The Latin verb aperire, meaning “to open, to provide access to,” holds special meaning for cross-cultural learning company Aperian. In fact, the company’s name is derived from the word.
“We see ourselves as opening up the world to collaboration, to trust, to communication,” says Mike Greto, Aperian’s president.
These elements are key in bridging boundaries across global teams and organizations, Aperian’s ultimate goal, which it drives toward by providing learning that creates awareness, inspires change and transforms the way teams work together. It does so through a combination of self-assessment, foundational self-paced learning, workshops and community learning, all made accessible through Aperian’s digital platform.
Founded in 1990, Aperian has navigated a great deal of change over the past 35 years alongside an evolving global economy and market. And it’s positioned to continue bridging boundaries across culturally diverse global teams today and into the future, meeting a need that persists perhaps more than ever before.
“We’re proud that we’ve been able to grow and evolve, and any time there is a moment where there’s fear, there’s doubt, there’s concern about how we as different people around the world are going to be able to work together, we feel well-positioned to help,” says Chief People Officer Addie Johnsen. “That was a driving force from day one, and it’s still here — it’s built into our mission and what we do. How do we help different people work more effectively together? It’s a skill we needed then, and we still need it now. That need is not going anywhere.”
From then to now
The cross-cultural and intercultural management industry is fairly niche, and Aperian’s co-founders, Ted Dale and Dr. Ernest (Ernie) Gundling, were instrumental players in its creation.
“This space is very familial,” Greto says. “That in part has to do with our two founders, who have helped create this industry. They’re seen as some of the giants in this space. And what brought them together in 1990 was really a shared love of Japan.”
Ted was born in Kyoto as the son of missionary parents and experienced life in Japan as a foreigner until he left for college in the U.S. Ernie went to Japan as a Buddhist monk, a student of the Japanese language, and later to conduct field research through a fellowship.
As Ted began giving seminars on “How to work with the Japanese” in Silicon Valley through his first business, Intercultural Training Resources Inc., in 1990, he was asked by some of his early tech clients to create video training tools with a similar focus. During this time, he was introduced to Ernie, who was working for a consulting company focused on U.S.-Japan business relations. Japan’s economy was booming, but this was coupled with a lack of knowledge about Japanese culture in the U.S. — and Ted and Ernie saw a need.
“There’s a joke here [at Aperian] … they took a long walk on a beach and decided to start a business that helped companies interact more effectively, with Japan in this particular case,” Greto says. The two drew up business plans “in the sand” for a business that would focus on helping people understand and interact more effectively with those from different cultural backgrounds.
Following their first collaboration in 1991 on a video training series focused on Japanese culture, followed by video series on “Working With China” and “Working Globally,” and once the internet became mainstream, they were approached to create an online tool that could promote their message and help organizations navigate successfully in various cultural contexts. This platform, originally called GlobeSmart, featured information on 10 countries and was the genesis of the Aperian learning platform.
The company eventually merged with Eaton Consulting Group in 2005 to create a global business platform with representatives around the globe. The name was changed to Aperian Global and then, years later, shortened to Aperian.
Today, Aperian is based out of Raleigh, N.C., with offices in Europe and Asia, and has a team of about 60 employees and 120 consultants worldwide. Many of Aperian’s team members, including Greto and Johnsen, were drawn to the company because its mission aligned closely with their own personal experiences and passions.
“One of my first jobs after college was working at the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican in Rome. I wanted to be an ambassador,” Greto says. “I got addicted to this idea of helping create what I call ‘citizen diplomats’ or ‘everyday ambassadors’ through global exchange.” Greto subsequently worked at a global education startup helping students secure internships abroad.
“When I found out about Aperian, I did not know this company nor this industry even existed,” says Greto, who began as a Global Account Manager. “I thought people just learned through the ‘school of hard knocks’ on how to go global, but turns out, no, there is such a company, and it really mapped to a lot of the things I’ve been passionate about. Whereas I helped students in my previous role after the embassy work, now we’re helping executives and teams be more effective globally and better everyday ambassadors.”
Johnsen’s introduction to Aperian also stemmed from a passion for navigating cultural differences.
“I joined Aperian as an intern when I was studying international relations at Boston University, and I had just come back from a study abroad program in Germany,” she says. “I was taking an international business class that covered a few case studies on businesses that failed globally because they were not able to adapt to local culture, and that is where I first learned about Aperian. It blew my mind that there was a company that could not only help people live and work in another culture, but also help businesses be successful in navigating different cultures. I was hooked from the start.”
