Life, culture, food, music, and the cross-cultural lens — from 24
years living and working in Seoul. An honest, personal view of Korea
for the professionally curious.
A question I hear constantly from professionals, Korean and foreign, moving into more senior roles here: what does executive presence actually look like in a Korean company, because the confident, talk-often model that works well in many Western organizations often backfires. Presence Here Is Read Through Restraint, Not Volume In many Korean organizational contexts, the…
I have lived through enough Seoul summers now to notice when the city actually changes shape, not just when a new cafe opens. 2026 is one of those years. Between the Han River, the neighborhoods, the number of tourists on the street, and what people are actually lining up for, the city feels different than…
Every year, a wave of my students and coaching clients decide they want to work at 외국계 기업… a foreign or multinational company operating in Korea… instead of a domestic conglomerate or startup. The appeal is obvious: different hierarchy norms, often more English usage, sometimes better work-life balance. What is less obvious is that getting…
A question that comes up constantly with clients and students working in or with Korea, on either side of a screen: what can I actually say online here, and how anonymous am I really. The honest answer surprises most people, expats and Koreans alike. Korean defamation law is stricter than what most Western professionals assume,…
Korean workplace hierarchy is real, consequential, and almost always misread by foreigners in the first months. Here is how it works.
Every year has its thing. Here is what is actually moving in Seoul this spring — food, fashion, nightlife, and neighbourhoods.
K-Pop gets the global headlines. What is actually happening inside Korean music culture in 2026 is more interesting.
The first ten minutes of a Seoul networking event establish more about your professional credibility than most foreign professionals realise. Here is what those minutes actually communicate and how to make them work for you.
The decision between Naver Blog and a self-hosted platform is not primarily a technical one. It is a decision about where your audience searches for credibility. In Korea, that answer is not the same as in most Western markets.
체면 is usually translated as face. That translation captures the status dimension but misses the more practically useful one: the coherence between who you claim to be and how you actually behave.
인맥 is not the Korean word for networking. It describes something more demanding and more valuable. Here is the distinction that changes how you build professional relationships in Korea.
The standard complaint about unnecessary meetings misses the more interesting problem. Most bad meetings are bad because of what happened before anyone entered the room.
In Korea, the way you give and receive a card tells someone more about you in three seconds than your LinkedIn profile tells them in three minutes. Cold outreach in Korea will get you a polite response. A warm introduction will get you the meeting. That gap, between being received and being remembered, is one…
Silence in Korean professional communication is not the absence of a message. It is a message. Learning to read it took years. Here is what that education looked like. About three years into my time in Seoul, I walked out of a meeting at a large Korean company convinced that nothing had been decided. The…
The LinkedIn strategies that work in North America and Europe land very differently in a professional culture built on different social norms, different relationship hierarchies, and a different relationship between public self-disclosure and credibility. LinkedIn is a global platform with a local problem in Korea, and most of the advice about using it was written…
The data on Seoul’s nightlife audience challenges almost every assumption the industry makes, starting with who is actually in the room. Spending time in Seoul’s nightlife is, for me, partly the experience of living here for 24 years, and partly the experience of watching a fascinating consumer economy that almost nobody studies with any rigour….
Most Western professionals think about trust as something you earn quickly and rebuild if it breaks. Korea taught me that is the wrong model entirely.
Western professionals have spent decades developing emotional intelligence, communication frameworks, and leadership presence programmes. They have been missing the thing that actually makes communication work in real rooms with real people.
Twenty years is long enough to stop being surprised. Long enough to stop interpreting silence as rudeness, hierarchy as inefficiency, or indirectness as dishonesty. Long enough to understand that what looks like a communication breakdown from the outside is, most of the time, a communication system… one that’s operating exactly as designed, just according to…