Brendan Thomas Quinn

Brendan Thomas Quinn, a cross-cultural communication consultant who has led organisations and international teams across Europe and West Africa, takes students into the situations where communication actually breaks — the negotiation that stalls for reasons nobody names, the feedback that lands as an insult in one country and a courtesy in another, the distributed team where silence means agreement to half the room and disagreement to the other half.

Brendan has worked as a project manager in the UK, as Director of Operations in Ghana, and as CEO of two organisations in Ghana and the UK, with a career spanning the UK, Spain, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Togo. He now works with co-located and dispersed teams to help them work effectively, reduce friction and increase productivity — advising and training international organisations on communicating across cultures, languages and time zones, built from practical workplace experience and supported by current research.

Brendan is host of Cultural Friction, a podcast for managers and executives leading international teams, and writes a weekly newsletter of the same name. He speaks regularly on cross-cultural communication, intrinsic bias and cultural intelligence. He is based in Barcelona and works worldwide.