Life, culture, food, music, and the cross-cultural lens — from 20+
years living and working in Seoul. An honest, personal view of Korea
for the professionally curious.
The slide deck was designed as a support tool. At some point it became the argument. That shift has made professional communication significantly worse and harder to reverse than most presenters realise.
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…