19 Apr

How One Person Can Change the World

How does one person actually change the world? Not through grand gestures, but through shifts in thinking and behavior that ripple outward. This article explores the science behind societal change, from evolutionary psychology to systems thinking. It shows how mental models shape behavior, how small choices scale into cultural shifts, and why institutions tend to follow rather than lead. For leaders, the implication is clear: real change starts with how individuals see their role in the system. When enough people act differently, culture moves—and with it, performance, policy, and outcomes.
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17 Apr

Getting Influential: Getting More Things Done

icons of people connected in various way and circles representing various levels; by salomons.coach
Most managers have two default tools when they need something to happen: tell people what to do, or escalate to someone who can. Direct communication and the chain of command. Both have their place. But if they are your primary or only tools for getting things done across an organization, you have a problem. Not because they don't work, but because they work less and less the higher you climb and the more complex your environment becomes. The managers and project managers who consistently get things done are not the ones with the biggest title or the loudest voice. They are the ones who understand that in most modern organisations, influence is the currency that actually moves things. Directives produce...
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12 Apr

Your Cross-Culture Leadership Compass

Most cross-cultural leadership problems don’t look like cultural problems, until they cost you performance. Misaligned expectations around trust, feedback, hierarchy, and decision-making silently undermine teams, delay results, and create friction that leaders misread as personality or competence issues. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass translates decades of academic research, including Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, GLOBE Study, World Values Survey, and Schwartz Theory of Basic Values, into precise, actionable leadership insights. Instead of generic awareness, it gives you a data-backed map of where cultural gaps actually impact your role, your team, and your results.
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12 Apr

The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass: A Practical Guide to Its 11 Leadership Dimensions

Every leader who crosses a cultural boundary carries two operating systems at once. One was installed in childhood. The other was acquired through years of professional adaptation. The real skill — the one that separates effective cross-cultural leaders from merely well-travelled ones — is knowing which system is running at any given moment, and whether it is serving the situation. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass is built around exactly this challenge. It integrates four validated academic frameworks — Hofstede, GLOBE, the World Values Survey, and Schwartz — and translates the data into eleven specific leadership dimensions where cultural gaps play out in practice. This post unpacks each one.
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03 Apr

The World Values Survey: The Deepest Layer of Cultural Difference — and Why Leaders Miss It

Most cross-cultural frameworks tell you how cultures differ at work. The World Values Survey reveals something deeper: what people fundamentally believe they are working for, whether they extend default trust to institutions or require it to be earned personally, and whether autonomy or security is their more basic professional motivation. These are the values that take generations to shift.
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03 Apr

The Schwartz Framework: The Dimensions of Cultural Difference That Other Models Cannot See

Every cross-cultural framework has blind spots. Schwartz measures four cultural dimensions — Embeddedness, Egalitarianism, Intellectual Autonomy, Affective Autonomy — that have no equivalent in Hofstede or GLOBE. If you work without them, you are missing a significant part of the cross-cultural picture. In some country pairings, the most operationally important gaps in the entire analysis.
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27 Mar

Beyond Hofstede: A Unified Framework for Cross-Cultural Executive Leadership

Hofstede is the most cited framework in cross-cultural management. It is also, by itself, incomplete. This article compares Hofstede with three other major research programmes — GLOBE, Trompenaars, and Hall — finds the ground where all four agree, and translates that consensus into seven executive management principles backed by five decades of independent evidence.
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