Chapter 9. Your Starting Point

Culture as translationCopy Anchor Link

Anthropologist Edward Hall distinguished high-context cultures, where much of the meaning lives in shared understanding and what goes unsaid, from low-context cultures, where good communication is explicit, simple and precise. Erin Meyer's The Culture Map turned this into one of eight scales for comparing cultures. On her communicating scale, the U.S. sits at the low-context extreme, while China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia sit toward the high-context end. Ca management book based on the author's teaching and interviews, not a peer-reviewed study (overview)

Meyer stresses that what matters is relative position: someone may seem direct next to one colleague and indirect next to another. Country-level scores, such as Hofstede's dimensions, are averages from survey data collected decades ago; applying them to any individual is a mistake. Treat them as possible explanations for a habit, not descriptions of you.

You don't have to give up the instincts that serve you — careful listening, respect, humility. You add a second version for rooms that reward a different style.

The East Asian pattern: Enter and OwnCopy Anchor Link

In the study from the Introduction, Lu, Nisbett and Morris (2020) tested three explanations for why East Asians in the U.S. were less likely than South Asians and whites to reach leadership roles. A (PNAS)

• Prejudice? East Asians actually faced less prejudice than South Asians.
• Motivation? East Asians were just as motivated by work and leadership.
• Assertiveness? East Asians scored lower, by both self-report and others' ratings, and this consistently explained the gap — after controlling for birth country, English fluency, education and socioeconomic status.

Follow-up work points the same way: an analysis of MBA graduates over 19 class years found East and Southeast Asians negotiated less, out of concern for relationship harmony, and received the lowest starting salaries; South Asians received the highest (Lu, 2022). B (summary)

Posts from engineers echo this: finishing work quickly but being told to "contribute more in meetings"; an idea ignored, then repeated by someone else who gets credit; finding it embarrassing to demo work and going years without promotion.

Where to start: Enter (Chapter 4) and Own (Chapter 6). Speak in the first ten minutes; keep ownership of your ideas; disagree in three steps; report results rather than praise; name a number first in salary and scope conversations:

"Based on the scope and market data for this level, I'm looking for X."

The researchers warn that over-valuing assertiveness can reward narcissism, and that organizations should widen their picture of what a leader sounds like. The goal is not to become aggressive. It is to make your judgment audible.

The South Asian pattern: Headline and paceCopy Anchor Link

In the same research, South Asians were more likely than whites to attain leadership positions, despite facing more prejudice than East Asians. Assertiveness was not their bottleneck. A

The evidence for what does get in the way is weaker, coming mostly from community posts, news reports and colleagues' observations — some of them hostile. Read this section as hypotheses. B–C

• Pace and clarity on calls. See Chapter 8. In a widely shared 2025 Reddit post, an Indian employee said a senior colleague told him to stop speaking in meetings because of his accent; most responses called the remark rude and noted the usual request is simply to speak more slowly. (report)
• Hierarchy, upward. Colleagues describe people saying nothing while their manager is on a call and asking privately afterward. In U.S. teams, a clarifying question in front of a manager usually reads as engagement: "Before we move on — can I check one thing about the timeline?"
• Hierarchy, downward. Because many South Asian professionals become managers, a second friction appears: frequent status checks learned elsewhere can read as micromanagement to U.S. teams.

Where to start: Headline (Chapter 3) and Pace (Chapter 8); for new managers, Reason and Next (Chapters 5 and 7).

If neither pattern fits youCopy Anchor Link

Then ignore both. These are starting points drawn from group-level research, and you are not a group average. The paper self-check in Chapter 2 is a better guide to where you should begin.