is that the people who are getting moved are extremely competent at what they do in their host culture, but find that it breaks down when they go and move into another culture.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they have said, we've cited so many case studies again and again, and they realize that they have not done a good job of getting cultural fluency.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard a couple of them use that term go global dexterity, which to show that they are uh able not just to understand and and under and work inside of a culture, but able to really move with that culture.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I like that term global dexterity for that reason.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so they they see that it is a glaring need, and they've actually struggled.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I remember one time he was telling me, this is a few years back, that they were struggling so hard in India with their program that they're about to pull down a one billion dollar investment because they couldn't get the Indian plant to work as efficiently as they needed it for it to.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was being led completely by expats.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they found out they just could not relate to the culture or the way people work, the way people think, but even their competitors had plants down the road that are doing fine.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't that it was just that industry was having trouble.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was that specific company that was having trouble.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I see that as being a real sensible thing to think about when we think about what the importance of this conversation is to the international marketer or international supplier.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So have you for sure.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I was gonna ask quickly, would you say that you know, training and global fluency, preparing truly global leaders, companies could even look at that as part of their risk management in a sense?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think they should.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: If they don't, they're not framing it properly.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you make a big investment like a billion dollars in India, you better hope that that investment is going to pay you back.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's a lot of capital to put into a market.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: They were smart to do it because the the market's good.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: The market is a good place for their product, but there's a lot at risk.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: So risk management is a very important way of thinking about it.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: If we do not put the people in there to run and be able to lead the workforce in that culture properly, um we could be putting a lot of capital at risk.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen it go both directions.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, expats need the preparation, the training.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I will say to be fair to corporations, the the best multinational corporations, they usually do have decent programs preparing people to become expats or another to move to their headquarters or factory or office in another country.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: They usually have decent programs to do that.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I have yet to see an effective repatriation program in a multinational corporation.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure it's out there.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying it's not, I just I haven't seen one.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because it goes, it cuts both ways.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I mean, we that's the kind of training we provide to have help students understand both their own culture and appreciate that, understand other cultures, the differences, and appreciate both.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: So they can go in all directions between different cultures, and including back to their expatriation, repatriation.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, corporations have to be taking these things seriously because they're HR issues, and maybe because of that, or maybe because it seems like, oh, it's, you know, we're just talking about language really.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's as long as you learn another language.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's different, the different language, but there's more even than that to the issue.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: There is uh sidelined as just a basic HR issue, where it's a major AR issue that affects risk management and many other aspects of the of the business.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: One thing we do know is that more and more of the global GDP is going to be global and not domestic.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that has just overwhelmed us in the last 20 to 30 years.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back in the early days when uh China was able to, you know, really produce about 40 to 45 percent more cheaply than even the Korean and Vietnam markets and other parts of Indonesia, they actually gobbled up and became the factory floor for the world.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: That just sent global markets just skyrocketing as a percentage of all uh commerce in the world.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be less than 25% of the global markets were uh international, 75% were domestic.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: That means I make something in the United States, I sell it in the United States.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: But now most of everything we buy in the United States has global uh fingerprints all over it.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to buy any product that doesn't have some kind of a global connection to it.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's growing even more.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's now it's well over 50%, and it's just getting it's growing at a 3.3% rate right now, according to the World Bank, as the total share of all business is going globally.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So no one sees this as tapping out anytime soon.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So this is why businesses need to be concerned about this.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just about logistics of how you prepare somebody to speak a language and be able to set up the factory properly.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's also about relocation readiness, having them be able to step into those areas and have meaningful control and leadership that really works.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what's missing with a lot of them.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Even those that already have incredible and substantial investments globally, they're struggling with this.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the reason why the Whigham School is paying so much attention to it.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those are eye-opening stats because in a sense the world has always been somewhat interconnected, but with modern transportation technology, even more so.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that just points it out right there.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, some of these international corporations have been around now for decades.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And yet the the trend, like you're saying, is it's more and more global economy, global GDP.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we're also seeing it culturally well.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean when you introduced this idea to me a couple of years ago that even those countries that speak English have different cultures.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the United States, I mean, there's multiple Englishes.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you go to sub-Saharan Africa, there are a lot of people who speak English down there, but it is a whole different frame of English speaking.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think, well, if I know the language, I am culturally fluent.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a much bigger and more complicated palette of understanding that they need to have.