Does the success of corporate America derive from the “frontier spirit” of the country’s earliest settlers? Do the roots of British industry’s collapse lie in a sense of lingering national complacency? These are assertions made by Kai Hammerich, a Danish headhunter, and Richard Lewis, a British linguist, in their new book Fish Can’t See Water.

The title is an allusion to the cultural blindness of executives who, the authors argue, are often unable to see the impact of national cultures on businesses. Indeed, they claim that culture has been neglected in studies of corporate strategy precisely for cultural reasons: management writing has been US-dominated, with US-centric case studies.

Central to their thesis is a rejection of Thomas Friedman’s notion of a “flat” world, and the idea that companies can have a truly “global” culture. “Virtually all global companies have a single national culture at heart,” write Hammerich and Lewis.