Johnsen’s role shifted over time from intern to recruiting subject matter experts to growing and supporting Aperian’s internal team and building a more inclusive workplace, which are all big areas of focus in her current role as chief people officer.
“Our mission is to bridge boundaries through deeper understanding of ourselves and others, and we’re very much a mission-driven organization,” Johnsen says. “We tend to attract folks who have spent time living outside of their home culture. They’ve worked across different cultures or might be multicultural themselves, and they have this innate curiosity and desire to understand themselves better, to increase their self-awareness. When something’s done in a different way, they’re curious about why and what we can do to bridge those differences. So, that really supports our mission. That’s what we do for our clients, but it’s also how we approach the way we work with each other.”
Navigating cultural complexity
When Aperian was founded, it launched a technology to supplement and complement cross-cultural training for organizations. And today, Greto says, the “DNA” of Aperian remains largely the same: helping organizations with cross-cultural challenges.
Central to everything Aperian offers is its expansive, modular digital platform. Organizations can choose the pace and focus that meets their current needs, and Aperian works with each client to build a learning journey that works for their leaders, managers and individual contributors.
That journey always begins with Aperian’s GlobeSmart® Profile, its primary self-assessment tool that helps learners discover their work-style preferences and how they relate to other colleagues and cultures. The “heart” of the overall platform, the GlobeSmart Profile is designed to create self-awareness as a foundation for each individual learner. The Profile is supplemented by Aperian’s GlobeSmart Guides, which include extensive information on working with over 100 cultures on topics such as building relationships, giving feedback, motivating employees, establishing trust and more.
The Profile and Guides go hand-in-hand along with AI-powered advice, and an organization’s journey at Aperian can also include self-paced courses, other assessments and live workshops. Depending on a client’s training need, that journey also might incorporate the Inclusive Behaviors Inventory, which addresses personal and organizational inclusion gaps.
Additionally, Aperian offers programming uniquely designed to help relocating employees thrive while on international assignment.
“In a nutshell, that’s what we do: the platform plus the training, and a lot of self-guided content along the way,” Greto says. “We also do a lot of nudging of our learners so that after they go through one of our experiences, we’re not gone. We like to say that we ‘meet learners where they are, but don’t leave them there.’ They’re getting periodic nudges, and they’re getting encouraged to come back to the platform and sustain their learning.”
In 2025, Aperian hit several milestones, including 2 million people who have created their GlobeSmart Profile and 3 million who have gone through at least one of the company’s solutions. The organization has also supported more than 20,000 international expatriates.
Additionally, more than 50 percent of the Fortune 100 currently leverage Aperian’s solutions.
“That tends to be where we gravitate, but we also work with midsized organizations,” Greto says. “Everyone’s global now, so it’s not like there’s a monopoly on cultural training for large corporations only. If you have a website, you’re a global company.”
Johnsen adds: “It’s also working with folks who are global in mindset. Even a team that’s co-located and mostly homogeneous, they still have work style differences and preferences. It can be helpful as a tool for a team leader who doesn’t necessarily have a lot of budget or isn’t going to go through their L&D department at the global scale — they still need something that’s going to help their team leverage those different styles.”
Additionally, 30 percent of Aperian’s clients today have been working with Aperian for 10-plus years, a strong indicator of the organization’s lasting impact, Greto notes.
“By virtue of the fact that clients keep coming back to us — some for 30 years — and they often bring us along with them as they move organizations, I feel like we’ve done a good job building valid, statistically reliable content, in addition to trusting relationships,” he says. “That’s a big differentiator for us; we’ve been doing the work for 35 years, and so we’re a known entity. There are a lot of startups promising collaboration tools, but if you don’t go below the surface of what’s driving collaboration and, in our case, the cultural component, it can be kind of hollow.”
More than lip service
The loyalty Aperian experiences doesn’t end with its clients. It permeates the organization, from employees to company leadership, and has even earned the organization recognition, including a coveted spot on Newsweek’s Global Most Loved Workplaces 2024 annual ranking. Aperian placed No. 11 on the 100-company list.
“We’re proud of this award from Newsweek,” Johnsen says. “We’ve talked a lot about our mission and values being such a core reason people love to work at Aperian. We have long-tenure clients, but we also have long-tenure employees. Almost half our staff have been here for more than 10 years.”
According to Johnsen, Aperian’s values go beyond “looking nice on our corporate page and during onboarding, to something that is embedded into our interactions, into our teams.” To keep these values aligned with the spirit of the company, a couple of years ago Aperian conducted a values refresh, along with a larger rebrand initiative.
