Culture is the quiet context
In London with four young Italians at an AI event, our talk moved from models to Frantoio, olive presses, harvests and villages. It reminded me that culture guides how we work, lead and sell. Speak the local language, …
Connections
I was in London, surrounded by four Italians speakers at an AI event. Brilliant people, technical, young and full of ideas. Ten minutes into our conversation, though, we weren’t talking about models or GPUs. We were talking about Frantoio, the olive presses back home. When to clean them, which village had the best oil, who still helps during harvest.
It was perfect. It reminded me that culture seeps into everything—even a chat about artificial intelligence over pizza.
Culture shapes how we work, how we care and what we value. Americans often build top-down systems where one person can fire everyone else. In Europe, where that’s nearly impossible, leadership tends to be more cooperative, more negotiated, slower. The structure bends with the culture.
Take the French: they do have long lunches, but many of those lunches are work. They talk, they share, they build trust. It’s social architecture disguised as dining. It’s not inefficiency, it’s context.
So when you do business, sell or train across cultures, don’t assume English is enough or that everyone sees hierarchy, time or productivity the same way.
If you can speak the language—literally or culturally—you’re already halfway to understanding how things really get done.