Culture as a Competitive Advantage in 2026

Happy New Year to all of you — and may 2026 bring you health, curiosity, and a few genuinely joyful surprises.

Like every year, 2025 brought its share of the unimaginable: the kind of headlines that make you stop and reread, simply to be sure you understood correctly.

Some developments inspired hope; others were deeply distressing. At times, it can feel as though the world is coming apart at the seams. Following global events can be both discouraging and infuriating. One reaction is to adopt the “ostrich strategy”: to look away and hope the turbulence will pass. Another is to dismiss reporting altogether as inaccurate, exaggerated, or “fake news.” Yet the dilemma remains: if we do not follow the news, we risk being uninformed; if we do, we may still worry that we are being misinformed.

Reasons for Hope… Still

On the hopeful side, there were  reminders that international cooperation is still possible when people decide it must be.

• One example: the Global Ocean Treaty (often described as a “high seas” protection treaty) finally became a reality in 2025 after enough countries ratified it to bring it into force in 2026 — a concrete step toward protecting ocean areas beyond national border.

• Another: at the COP16 biodiversity conference, countries agreed on a plan to mobilize major financing for nature protection — an imperfect compromise, but a sign that multilateralism can still move.

• And in public health, progress continued in vaccination and disease prevention — including the expanding push to roll out malaria vaccines and strengthen routine immunization after pandemic disruptions.

…and Painful Realities

On the painful side, 2025 also confronted us with the cruelty of unresolved conflict and the fragility of societies under stress.

• Sudan’s civil war continued with staggering human cost, displacement, and famine conditions in parts of the country.

• The war in Ukraine ground on, year after year, becoming tragically “normal” in news cycles even as ordinary lives were repeatedly shattered.

• And the planet itself kept sending increasingly urgent signals: 2025 ranked among the hottest years recorded, alongside immense losses and deaths tied to climate-related disasters.

So yes — good and bad, hope, denial, grief, resilience and just plain exhaustion. That’s the world we’re stepping into as we kick off 2026.

And it’s exactly why I believe multicultural competence is not a “nice-to-have” extra anymore.

Why Culture Is No Longer Optional

As democracy and globalization feel as if they’re receding in many places, understanding cultural backgrounds — of our friends, colleagues, clients, business partners, and suppliers — becomes even more essential to stability, trust, and performance. Surveys and “risk” conversations increasingly talk about a world shaped by geopolitical and geoeconomic confrontation rather than integration. In that environment, culture stops being a “soft topic” and becomes a practical skill: a way to reduce friction, prevent misunderstandings, and keep relationships productive when the context is uncertain.

Culture in Everyday Practice: Concrete Examples

In my own work, this shows up in very concrete ways.

Take “face” in Spanish culture: what looks like “just feedback” to one person can land as public embarrassment to another, with consequences that last long after the meeting ends.

Or the art of connecting with the French intellectual mind in training: if you try to “simplify” too quickly, you may lose people; if you engage the reasoning and nuance, you gain attention and respect.

Then there’s a recurring challenge I see with many American clients: persuading talented professionals that culture is not decoration — it shapes how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, what “professionalism” looks like, and even what counts as “clear communication.” There is more than one legitimate way of doing things, seeing the world, and being in the world.

And with Indian expats, I often return to one key theme: the time needed to build trust. In some professional cultures such as in the US, trust is assumed until broken; in others such as France, it’s earned through repeated interactions, reliability over time, and careful reading of intent. If we ignore that difference, we create unnecessary loneliness for new expats and unnecessary frustration for host teams. If we acknowledge it, we can design smoother onboarding, and clearer expectations.

All of this brings me to a quote that I love — and that I want to offer as a small “thought experiment” for the year ahead. Many people attribute it to a French political figure Édouard Herriot, but the line has a complicated history: it is often misattributed to Herriot, and research traces versions of it back to the Swedish educator Ellen Key.

Culture is what remains when we have forgotten what we learned.

Think about it for a moment. Think of all the things you learned and then unlearned, or simply forgot: middle and high school facts, university formulas, outdated work processes, buzzwords that vanished, methods you replaced with better ones. And yet something remains — a quiet “black box” that guides how you interpret tone, status, conflict, silence, speed, hierarchy, intimacy, rules, exceptions, and what counts as respect. That remainder is often culture: not the visible labels, but the invisible defaults.