“We really wanted to think about: What are some of the hidden or implicit rules or expectations we have for folks, and what can we do to make them more explicit?” Johnsen says. “What is it that makes Aperian a special place to be and our people here so special? And also, who do we want to be? What do we want to strive for? What do we want to improve?”
What emerged from this project was that Aperian’s core set of values — embrace our differences; stay curious and keep learning; trust each other; diverge, converge and commit; take ownership; and inspire change — are also personally held values among the Aperian team.
“We asked employees what they’ve learned from work that’s been valuable to them, and what came back unanimously was: The skills we’re learning in working with folks in different cultures, working with our product teams in different regions … those skills apply to our personal lives, they apply to our spouses and how we interact as a family,” Johnsen says. “A lot of folks come in already with these as part of their personal values, and then we get to do that as work, and get to work with clients that are also passionate about bridging boundaries. It’s a beautiful way to have something that we do as a job really improve our lives and our ability to connect with others outside of work.”
Aperian strives to live these values day to day. They’re part of regular performance assessments, for example — employees are asked what value they feel they have exhibited exceptionally well in the past few months and what they want to work on in the upcoming months.
The values are also helpful in setting the framework for difficult conversations.
“If we’re going into a meeting where we know we’re going to have disagreements and hear different perspectives, [we might] choose a value we really want to exhibit and lean into — ‘I want to be extra curious in today’s conversation and really listen to you,’ for example,” Johnsen says.
In addition to being true to its values, Aperian ensures it is using and embedding its own products, tools and methodologies internally.
“We are, again, a global, diverse company. So if things are working well for us, those can be useful cases for our clients, too,” Johnsen says. “It’s about making sure that it’s not just lip service. It is something we’re living by.”
“It’s a very authentic culture because we’ve all experienced living, working and being challenged abroad,” Greto adds. “There’s a lot of grace and empathy, and we bring those authentic traits to working with clients. I think that drives people here, too — to be able to help our clients grow because we’ve been there ourselves.”
Staying true
As Aperian moves forward in 2025 and beyond, the company is placing emphasis on meeting learners where they are, especially as AI ramps up and the world of work is changing so rapidly.
“With tech, we try to be nimble with how we develop our solutions,” Greto says. “We’ve built our own AI capabilities so we can meet learners where they are, just in time. And we’re really leaning into making global teams work — trying to build out more resources for teams and team leaders, to be able to leverage what we have more efficiently. It’s about scaling up.”
Greto also stresses the importance of continuing to build emotional intelligence in a world that’s becoming more AI-driven and murkier with regard to diversity, equity and inclusion practices, particularly in the U.S.
“Right now is an interesting time with the dismantling of DEI in the U.S,” he says. “In the last number of years, the cross-cultural field has kind of fallen under the DEI umbrella, but we’ve been doing cross-cultural inclusion work since day one. So, we’re just helping our clients and everyone understand that while the words may change, the work we do is never going to change, and we’re going to stick by it, come what may, and help create a better place for you to work and a better team for you to work in. We’re clear on our mission and values, irrespective of what’s happening in the market, politically or otherwise.”
Johnsen agrees.
“We stay true to who we are and our mission. And yes, the words have changed, the marketing might have changed, but the work itself is constant. Our clients and customers are in different places, and their challenges evolve, and we’re there to help them. So, we strive to be true to who we are while meeting customers where they are and find the marriage of those two.”
Ensuring that Aperian’s internal team leaders and people managers have the tools they need and that they are experimenting with actions and structures to keep morale, productivity and engagement high continue to be priorities for Johnsen, or what she calls “having our insides match our outsides” … following best practices internally that Aperian recommends to its clients.
“The world’s changing quickly, and we’re convinced that what we have to offer is more important now than even five years ago,” Greto says. “It sounds lofty and cliché, but honestly, one teammate at a time, one expatriate who we train at a time — you’re chipping away at creating a better world. And that’s what all of us come in every day trying to do.”
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Interested in learning more about Aperian? Listen to a recent podcast by our sister publication, Chief Learning Officer’s Voices of CLO podcast, featuring Joyce Lee, Aperian’s director of client success, and Emma Howard, group head of talent and development at LGC, a global life sciences organization.
Aperian is a corporate member of BetterWork Media Group, the parent company of Chief Talent Officer. Learn more about Aperian by accessing BetterWork Media Group’s Corporate Member Directory.
