Essay
Randy McGraw · 2025
There is an old courtesy, older than any of the countries I have lived in, that the Greeks called xenia, the law of host and guest. People do not really think of it anymore, which is both too bad and a bellwether of our collective drop in culture and good manners in the West. When we do remember it, we typically remember it incorrectly (perhaps selectively) as a duty of hosts. It is far more. The villains of the Odyssey are not bad hosts; they are bad guests, men who sat at another man’s table for years and mistook tolerance for welcome.
I learned a plainer version of the same law from my mother. “It is one thing,” she said, “to learn how to be a good host; it is another altogether, and every bit as important, to learn how to be a good guest.”
Tokyo, 1999. The first lesson came early, and I will state it as plainly as I learned it: do not leer. Do not womanize in the office, and do not be perceived as a womanizer out of it, by your Asian male colleagues in particular, who are likely looking to discount you in business to start with. In thirty years I have seen nothing else end a foreigner’s corporate and business prospects so quickly or so completely. It’s kryptonite to your business success, especially in Japan.
I watched it happen, more than once. The American partner in our joint venture had installed one of its own in a position of real authority, and the title, at least, was unimpeachable. He was a highly competent leerer, and everyone in the office knew it. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. His Japanese male colleagues simply wrote him off. They stopped taking him seriously, and from then on he was neutered: heard with perfect courtesy, and discounted entirely.
Coming from a culture that espouses and prizes “second chances,” it took me some time to understand why the verdict was so final. A foreigner arrives with no standing of his own. He has no school ties, no family name, no history with anyone in the building. Respect is the only currency he will ever hold, and perhaps, eventually, trust, though not without a good long due process. He earns either, or both, from nothing, and they land with little margin for error, easily uprooted. My Japanese colleagues gave it only to those who earned it. But they were also taking each newcomer’s measure, and the man who leered had idiotically handed it to them. He had shown what he thought of the people around him, the women first and, through them, everyone else. He had told his hosts that he regarded their house as a playground, and they returned the valuation. He would be gone in a couple of years anyway, as foreigners were assumed to be, and now the Japanese had even more of a reason not to listen until he was. For the Western foreigner in Asia there is plenty of time to become one of the boys, and the boys’ nights out here are legend; but that comes later, and only after fitting in has been earned. It is worth remembering what Homer’s suitors were actually guilty of. They were guests who would not leave the woman of the house alone.
I was in the same building, carrying the same passport, every bit as foreign, and I took the lesson the way one takes a shot across the bow. I kept my eyes on the business at hand. I took my questions out of the room, where a question could be answered without anyone having to lose by answering it. I tried to be, without apology, the expert they had hired and expected me to be, for expertise is the one thing a guest is expected to bring to the table, and I asked for help with how the dish ought to be served. My expertise, their way.
I had something to serve. Our distribution partners were being rewarded for moving the set-top box, the hardware on which my Japanese colleagues lavished an engineer’s devotion, when what we were in fact selling was what came through it: the programming. I did not make that argument in a meeting. I made it to one person, off to the side. The young Japanese liked me, but my manner at first made their eyeballs spin. HR came to me one day and asked me to lunch, whereat one of them told me: “you have good ideas, share them with Mr. Natsume first rather than openly in a meeting when no one is ready, and pay attention to his cues.” What followed was no revolution. It was a slow roll, consensus gathering like a tide. But the tide came in, and by early 2000 sales through our key distribution partners rose one hundred and twenty percent, year on year.
Same building, same passport, opposite verdict. The difference was never competence. It was conduct as a guest.
The first thing I surrendered was the presumption that my own way of doing things was the way things are done. It was a small surrender, and I made it daily: office greetings, what can be said in jest, when to be formal and when not, and how badly a wrong guess is taken; the inestimable value of indirectness, and how to bite your tongue. It is a long list, and it needs conscious deliberation. None of it was costly, all of it was noticed. I came to see that the guest who insists on his own customs at another’s table is not standing on principle; he is merely announcing that he does not intend to stay. To be asked back, I had first to be the sort of guest for whom the evening was no trouble, and who saw to it that it was easy for everyone else.
