The business ecosystem around WordPress is multicultural and distributed. The strive for diversity, autonomy, and location independence that governs the open source world is what businesses have been successfully adopting so they can win clients all over the world and hire amazing talent. But why is it that even though global business speaks English, we’re so often struggling to understand what the other is trying to communicate? Remote companies operating in different regions, like the one I work for, often fall short when it comes to effectively implementing practices that seem to work equally well in the West and in the East. What drives success in the US and Canada seems likely not to deliver the same results in Central or South East Asia, or not even Europe. How do you navigate the minefield of culture-based misunderstanding?
In this talk, we’ll dig into some of the big invisible boundaries of global business and look at ways to help bridge them based on the experience of a former rookie who joined the Polyglots WordPress team consisting of 20 000 contributors speaking 200 languages on a whim, and at the same time found herself resource managing a team of 50 engineers and project managers across APAC, Americas, and EMEA.