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After leaving my career to become a freelance writer (an audacious move, with just one commission in hand), I entered a season of collecting “how to do life” books. My shelves quickly amassed self-improvement manuals, each titled by single, untranslatable nouns. The Japanese concept of ikigai promised to affirm my purpose in writing, and the Swedish hygge justified buying candles I couldn’t afford.

When I picked up The Power of Nunchi, by Euny Hong, I gained insight into something far more strategic. Nunchi, a Korean concept often translated as “eye-measure”, is the ability to read a room in seconds – to register hierarchy, mood, alliances and tension. It’s an astute calibration of perception, challenging Western ideas that equate power with charisma. It asserts that what happens around the meeting matters more than the meeting itself, as opposed to Western “success” culture, which tends to worship the cult of personality.

The Power of Observation

In some corners of the world, arriving with the strongest opinion signals confidence; think of an erratic billionaire live-tweeting market-moving impulses at 2am. We obsess over these personae and often strive to emulate them, believing that spectacle and unconventionality is a good strategy. But nunchi suggests the opposite: that the person who observes first often wins later.

South Korea’s ascent in international business, from Samsung’s scale to the global reach of “K”-everything, illustrates the point. The nation’s industrial strategy and innovation is now widely respected, but, during the Joseon period of 1392–1897, the West considered it the “Hermit Kingdom” – a Confucian society shaped by boundary-keeping. Later forced open by imperial powers, colonised by Japan, divided by war and perpetually positioned between geopolitical giants, attentiveness became survival. Euny Hong argues that South Korea’s situational intelligence became a national asset.

Lessons in Philosophy

Culture is strategy, and understanding unspoken dynamics can be as valuable as possessing technical expertise. In Japan, the governing instinct is wa (“harmony”). Consensus is often built through nemawashi – informal groundwork laid before any formal presentation. By the time a meeting takes place, the decision has frequently been shaped privately. Arriving in Tokyo with a fully formed strategy but no prior alignment can leave you with little more than courteous nods and zero traction. This aversion to open friction is risk management, and underpins the approach taken by companies such as Toyota, which has been studied globally for its efficiency and resilience.

The UAE, meanwhile, is home to over 40 free zones and more than 200 nationalities, with business built almost entirely on cross-cultural negotiation. The Arabic term wasta is often reduced to “favouritism”, but in practice it’s closer to visible social capital. In an ecosystem built on sovereign wealth, family conglomerates and joint ventures, reputation travels faster than a contract, so a well-placed introduction can remove the need for months of market-entry strategy.

Relationships are the transaction, and “cutting to the chase” could signal impatience and instead cut you out of a deal. Dubai’s extraordinary capacity for reinvention, from desert entrepôt to global innovation nexus, rests on enduring networks that survive sector pivots. Wasta is deeply cultural and powers one of the world’s most futuristic skylines.

In Nairobi, the Swahili term harambee (“all pull together”) positions success as collective, and the entrepreneurial ecosystems in East Africa’s commercial centre, from mobile banking to agritech, thrive on collaboration. M-PESA, Kenya’s pioneering money-transfer platform, is an example of this, driven as it is by grass-roots adoption and community networks.

Over in Europe, seductive start-up tech hub Lisbon has its own cultural code. Shaped by Portugal’s maritime past and subsequent contraction, saudade signals a nostalgia for what has been lost. Silicon Valley bombast has little meaning in a culture where memory tempers ambition, so pitch decks heavy on disruptive rhetoric may not land as they would in Palo Alto.

Pay Attention to Get Paid

Peter Drucker’s oft-quoted line “culture eats strategy for breakfast” still rings true today. Given a few clever prompts, AI can draft a decent business strategy in minutes, but misreading cultural cues risks a slow erosion of trust that could derail a deal.

Reducing cultural concepts to etiquette tips (wait your turn in Seoul, accept coffee in Dubai) trivialises the point. For the business traveller, cultural intelligence is the new due diligence. It doesn’t require fluency in five languages; just pay attention.

Global business may often be conducted in English and denominated in pounds and dollars, but it’s dictated by untranslatable, yet decipherable, rules. Become an expert at reading those rooms, and you’ll be invited back. In any market, that’s the only metric that counts.

• Arrive to the meeting room early enough to understand who speaks to whom before the meeting begins.

• Notice who is never contradicted, and whether a disagreement is aired or deferred.

• Don’t conflate speed with efficiency, and avoid forcing immediate agreement. Ask instead, “Who else should weigh in?”

• Build time for informal conversations – an unstructured dinner may be the best setting for a negotiation.

• Let silences linger or flowing conversations stretch, and watch who else watches. It’s astonishing how much information circulates through this alone.

• Send follow-up notes that reinforce relationships rather than action points.