What Counts as Normal

I was born in New Delhi to Hindu parents. My father worked for the United Nations, and when I was five the posting took us to Pyongyang for three and a half years. After that came Indonesia, then boarding school in southern India while my father was posted to Burma, then my last years of school in Thailand, then America.

That is not a story about being a global citizen. It is about something narrower: very different societies teach radically different versions of what is normal, what is obvious, who is authoritative and what is expected. I lived inside several of them before I was eighteen.

Four versions of normal

In North Korea, the man in charge was worshipped as a god. Authority was not something to question. It was the background of everything.

Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. I had to repeat a year there because my English was not good enough.

In Thailand, where I finished school, more than nine people in ten are Buddhist. Then America, a Christian country.

Most of the world’s major religions, and several very different political systems, lived in rather than read about. Each of those places experienced its own normal as simply the way things are, not as one option among several.

In business: distrust the default

What that leaves, in practice, is a reason to distrust defaults, including my own.

In 2009 an agency in New Delhi was weighing whether to be listed in our India rankings. A national view would say an India list exists to help Indian buyers find Indian agencies. That was not how it was used. As I explained to them:

A lot of the companies in that rankings list only entertain US, UK, Australian, and Canadian clients - they recognize that companies are looking at the Indian listings with the intention to outsource to India

The same page meant something different depending on who was reading it and from where.

In 2024 I made the opposite mistake myself. I applied a national rule to a single-city platform, insisting that ranking lists should run to ten because that is what works nationally, and reversed it within minutes when a local partner told me five was right for his town. That is in Ten Was the Default. Five Was Right. The default felt obvious. It was only obvious from where I was standing.

Meeting people where they are

In 2022, drafting an application essay for an executive programme, I tried to put this into a sentence: that a wide variety of experiences and living outside one’s comfort zone can make a person “more able to engage across cultural boundaries, more willing to endure change.”

The story on this site says it more simply. After a life among people of different faiths and incomes, I can usually meet a client where they actually are, rather than where I assume they must be. The word that matters there is “assume.” Every room has its own normal, including the one you grew up in.

Every company has one too, and naming it out loud is early work in any leadership engagement.