Culturally intelligent leaders will not assume they know what will build trust with clients or staff. Instead, they'll discover what's most important for communicating and building trust.

Smaller companies are often more homogenous. Don't simply increase your diversity because of the social pressure to do so. Instead, realize that hiring a more diverse team will give you a whole new repertoires of innovative ideas. And then develop a strategy for effectively using the diversity of your team.

Culturally intelligent innovation begins with changing our impulse from Why can't you see it like I do? to Help me see what I might be missing!

When you start paying attention to diversity, you notice it (and notice its absence!). And based on the culture of your upbringing and the culture of your organization, you may or may not be primed to think consciously about innovation.

The most important part of aligning various expectations is to clearly describe the problem you are trying to solve and identify at least three different ways diverse users experience this problem. The more diverse your team, the better you'll be at doing this.

The very ability to empathize with a user requires that I have an understanding of that user's value and needs. This is what leads to many product fails. The individuals developing the innovation don't actually use it.

Given the increasing diversity among customers and employees, organizations that attend to cultural intelligence are more successful.