>>This experience taught her how she wields her bi-cultural identity, business is business and success ultimately relies on performing better than the next person. “To earn their respect, I really had to prove I was worth listening to. The way I earned their respect [was to understand] the issues they were facing," said Koo. "I was able to bring them so many clients that they both doubled and tripled in size. I had to earn their respect by showing them I could outsell them.”<p>tl;dr - only by <i>outperforming</i> locals will others be forced to listen to and respect you to compensate for the disadvantages of looking like a local but not speaking a second language fluently.<p>The shtick is that supposedly superior Western culture (and upbringing), processes and know-how coupled with an understanding of local market dynamics beats the Asian 'lemming' upbringing and implied second-tier domestic home-grown business processes.<p>The article talks about Asian-Americans being "aggressive" presumably due to an American upbringing. However, I usually feel it's the other way around -- that Asian business sense and culture has a much more aggressive and competitive undertone.<p>I will concede that there is less of a risk appetite in some countries, but hesitate to simply restrict this supposed educational system failure to Asian countries alone. This old HN thread (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731</a>) touches upon the idea of a culture being considered risk-averse, but was specific to startup culture differences between Japan and the US, and not generalized to 'all' Asian countries as this article seems to be doing.