Florence Kintzel

You built a career that made sense in your world. Then you moved. Perhaps you arrived with a clear mandate and a team waiting for you. Perhaps you landed without a defined role. Either way, the achievements that once spoke for you now need translation. A title that opened doors at home may not mean the same thing here. Your reputation did not cross the border. Your network is now a continent away. Your skills remain. What has changed is the system around you. In these moments, an...

In July 2025, after twenty-four years in Japan, I closed a company, said goodbye to a team of Japanese colleagues, and came back to France. The logistics took months. The professional transition, deciding who I would be on the other side, took far longer, and nobody had planned for it. A few weeks after the company closed, the team invited me to lunch. After fourteen years of working side by side, we sat as former colleagues, ordering as we always had and talking about everything except the...

Most first-90-days plans share one quiet assumption: that trust can be built on a quarterly schedule. The idea was popularised by Michael Watkins’ The First 90 Days (2003), and it serves leaders well in New York, Toronto and, increasingly, Paris. In Japan, it runs on the wrong clock. I learned this in my own first months leading our team in Yokohama. At an early staff meeting, I presented a new way of handling our autumn orders, the busiest season of the wine year. The plan was clear, the...