The next lesson took me longer, because it cut against everything an American business education had taught me about leadership, which is that it consists chiefly of going first. In the rooms I worked in, authority ran from the top down, visibly and without embarrassment, and a man’s standing depended a good deal on his knowing precisely where in that order he stood on any given day. A good leader, I came to see, is first a good follower: he knows when it is his turn and, the rarer gift, when it is not. Star Channel was the HBO of Japan in the early 2000s, and it was a floundering joint venture when I arrived. I was expected to lead, but I had an operating role not a director role – and the top made the real decisions. My opinions sometimes differed from theirs, and perhaps I was often right – but nothing ever sits in isolation; it is always connected, often in ways you cannot see from where you sit. To lead was to first analyze and suggest, to build the idea one to one with the partner’s people, wait for the synthesis, then to implement. To overstep was not boldness. It was simply bad manners, and it carried with it the possibility of risk, which to my Japanese colleagues was poison. And it was remembered.
Risk deserves a word of its own, because the foreigner carries more of it than he knows. In Japan, success is the group’s success. Failure is another matter. When something went wrong in a company, I learned, blame and risk would come to sit on the foreigner, without question and whatever the level he sat at. He would own the failure out of all proportion to his part in it. The truth was secondary to the lack of ripples on the surface. So I learned to be careful, and to know, before I put my name to anything, who would own it if it sank.
The real and deep cross-cultural challenges are never visible on the happy path, when things go well. Some ways of doing things are better than others even then, to be sure, but tolerance is easy on the happy path when the business is making money and revenue is not an issue. The test of grit, and of fitting in, comes with conflict, because it is in conflict that a culture shows its grain.
The first rule of the good guest is to stay out of the politics. Do not jump in; you have no dog in the fight. The trouble is that jumping in is instinct, especially for a titled leader, and at home the instinct goes unexamined. Politics ran around me all the time in my own culture, mostly unobtrusively; I knew it by smell, knew how to address it, and knew when to turn it to my advantage, without ever thinking about any of it. I moved through it the way a fish moves through water. In Asia the water was different, and the radar had to be switched on and kept on. Every company I joined had a history that predated my arrival: old rivalries between departments, two senior men who had not agreed in a decade, a falling-out between partners that began long before my deal did. I would miss the subtleties on which those quarrels turned, and there was no outcome in which I won: whichever side I took, the other would remember it long after I had forgotten what the fight was about.
But avoidance only goes so far, because in business one inevitably gets drawn in. A decision lands on the table that the two camps are fighting over, and the foreigner in the room, whose very foreignness lends an air of neutral judgment, is asked what he thinks. How an executive handles that moment is, in my experience, what separates the wheat from the chaff in Asia. What I learned to do, and what the good guest must do, was this. Dodge the politics artfully, and frame everything, all of it, in objective terms: what is good for the business, and why. Represent the position of each competing side as sane and rational, more generously than its own partisans would, even when it is neither. Then give your own point of view, which is only ever the economic one, and the reasons for it. In practice this is very hard. It is also very necessary.
Singtel is the example. Senior executives from the group were routinely put over businesses they had never been in before. In a partnership, the question that matters is why the counterparty would believe in the deal, or want it at all, and that is a hard question to answer from a business you have never run. My job, I came to learn, was not to make the decision or arbitrate a point. It was to help prevent a bad one from being made by those who held the power to make it. That is often how you earn your stripes in Asia as a foreigner.
None of the soft rules of being a good guest is complicated. What is difficult is remembering that they are perpetually needed: the assumptions I carried, and the automatic responses I had never once had to examine at home, had to be checked at the door like a coat, and the room navigated consciously, without home-field advantage. In thirty years I have not seen talent carry anyone as far as humility and an honest respect for other ways of doing things.
So, in short. Do not leer; nothing ends a foreigner faster. Bring the expertise you were hired for, and ask how it should be served. Give up the presumption that your way is the way, daily and in small things. Know whose turn it is, and that a good leader is first a good follower. Know, before you sign, who owns the failure. Stay out of the quarrel, and when you are pulled in, speak only for the business and give each side more credit than it gives itself. These are the general rules of being a good guest anywhere. In Asia they are the table stakes for doing business at all.
The suitors of Ithaca ended badly. The good guest has a better fate, and it is the only one worth wanting: he is asked back.
I have been asked back for thirty years.
© Randy McGraw. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or used in any form without the written permission of the author.
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