.

That was the problem.

For more than two decades, my work has lived where business, technology, and culture meet. I started as a mechanical engineer in heavy industry. Construction equipment. Cranes. Trenchless technology. Complex international operations. The work took me through India, the Middle East, Russia, China, and most of Asia Pacific.

For three years I lived in Saudi Arabia, managing multicultural teams in a demanding environment. Later, at a US multinational, I helped open offices in new markets, ran the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, and eventually took responsibility for Asia Pacific.

On paper this reads like a career in international business.

In practice it was an education in misunderstanding.

Not the dramatic kind. Not the sort that ends up in case studies with obvious villains and clean lessons. The misunderstandings I cared about were smaller, quieter, and more expensive.

A polite sentence that read as evasive.

A direct request that read as rude.

A ‘yes’ that did not mean agreement.

A delayed reply that signalled respect to one colleague and disengagement to another.

A careful explanation that one side called professional and the other called avoidance.

These rarely look like cultural problems at first. They look like slow decisions, weak ownership, missed deadlines, or lack of urgency. Only later do you realise people were not disagreeing about the work. They were operating from different assumptions about how work should be written, framed, challenged, softened, escalated, or concluded.

That realisation became impossible to ignore when I was promoted to Director, Asia Pacific.

My remit suddenly covered multiple countries. China, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and more. The Indian subcontinent stayed on my plate. The China and Philippines offices reported into me. American headquarters sat across time zones with its own expectations of speed, clarity, and decision-making.

At first I managed the way many international managers manage. By getting on planes.

Quarterly visits. Factory walks. Corridor conversations. Long dinners after difficult meetings. The real work often happened outside the formal meeting room. A tense issue softened over a meal. A hesitation became visible in someone’s body language. A disagreement surfaced only after the senior person had left. Writing mattered, but it was held up by presence.

Then COVID grounded everything.

The corridor conversations disappeared. The factory floor disappeared. The after-meeting clarification disappeared. The dinner where the difficult subject softened over a glass of wine disappeared.

What remained was a screen and a keyboard.

My day reorganised itself around writing. Early mornings with China, where every exchange carried the weight of face, hierarchy, and relationship. Daytime with India, where context mattered and a decision often needed the conversation around it to make sense. Late evenings with American headquarters, where messages were short, direct, and built for speed. The Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other threaded through the day, each with its own rhythm of respect, caution, warmth, and indirectness.

Within weeks the cracks showed.

A short, polite email from a Japanese reseller partner read in Seattle as evasive. A direct American request read in China as aggressive. A Chinese ‘yes’ meant agreement on Monday and reluctance on Wednesday, and the difference lived not in the word itself but in the sentences around it. Velocity dropped. Trust frayed. Problems that looked operational were often embedded in writing.

So I went back to the books.

Erin Meyer helped explain cultural mapping. Richard Lewis helped explain broad communication patterns. Hofstede’s dimensions sat underneath much of the conversation. Andy Molinsky wrote about adaptation. Craig Storti wrote about crossing cultures. The frameworks were valuable. They helped me understand why a meeting had gone wrong.

They did not help me write the next email.

The academic literature held more answers. Those answers were buried behind paywalls, technical language, and hundreds of pages of theory. A practitioner drafting a sensitive reply at midnight had nowhere simple to go.

So I started keeping notes.

Patterns from my own inbox. The structure my Chinese colleagues used to deliver bad news. The way Filipino colleagues softened a refusal. The signals that suggested a Chinese colleague had a serious objection but would not state it directly. The American instinct to put the conclusion first. The German preference for context, evidence, and precision before commitment. The Indian habit of building meaning through relationship and surrounding explanation before arriving at the point.

At first the notes were only for me.

They helped me decode what I was reading and adjust what I was writing. Over time they became something larger. By 2022, during a four-week sabbatical, I started turning them into a book. By late 2023, the first draft had crossed two thousand pages. Far too long, but complete.

Two more years went into cutting it down.

The personal irritations had to go. The patterns that survived distance stayed. Theory remained only where it served the practitioner. What was left was the practical core. How to read cultural signals in writing. How to write back in a way that lands.

That book became *When Culture Collides with Language: Decode. Adapt. Transcend.*

This Substack starts from the same place.

It is not an academic newsletter, though it will draw on research. It is not a travelogue, though it will move across countries. It is not a collection of etiquette tips, though it will sometimes touch on gifts, greetings, silence, hierarchy, honour, directness, and face.

It is about the written work of crossing cultures.

Here I will write about the things that rarely get taught but often decide whether international work succeeds. Why some cultures expect the writer to be explicit and others expect the reader to infer. Why politeness can look like clarity in one place and aggression in another. Why ‘yes’ is one of the most dangerous words in global business. Why some emails begin with context and others with conclusions. Why silence, delay, hedging, apology, titles, emotion, humour, and even emoji carry different weight across borders.

I will also write what did not fit into the book.

Every book leaves material behind. Some topics were too specific. Some too playful. Some deserved their own space. Honorifics. Emoticons. Digital etiquette. Status anxiety. Apology styles. Feedback rituals. Translation traps. Meeting follow-ups. The quiet politics of ‘just checking in.’

The aim is practical.

If you run cross-cultural teams, report to a foreign headquarters, sell across borders, build international partnerships, or rewrite emails because something feels off, this is for you.

I will not promise easy formulas. Culture does not work that way. What I will offer is patterns you can recognise, questions you can ask, and small adjustments that change how a message lands.

Most global misunderstandings do not begin with bad intent.

They begin with a sentence that travelled badly.