Selling in Hong Kong taught me more about leadership than any seminar

Hong Kong, 1994. A restaurant in Wan Chai. Across the table, a potential client. On the table: dim sum, tea, and a politeness that is slowly making me nervous.

For three months I have been trying to get a foothold in the construction industry. My product is genuinely good, my offer is competitive, my presentation is solid. I have done everything right — by German standards. And that is precisely the problem.

The man opposite me has been nodding pleasantly for an hour. He says „very interesting“ and „we will consider.“ I read that as interest. Later I learn: it was a polite no.

That evening I sit in my small flat in Causeway Bay and cannot make sense of it. Everything was perfectly prepared. What did I do wrong?

The answer did not come from a book. It came from a local business partner, over a beer on the waterfront in Cheung Chau. Six words that changed everything:

„First make friends, then make business.“

Six words. No curriculum, no seminar, no MBA module. But they taught me more about leadership, selling and human relationships than everything I had learned before.

Because what that sentence really means is: stop seeing the person opposite you as a target. See them as a person. Take an interest in them before you sell them anything. Invest in the relationship before you expect anything in return.

What did I change afterwards? Everything. I stopped presenting and started listening. I stopped seeing meetings as outcomes and started understanding them as relationship building. I learned that a lunch in which everything except business is discussed is worth more than any slide deck.

It took months. Then came the first large contract. Not because my product had got better. Because the person across the table felt, for the first time, that he could trust me.

What does this have to do with leadership? Everything.

Because leading across cultural boundaries — and I do not only mean national borders, but also the borders between departments, generations and industries — always begins with understanding your own perspective as one of many. Not as the correct one.

The leaders I have worked with internationally for more than 25 years almost never fail on technical competence. They fail on the assumption that their way of thinking, communicating and deciding is universal. It is not.

My question: when did you last notice that your way of communicating did not land — and what could you have done differently?

Lead yourself, and everything else follows.
— Ralf