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.

Even an organization that doesn't do much work internationally will benefit from a culturally intelligent strategy to innovation. Working across different generations, business units, regions, and functions are all factors that can also influence the innovation process.

When you jump on a city bus or roam the streets off the major thoroughfares you'll quickly learn that we have as many differences as similarities. And therein lie the greatest opportunities for innovation - our different ways of viewing the world and coming up with solutions!

I never expected my graduate degrees to give me all the practical how-to's that can perhaps only be learned through the school of hard knocks.

The more diverse your team, the better you'll be at identifying what a diversity of users perceive as problems.

The distraction, particularly of technology, impedes the innovative process. And when you add to that the distraction of working with colleagues who are in different time zones and/or who have a different approach to urgency and distraction, the potential for losing focus is abundant.

Many Westerners see follow-through and reliability as the most critical factor in how they calculate the trustworthiness of another individual. In some other cultures, who you know and how you're related to other individuals is the most important variable. And for others, it may be as much about your reputation and what others have said about you.