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to comment on that because I remember that conversation so vividly because it really shocked me when I started thinking about it.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because you know, language and culture they go together.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: They go hand in hand.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can't separate them.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: We we do, people try to separate them, but it's artificial.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when language learning becomes boring.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: If it's like, well, let's just learn the mechanics of this language.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can't separate language and culture in an effective way, and you shouldn't.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there are two ways we can go with this.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about this too.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like English is not sufficient, even with you know, English as the business lingua franca, you can't just assume it's always going to work for you.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there will be losses along the way if you do.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other directions, what you just mentioned, like even within English, let's say everybody does speak English or you're working interculturally across English-dominant cultures, the cultures, other aspects of them beyond the language are still different.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go in thinking, well, they know English, and so they have watched our American sitcoms, since I'm English coming from the US.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, they're probably more familiar with my culture than I am with theirs.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: But they're still not from my culture.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they still don't fully understand my culture, and I certainly don't understand their culture unless I'm prepared to learn about it and have that cultural dexterity.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And a big part of the cultural dexterity is that cultural humility to be willing to learn about it.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: But that I feel like as an academic, I feel like that's difficult to sell in the business world.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're more on the business side of things.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: How would you advise business leaders to incorporate that idea of cultural humility or developing cultural fluency with their goals of making money, of selling products, providing services?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: How do you balance the business goals with cultural humility and humanitarian responsibility?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm going to talk from an American point of view because uh we're kind of blind.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And because we've been so successful, we think that's exactly how you should do it no matter where you are, whether you are in India, whether you're in China, whether you're in South Africa, whether you're in Europe.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: The American model is the best model.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember being in Shanghai, talking to a group of business people there, and I was really kind of preaching hard the management styles of American businesses to help them become better at what they did.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there was significant pushback.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was kind of shocked by that.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you're good in the United States and you have been successful, it's gonna be tempting to think all I've got to do is just wrap this into a nice little cultural ribbon and a little bit of a language ribbon and send it over to another country, and it's gonna be as successful as what we experienced in the U.S.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not gonna happen.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there are just too many stories in the graveyard of people who had that mindset.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is gonna be hard for us as American business people that we have to step in and say other people are probably have better ways of doing things in certain areas, and we have got to pay attention.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like for me, being an a typical American, I get frustrated people don't show up on time to meetings.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Other cultures, not a big deal.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: They don't really sweat that detail.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Matter of fact, they think people who are hyperpunctual are very selfish, very uh, you know, they see it as a as a rudeness.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: We see their their lack of concern about start times as a rudeness.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: They don't value me.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're being they're treating me as I I'm not as important to them.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when you talk with them, you find that they have legitimate, value-based reasons why time is not that strict of a concern for them.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And they think people who are just strict on time are just so closed-minded and harsh that they just can't see the humanity that's happening all around them.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they criticize us for that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of cultural humility we need to have.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are places where people speak their minds so freely.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the U.S., we're kind of half and half, guarded sometimes, or sometimes we can speak kind of directly and bluntly.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you go to Amsterdam or even to France or other parts of the world, it is all bluntness.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: They just think that's the best way to communicate.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they get frustrated when you kind of you know dance around the issue.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you just say what you need, say if it's good, say if it's bad, just clear the air, be direct, and they're frustrated with us.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go to Japan and everything's contextual.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: You live there, Jeremy, so you know all about this.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a contextual they don't come out and obviously state, they give you cultural uh context in order for you to understand what they're trying to say.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it happens in China that way too.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's really interesting.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because in France you barely you don't use caveats like you were saying.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: In the US, we think we're direct and blunt, but we use a lot of caveats to make it palatable.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know how often I've ever really heard a true caveat.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because like you're saying, it's all contextual clues.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: You just there are just things you don't say.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you say a certain thing, it's it's it's a massive hint towards the the meaning.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need caveats because everything's so indirect, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they have a very much uh you know a shame-based uh, you know, your honor is everything.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the reason why they speak in those kinds of terms.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So no one has to sacrifice their honor.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's a part of the whole thing.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the Whigham School is based, that's where most of our audience is from, we assume, could be wrong about that.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not that we're saying this is only for US companies or US owners or students.