I’ve been creating cultural persona maps based on Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map.”

As a Russian who moved to Berlin and spent the last six years working in tech, I’ve been watching which cultural archetypes get considered “leadership material” – who gets promoted and who gets benched, independently of hard skills.

And the archetype to be considered the “perfect” founder and a perfect leader is… calibrated for Silicon Valley.

So here it is – the US cultural archetype is attached.

I’m posting these on LinkedIn, and Erin Benson from the US pointed out that this archetype generalises to US business culture as a whole. Those who embody these traits are considered leadership material. Those who don’t fall to the bottom of the stack rank.

Another layer Erin highlighted is deeply ingrained American Exceptionalism – the belief that the way we do things is the best way, in business and beyond. She described it well: “The invisible glasses of American Exceptionalism trick us into viewing our specific cultural habits as universal truths, leading us to subconsciously treat other perspectives as deviations to be tolerated, puzzles to be translated into our own logic, or exotic curiosities to be observed – all while remaining blind to the fact that our ‘standard’ is just one of many cultural choices.”

I absolutely love this level of self-reflection.

I’ll keep working on this series – because the more aware we are, the more we can meet in the middle. Immigrants who move to the West don’t need to fully assimilate, and neither does the West. The more we understand about each other’s cultural operating systems, the higher our chances of working together effectively.