The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be under

The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be understood. All English speakers are familiar with the Western US accent and British RP. But faced with an accent they haven't heard before, they miss nuances. By 'nuances', I'm not talking about literary subtleties. For instance, when you ask if someone can do something and they say "Okaaaaaay...", there's a lot of content in the inflection of the aaaaaay that tells you how likely it is to happen. That content is different for different accents. Since it's a hopeless cause that everyone will learn to speak with the same accent, people working in global businesses should learn to understand the major world accents. It seems like an order of magnitude less work to understand an accent than to speak it. In the tech world, it's pretty useful to be able to understand Hindi, Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Singapore, Israeli, and Filipino accents.