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: What we're teaching that this this applies to everybody.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: We if we had, let's say, a cohort of students from India, a cohort of students from Kenya, we would be teaching the same principles of global fluence.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: We're not saying any one country or culture is more backwards than the other.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're saying in general, humans are very bad at this global fluence.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: We are not good at understanding cultural differences.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: We aren't.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: If companies aren't gonna do much of anything other than have like a one, two-hour session on, oh, what are the some of the differences you'll face in your new culture?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, here's the food and this.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's like okay, that's not really gonna do much for your employees.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: If there were one thing I could get corporations to do, I'd say, okay, teach your employees to go to the other country, the other culture, whatever, observe the differences, see that, okay, yeah, these are cultural differences, but have them look for the cultural logic behind the practice.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Makes total sense.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Just teach them this one thing.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, developing global fluency is much deeper than this.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're not going to do much of anything as a company, at least do this.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Teach them to understand the logic behind what's being done.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's nothing wrong with a hyper-punctual culture like ours.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's a cultural logic behind that, and it works well in our culture.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a cultural logic behind less punctual societies, and there's nothing wrong with that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Understand why this is the way it is.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: That I mean, that's just that's good to revolutionize your mentalities and how they interact with things.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's I don't know what what's one practice or one piece of preparation that you would like to see companies implement more when they send their leaders abroad.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is just open themselves up to the fact that all the things that they culturally prefer, whether it's a distance between a management and the workforce, or where they like to be very flat and close, that's a cultural dimension.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we just assume that that's a good thing, is that we need to be close to the workforce, but you go to a former Soviet state, and that distance is huge.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a reason for their why they do that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so we need to understand the why behind it.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: I had a client from Brussels who just had purchased a company in Montreal.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they were now responsible for the operations of a you know French Canadian company.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so they hired me to help them help their executives figure out how to look at the Montreal market, how to lead them.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was so amazing their concern for that, that they would hire somebody like me to help get their executives ready to manage it.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we went into these very conversations about not just tolerating other differences, but truly understanding the differences that are there, and they are profound.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the more that you open yourself up to it, you realize that some of the things that we do in the United States really preclude or even repress the development of better ideas, and we just don't see it because we're in it.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And every culture has those both positive and negatives.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: You need, as a uh international company, needs to embrace that differentiation because they're all going to help inform your culture, make the entire organization stronger, and that's what you really need.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I would tell every C that I meet have that mindset mentality.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's amazing how rare it is, even for people who have experience globally.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that we all have this blind spot and we have to we have to work our way through it.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because the world's not going to return back to domesticated markets.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's just too much that's happened, too much water has gone under the bridge for us to return because we found you know comparative advantages and expedited uh logistical ideas that have just made global commerce more than attractive.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: We've made it essential.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it can't return.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how much we romanticize the past of being a an isolated country, that's never happening again.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Human history has moved way past that idea.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got to be prepared.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Would you agree?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that this points out why a company need to focus on this.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: We we have to stop assuming that good intentions are enough.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: But because if there's not understanding, then the intentions don't get you anywhere.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: You have to stop assuming that a a talented leader in one context will automatically become an effective in a global context just because they've been successful somewhere else.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we exist, right?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: The Whigham School exists because we believe that this type of leadership must be formed and prepared, not just credentialed or assumed.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're out of time.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let me say one thing before we go, because this is a really important point.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: All the stats are moving in the right direction for people who are growing concerned about this.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: But what has not changed yet to the point it needs to change is how it's being done, the quality of the global dexterity that's being implemented.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're concentrating on the in the Whigham School.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just learning the language, giving lip service to whether you leave a tip or you bow before you shake someone's hand.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's all good stuff, okay?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not nearly enough.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get to understanding the very culture to its foundation, what really drives the values and motivates the people of a culture.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the Whigham School is stepping in.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: So be encouraged by the interest in this area, but still be concerned that we're still not delivering enough depth to cultural dexterity that is necessary for companies to be successful.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what our role is.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's going to be wonderful to see what happens.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the future of global leadership.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for joining us.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe for more conversations like this one.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can also learn more about our program by visiting wiggumsschool.org or following us on social media.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.