What's in a Name
The Story Behind Cultural Savvy
By Joyce Millet, Founder & President
It started in a college classroom
My curiosity about the world started early, but it took shape in a college classroom.
I was a political science major who wandered into Asian history courses taught by former diplomats and educators from China, Japan, and India. They didn’t teach history as timelines or memorized facts. They taught it through lived experience — and that’s what made it real to me.
Those courses — and the relationships I built with those professors — pulled me in a new direction.
From classroom to immersion
A year later, I joined a study‑abroad program led by the professor who had first opened my eyes — the Japan specialist. She took a small group of us through Asia, introducing us to the people who lived the histories we had studied: local business leaders, community members, and practitioners who understood their cultures from the inside out.
It wasn’t tourism. It was immersion. Each place, each conversation, each moment revealed something new about how culture shapes how people work, communicate, and make decisions.
Those months made everything I’d learned in the classroom real — and they made me realize I wanted a career that would take me back to Asia and deeper into this world. That decision set the course for the next decade of my life.
From experience to identity
After graduate school, I moved back to Asia and spent ten years working inside local companies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. That’s where I learned how business really worked on the ground — how decisions were made, how trust was built, how teams communicated, and how culture shaped leadership.
I also learned something else: no one had prepared me for any of it.
I had to figure it out by listening, observing, getting it wrong, and being guided as I learned. And over time, I saw many other leaders facing the same challenge — talented, experienced people suddenly working across cultures with almost no preparation, in environments where the stakes were high and missteps were costly.
When I eventually moved to San Francisco, I knew I wanted to build something I never had: a practice that would give leaders real preparation for working across cultures.
But first, I needed a name.
I kept coming back to the same question: What do people actually need to succeed across cultures?
Not just awareness. Not just information. They need to be culturally savvy — able to navigate, adapt, and use culture strategically.
That’s when the name — and the purpose — became clear.
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