When head office says you have gone native

The New York office was angry. I had been pushing back on a global initiative because I knew that approach would not work in APAC. The feedback from the executive meeting came back through someone who thought I should know. "Hakan has gone fully native."

So why had I been pushing? Because we knew this approach would not work the way our CEO expected it to in the region. We had a pricing model for a buying cycle that didn't exist, plus a playbook that was built for places where decisions happen in weeks, not months. I thought I had raised all of it the right way, using data, examples and client feedback. But the response was not to adjust the approach; instead it was to question whether I had lost perspective. That is what "gone native" often means. You have spent long enough in the market to understand how things actually work, and that understanding has become inconvenient for a plan that is meant to work everywhere.

To be fair, they were partly right. There have been times when I crossed the line from explaining to protecting, when I was so close to the market that I could not always tell the difference between defending the client's reality and defending my own position. That line is harder to see than most people think, and I did not always get it right.

But the bigger problem was not me. It was an organisation that had no way of differentiating between a regional leader who had lost objectivity and the only person on the call who was close enough to the clients and market. From London or New York, both look the same. Both push back. Both slow things down. Both get labelled.

Most regional leaders who have succeeded have heard some version of this. Gone native. Too close to the market. Lost the global view. The instinct when you hear it is to pull back, to soften your position, to stop being the difficult voice on the call. That is the wrong move, but so is repeating the same argument and expecting it to come across differently this time. If the message is not getting through, the insight is not the issue; how you are making the case is. The job is not to give up the argument. It is to make it understandable to people who are optimising for a different reality.

If you go quiet after being labelled, you fail the region. If you keep saying the same thing the same way, you fail the organisation. And eventually yourself.

If you have never been accused of going native, it is worth asking whether you are close enough to the clients, the market and the team to be useful.

First published on LinkedIn, 9 April 2026.