Most global businesses enter Asia with a playbook built elsewhere. The pricing models, growth assumptions, labour structures, and definitions of value that worked in North America or Europe get applied to markets that operate by fundamentally different rules. The result, as Eric Stryson has observed across nearly two decades of on-the-ground leadership work in Asia, is failure – not dramatic failure, but the slow erosion of credibility that comes from never truly understanding where you are.

Eric Stryson is Managing Director at The Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent pan-Asian think tank with offices in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. He has designed and facilitated more than 60 experiential leadership programmes across fifteen countries in Asia and the Middle East, working with over 3,000 executives from organisations including HSBC, Petronas, Marriott, MasterCard, and Standard Chartered. His public sector clients include the Hong Kong SAR Government, the Dubai Government, and the Central Bank of Malaysia.

In this episode, Eric argues that much of what organisations believe they know about Asia is filtered through AI systems, research, and analysis shaped by Western institutions and historical precedents. Even conventional online research surfaces insights produced predominantly by incumbent Western policy and academic bodies, reinforcing a narrow and often distorted lens. Challenging these assumptions, he contends, requires moving beyond second-hand analysis and grounding decision-making in on-the-ground observation and lived experience.

From renegotiating what ‘value’ means to understanding why Western growth models break down in Asia’s diverse political and social contexts, Eric offers a rare perspective on what it actually takes to operate credibly in a post-Western, Asia-led growth environment.