Does corporate strategy have a language problem? Almost certainly. Not the sort that HR departments fret about—diversity training and all that—but something rather more expensive. Western boardrooms scan exclusively English-language sources when mapping global competition. Some 65 per cent of executives admit communication gaps between management and workers muck up operations. Fair enough. But whilst they worry about internal chatter, they’re missing entire markets where innovation happens first, gets written about in Portuguese or Mandarin, and only surfaces in English months later when it’s old news.
Take Brazil’s Pix payment system. Launched in November 2020, almost half of Brazilians were using it just six months later. (It is now used by an astonishing 92 per cent of Brazilian adults). Silicon Valley’s payment processors would kill for such numbers. Pix has revolutionised how Brazilian consumers pay for everything from groceries to taxi rides. Meanwhile, Western boardrooms? Blissfully unaware of its existence until English-language tech journals caught on months after the launch. By then the most useful insights—how instant payments actually get adopted at scale—had gone stale. Now, five years on, it’s being touted as the future of money.
This happens everywhere. African markets cracked mobile money in the 2010s. East Asian ‘super apps’—ride-sharing plus payments plus e-commerce in one place—redefined what consumers expect. Western firms noticed years later. These Southeast Asian platforms figured out cash-on-delivery and social commerce models that actually work. Western companies? Still waiting for the Harvard Business Review case study.
Monolingual teams fail
The cost is more than just missed opportunities. It warps how companies understand competition entirely. Add one team member who actually represents your target consumer, and the whole team becomes 158 per cent likelier to understand that consumer. That’s from the Center for Talent Innovation. Extend this to language: monolingual teams are systematically rubbish at anticipating what happens in markets where people might not speak English.
This isn’t about hiring translators for client dinners. It’s about epistemic range—what information sources inform your thinking. Every language carries its own worldview. American business English especially so: techno-optimism, faith in individual rather than collective action, certainty that disruption flows from charismatic CEOs rather than grassroots adaptation.
Rely only on English sources and these biases become invisible. Try understanding Asian manufacturing resilience or Latin American fintech through Anglo-American frameworks. You’ll get it wrong.
Cultural intelligence
The consequences are getting harder to ignore. Chinese tech firms—Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei—now dominate across Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America. American and European competitors? Displaced. Yes, Chinese firms benefit from state support and lower costs. But that’s not the whole story. They’re brilliant at tailoring products to local markets. Huawei’s budget smartphones for African markets. Alibaba’s payment systems adapted for Indonesian small traders. This capability rests partly on linguistic and cultural intelligence that Anglo-American firms simply don’t have.
Look at the Global Innovation Index. The world’s five biggest science and technology clusters? All in East Asia. Tokyo-Yokohama leads globally. Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou comes second. Beijing third. India, Moldova and Vietnam have been innovation overperformers for 14 straight years. Yet how many Western strategy teams routinely scan Vietnamese tech blogs or Hindi-language forums for emerging trends? How many track what Polish fintech developers are saying on local forums? The innovation is happening. Western firms just can’t see it through their English-only spectacles.
Tools to do so exist. Valona Intelligence monitors 200,000-plus global sources in 115 languages, spotting trends and competitive moves in real time. Multilingual intelligence gathering is perfectly feasible at scale. ESCP Business School research shows that openness to language diversity strengthens team performance. Cultural attitudes matter as much as technical kit.
Question assumptions
A few firms get it. Germany’s SAP invests in multilingual communication training so employees can actually collaborate across linguistic boundaries. Airbnb structures customer support to be multilingual, ensuring deeper connections with diverse users. Early movers in what ought to be standard practice.
The business case goes beyond better market intelligence. A 2024 study found multilingual people have enhanced executive functions: better cognitive flexibility, attention control, problem-solving. Exactly the skills needed to navigate uncertainty and spot non-obvious opportunities. Multilingual teams adapt better when facing knotty workplace challenges. They’re also likelier to question assumptions, spot logical gaps, think round corners. In today’s market that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s essential.
Resistance, alas, persists, dressed up as pragmatism. English is the global business lingua franca, executives say, unironically. Why complicate things? This misses the point spectacularly. Nobody’s suggesting conducting meetings in Swahili. The question is which intelligence sources to tap. Run your meetings in English. Fine. But also monitor Mandarin tech forums, Portuguese fintech blogs, Arabic market research. It’s not complicated.
Otherwise? Wait for insights from non-English markets to trickle through to English business media. Perpetually reactive. By the time The Economist writes about an Indonesian payment innovation or Polish logistics breakthrough, savvy competitors have reverse-engineered it and adapted it elsewhere. Fifteen per cent of all monthly search terms are completely new. Google Trends captures emergent phenomena long before conventional datasets. But only if you search in the right languages.
Working through differences
What’s needed isn’t language lessons for the board. It’s building linguistic intelligence capabilities. Hire analysts who can scan non-English sources. Partner with regional research firms in São Paulo, Mumbai, Warsaw. Create systematic processes to surface insights from diverse linguistic ecosystems. Set up monitoring for key terms in multiple languages. Track what’s trending in local markets before Reuters translates it. As that ESCP research notes, language diversity alone doesn’t automatically boost creativity or performance. It requires openness, active engagement, willingness to work through differences.
For Western firms used to assuming important developments announce themselves in English, this is uncomfortable. Business strategy is going multilingual—not because English is declining, but because advantage flows to those who see what others can’t. Monolingual strategy teams can’t see rather a lot.
The global conversation about reinvention and competitive positioning is happening. In Mandarin, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, dozens of other languages simultaneously. Western firms can build the capability to join that multilingual dialogue. Or they can keep wondering why competitors who somehow saw the future coming keep blindsiding them.
Photo: Dreamstime.
