How Culture Shapes Our First Misunderstandings
Nov 19, 2025
| by
Henrik J Klijn
When Walmart pulled out of Germany in 2006 after losing roughly $1 billion, postmortems blamed everything from real estate missteps to labor relations.
They missed the deeper cause.
German employees disliked Walmart’s morning cheer. Customers found greeters intrusive. Store managers resisted mandates to smile constantly, a gesture Americans viewed as friendly service but Germans read as artificial.
The strategy wasn’t bad. The talent wasn’t weak.
The assumptions were wrong.
And nobody saw them until it was too late.
The Pattern: Invisible Alignment Gaps
Walmart’s not alone.
Home Depot withdrew from China in 2012 after seven years of losses, its do-it-yourself model clashing with a culture where home improvement is largely outsourced to professionals.
Target shut down all Canadian operations in 2015, writing off $5.4 billion after failing to connect with local expectations around pricing and inventory reliability.
eBay exited Japan in 2002 when users preferred Yahoo! Japan’s more relationship-oriented auction system.
These weren’t strategy failures. They were cultural ones.
A Harvard Business Review analysis of 150 cross-border mergers found that 70% fail to meet their financial targets most often because of cultural misalignment, not bad financial modeling.
The pattern repeats: teams believe they’re aligned until they discover they’re not. A meeting ends with apparent agreement. Follow-up reveals completely different interpretations of what was decided.
A “yes” means I understand in Tokyo.
In New York, it means I commit.
Same word. Different cultural coordinates.
The cost shows up in stalled projects, frayed trust, and delayed execution, not because people are incompetent, but because the assumptions guiding them are invisible.
Why Cultural Awareness Training Doesn’t Scale
The corporate cultural training industry generates roughly $200 million annually, teaching leaders how to act in specific contexts.
The problem? Contexts don’t hold still.
“Most cultural training operates like a phrasebook,” says Hanlie van Wyk, co-founder of Leading Across Culture. “It gives you scripts for specific situations. But leadership isn’t scripted. The moment that matters is when your script runs out and you have to read the room.”
Traditional training teaches static rules:
Don’t show the bottom of your feet in Thailand.
Bring gifts to first meetings in Japan.
Use titles in Germany.
These rules help. Until they don’t.
Research in the Journal of International Business Studies shows that static cultural knowledge predicts collaboration success poorly. What predicts success better is awareness of one’s own assumptions.
The leaders who struggle globally aren’t those who lack cultural data. They’re those who don’t notice when their data stops applying.
What Works Instead: Making Assumptions Visible
The Culture Map framework, developed by INSEAD professor Erin Meyer, gives leaders a diagnostic tool for invisible assumptions. It compares countries across eight dimensions of difference from communication style to decision-making approach. Not to create stereotypes, but to replace gut instinct with data.
Three dimensions matter most for global teams:
Communication: Low-Context vs. High-Context
In the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands, messages are explicit; clarity is the virtue.
In Japan, Brazil, and the UAE, much goes unsaid because shared context carries meaning.
A meta-analysis of 72 studies on cross-cultural communication found that mismatches on this dimension account for 40% of reported collaboration friction
Feedback: Direct vs. Indirect
Dutch, Israeli, and German teams view blunt feedback as honest. Thai, Indonesian, and Japanese teams preserve harmony through indirect phrasing.
“Leaders memorize dos and don’ts, but culture doesn’t stay still long enough for that to work,” says Flor Bretón-García, co-founder of Leading Across Culture. “The scalable skill is noticing when your logic doesn’t land—before you double down on it.”
Decision-Making: Consensus vs. Top-Down
In China, India, and Saudi Arabia, decisions flow from authority.
In Sweden, Japan, and the Netherlands, they emerge through group discussion.
When a New York executive asks, “So we’re good to go, right?” and an Asian counterpart nods, both believe they’ve agreed—until nothing happens.
To the American, “yes” confirmed commitment.
To their colleagues, “yes” signaled polite acknowledgment.
That’s not a competence gap. It’s a mapping gap.
Why Talking About Differences Speeds Things Up
It seems counterintuitive, but naming invisible assumptions accelerates collaboration.
Research from MIT’s Sloan School of Management found that distributed teams who discuss cultural differences in their first three meetings complete projects 30% faster than teams who don’t.
Culture mapping doesn’t eliminate complexity—it gives language to it.
That shared vocabulary prevents teams from spending weeks repairing misunderstandings they could have prevented in an hour.
The stakes can be immense. In the Boeing 737 MAX crisis, investigators found that engineering teams in Seattle and suppliers abroad operated under different assumptions about authority and what “safety-critical” meant. Those invisible gaps contributed to deadly miscommunication.
Most companies won’t face stakes that high. But the dynamic is the same: invisible assumptions compound until they become visible disasters.
The Business Case for Cultural Infrastructure
McKinsey research on global M&A found that companies that map cultural differences before integration complete deals 18 months faster on average than those that don’t.
The upfront investment—clarifying who decides, who advises, and what “agreement” means—saves months of rework later.
Walmart could have invested a fraction of its $1 billion loss in mapping German workplace norms. They would have discovered that mandatory smiles violated deep cultural expectations around authenticity and employee autonomy.
Instead, they learned by losing.
Culture is leadership’s hidden infrastructure—the operating system beneath every strategy and every success.
Leaders who learn to map it aren’t navigating blind anymore.
They’re building collaboration that lasts.
The confusion you felt last week? That was the signal.
Mapping is what you do with it.
Henrik J Klijn
South African-born Henrik J.Klijn has been writing since ehildhood, when his mother handed him a stack of notebooks to fill with his stories. Years later, she admitted it had more to do with keeping him quiet "because everyone needs a break, now and then."
In his role shaping Communication & Strategic Content for Leading Across Culture, Henrik develops content systems for global clients. Previously, as Head Copywriter at Reflex Media, he built content strategies for platforms reaching 56 million users globally. As a writer, he has contributed to various outlets, including Sourced Fact Media, Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, The Big Issue, and considerable Afrikaans—his home language—publications.
Currently, Henrik is pursuing a Master's in Journalism and Sociocultural Anthropology at Harvard. He is authoring a predoctoral dissertation on the |xam people of South Africa and the role of storytelling—told in resignation at their imminent extinction at the end of the 19th Century—as oral history and collective memory. In his spare time, he attends music events, ranging from classical to jazz and electronica. Henrik is an avid cook and a voracious reader who tries never to complain about Chicago winters, a city he has called home since 2017.
