Why Culture, Not Capability, Builds Global Businesses
Aug 07, 2026
A few years ago, I was standing at a trade fair booth when three men in beautiful Armani suits walked up, didn't look twice at our product, and asked what the most expensive thing on the table was. I pointed one out. They said, "We'll take three. Cash." And opened a briefcase to prove it.
My VP at the time didn't blink. He said, "Bram, just thank the gentlemen for coming, and tell them we can't help them." And that was that.
I thought about that moment again this week while recording the podcast with Koen Cardon, the ex-CEO of Katoen Natie's Southeast Asia business. Koen told me almost the same story, except his version played out across entire countries. There were places Katoen Natie simply wouldn't operate, because doing business there meant paying for the privilege under the table. No negotiation. They walked.
What struck me wasn't the principle itself — plenty of leaders will tell you they have one. What struck me was what Koen said next: that culture, not capability, is what took his business from 400 people to more than 25,000 across three decades. "Everyone can build warehouses and hire workers and buy forklifts," he told me. "That doesn't mean you're successful."
If you've built or led a business across borders, you already know the technical side isn't the hard part. You can teach logistics. You can teach process. What you can't shortcut is getting a Belgian head office and a Singaporean shop floor to actually understand each other — not just the words, but the why behind the way each side works. Koen said it plainly: half his job, for years, was explaining Europeans to his Asian teams. The other half was explaining Asians to his European teams. That's not an HR problem. That's the job.
A few things from our conversation stuck with me, because I see versions of them in almost every corporate client I work with.
First, respect has to run in both directions before anything else works. Koen's own mentor told him early on: you need respect for the people who work for you, and you need to earn respect from the people you work for. Simple to say. Most leaders get one half right and wonder why the other half never shows up.
Second, you can't dictate your way into a new culture. Koen called it the "colonial approach" — flying in and telling local teams "we know better." He said it fails quietly: people won't argue, they'll just leave. The teams that stayed and thrived were the ones his company trained and then trusted to lead.
Third, credibility gets built on the floor, not in the boardroom. Katoen Natie's management trainees spend two years on a packaging line or driving a forklift before they're allowed to manage anyone. It costs them talent — competitors poach the best ones the moment they're trained. But the ones who stay walk into any meeting already knowing what's actually happening on the ground. That's not a soft skill. That's commercial leverage.
And fourth — the piece I come back to most in my own work — none of this is about being liked. It's about communicating in a way that actually lands with the person in front of you, whether that's a forklift driver, a head office executive, or a government regulator. Koen made the same point about Singapore itself: companies that fail there haven't failed on strategy, they've failed to understand what the other side actually wants.
That's the thread running through almost every conversation I have with commercial leaders. The strategy is rarely the problem. The communication underneath it is.
If any of this sounds familiar — if you're leading people across regions, generations or head-office politics and feeling the friction of it — that's exactly the kind of gap Communication Mastery is built to close. If you'd like to talk through what that looks like inside your organisation, book a discovery call and let's have a proper conversation about it.
