05/15/2026
It’s all Greek to me. 🏛️
I’ve just spent a week exploring Santorini, Paros, and Athens — and I’m returning with a fuller heart, a broader mind, and a few reflections on leading across cultures.
There is something profoundly humbling about immersing yourself in a place where you cannot read the signs, cannot speak the language, cannot even decode the alphabet. (And yes — despite a brief and ill-fated attempt at ancient Greek as a theology student in Finland many years ago, modern Greek remains beautifully opaque to me. That’s a story for another day.)
But humbling is not the same as disconnected. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Today at the Acropolis, our guide said something that stayed with me. He described how Greek mythology is largely a story of humans conquering nature — mastering it, subduing it, extracting from it. And it struck me how deeply that narrative is woven into Western thinking: the tendency to categorize, analyze, break things into parts. To win.
Contrast that with many Eastern traditions — where the relationship between humans and nature isn’t about conquest, but about harmony. Where the goal isn’t domination, but coexistence.
As a cross-cultural coach, I know this distinction intellectually. But standing at the foot of the Parthenon, hearing it told through the lens of mythology and millennia of history — it lands differently. It means something differently.
This is exactly why I believe global leaders need more than frameworks. They need lived experience. They need to stand somewhere unfamiliar and sit with not-knowing — whether that’s a language they can’t read or a worldview that challenges their own defaults.
Returning to work next week with new ideas, renewed creativity, and a reminder of why this work matters. 🌊
What cultural experience has most shaped how you lead?
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