Christian Havrehed

Why organisations work with Christian Havrehed

• He has operated inside the Sino-Western seam at every level: management consulting at L.E.K., MD roles in Hong Kong and Shanghai with KPMG, Allianz and VIKING, and a two-person expedition partnership that lasted 70 days at sea.
• Mandarin fluency lets him work directly with Chinese stakeholders in the room, not through a translator, which materially changes the quality of preparation and post-meeting reading.
• The Atlantic row with Sun Haibin is a documented case study in trust-building under pressure, published in three languages and over 20,000 copies, that he uses to make cross-cultural failure modes concrete.
• He is qualified to challenge the comforting Western assumption that cultural difference can be managed with a framework imported from headquarters.
• For boards weighing China exposure, he brings a credible inside-and-outside view that few Western speakers can match without a state affiliation that constrains them.

Biography highlights

• 20 years working in China, including managing director roles with KPMG, Allianz, and VIKING Life-Saving Equipment in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
• Former consultant at L.E.K. Consulting, London.
• BA Joint Hons. in Chinese Language and Western Management Studies, Durham University, with study at Renmin University, Beijing.
• Author of “Beijing to Barbados in a Rowboat”, published in English, Chinese, and Danish; over 20,000 copies sold.
• First Dane to row an ocean: 3,000-mile Atlantic crossing in 2001 with Chinese ex-soldier Sun Haibin.
• Founder of the Yantu Project; Adventure Ambassador for Engage with China and Eyesea; member of The Explorers Club.

Biography

China is no longer a question of market entry. It is a question of whether senior teams can lead partnerships, joint ventures, and supply relationships where the other side does not share their assumptions about risk, hierarchy, or time. That is the ground Christian Havrehed has worked for two decades.

After reading Chinese at Durham University and studying at Renmin University in Beijing, he moved into management consulting at L.E.K. in London, then ran businesses inside China and Hong Kong as managing director with KPMG, Allianz, and VIKING Life-Saving Equipment. He speaks Mandarin in commercial settings, which changes the texture of every conversation he is part of.

In 2001 he rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic with Sun Haibin, a former Chinese PLA soldier and Communist Party member, becoming the first Dane and the first Chinese citizen respectively to row an ocean. The story, told in “Beijing to Barbados in a Rowboat”, is published in three languages and used by Havrehed as a working case study in what trust actually requires when the contract runs out and the weather turns.

For senior leaders, the value is practical. He challenges the soft-skills framing of cross-cultural work and treats it as a leadership problem with real commercial consequences: deal terms misread, partners disengaged, talent lost. His Yantu Project, founded in 2000, has been the spine of this work since long before China became a board-level agenda item in the West.

Key speaking topics

• Sino-Western leadership and partnership
• Cross-cultural collaboration in joint ventures
• Trust-building under operational pressure
• China market strategy and stakeholder engagement
• Risk-taking and decision-making in unfamiliar conditions
• Sustainability and citizen science through expedition

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees with material China exposure
• Country leaders, regional MDs, and joint-venture sponsors operating in or with Greater China
• Heads of strategy, M&A, and partnerships evaluating Asia-Pacific deals
• Senior teams running multinational cross-border programmes where cultural fluency is operationally load-bearing

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of where Sino-Western partnerships actually fail, drawn from inside both sides of the seam.
• Specific, named examples of trust-building behaviours that hold up when conditions deteriorate.
• A direct challenge to standard cultural-intelligence frameworks imported from Western HQ.
• Practical reframing of risk-taking as an organisational capability, not a personality trait.
• A more grounded basis for boardroom conversations about China exposure, partnership terms, and joint-venture governance.