I’ve recently returned to London following a fascinating 12 days or so meeting with clients, media, and colleagues in three of the six offices in Ketchum Greater China – Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Over the weekend between these meetings, I was fortunate enough – thanks to the excellent hosting of Nick Wheeler, our general manager in Beijing – to visit the Great Wall.

It is a truly breathtaking spectacle and, it struck me, an interesting symbol (clearly!) of China, its scale and that of its ambitions. The Wall itself was originally constructed in the third century BC, though the vast majority of today’s structure was built under the Ming Dynasty between the 14th and 16th centuries. In its entirety, it runs nearly 9,000km across the country – over 13,000 km if you include all of its branches.

The statistics for China itself are no less mind-boggling. With a population of over 1.3 billion and covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, it is the world’s second largest country by land area and also the second largest economy after the US with a nominal 2012 GDP of US$7.3 trillion and annualised growth still topping 7 per cent. Faced with these sorts of figures, it is natural for our industry to have its eyes fixed on the commercial opportunity there.

But every time I visit this fascinating country, it sets alarm bells ringing when it comes to the talk we sometimes hear of “breaking China”. The country in fact consists of 22 provinces (some with a population of over 100 million), five autonomous regions, four directly-controlled municipalities and two largely self-governing special administrative regions – with 56 officially recognised ethnic groups and seven languages. And this diversity is very much mirrored even within China in terms of our clients and colleagues.

Even for organisations like ours, with fully-fledged Ketchum logos across most of the globe, the world is simply not quite as flat as we might think – just as China is not truly a single market. And as we work with our colleagues around the world in serving international clients, this recent trip reminded me more than ever before that two behaviours absolutely have to come to the fore in working internationally: fearless listening and generous understanding. Behaviours that do not, necessarily, come all that naturally to many in business!

Because for any organisation, in PR or beyond, unless you realise that dots on a global map do not actually make you global and truly work hand-in-glove with colleagues locally, the commitment to thinking global and acting local runs the risk of looking a little partial. And this applies everywhere that you do business. Europe, the Middle East and Latin America are no more uniform regions than is East Asia or indeed, the US is truly a single country.

There is rarely a “European view”, a “Middle Eastern position”, a “Latin American-take” or “an American stance” on an issue. The point is this – wherever we live and work, there is a world out there of which we, candidly, know rather less than we might sometimes pretend.

For me personally, it was a timely reminder that no matter where we operate, one of the single most valuable things we can do is to realise what we don’t know, rather than focusing purely on what we do, truly to listen to and learn from our colleagues around the world, and to trust what we hear from them – even if it’s not what our initial prejudices and beliefs may find comfortable. As many of our mothers will have said to us as kids, “you have two ears and one mouth – use them!”. This is something I’ll be applying myself to anew and which, I like to think, Ketchum gets right far more often than it gets wrong. Anyone else been having similar thoughts?