artificial boundaries imposed by outdated mental models.
● Crossing unfamiliar boundaries. Many people will be asked to go to places they have never visited or perhaps never even heard about previously. Europeans can expect to do business in China, Chinese in India, Indians in Africa, and Africans in Europe. And beyond the usual capital locations, leaders may find themselves drawn to expanding second-tier cities such as Surabaya in Indonesia's province of East Java, Chongqing in southwestern China, or Belo Horizante in Minas Gerais, the Brazilian state north of São Paulo.
● Adapting to a globalized home. Once-familiar places are also changing rapidly. Urbanization, migration from abroad or within the same country, economic growth, and other forces are all altering what is “known” – whether that is in Los Angeles, London, Beijing, or Kolkata. Old physical boundaries that once provided clearer demarcations between different national cultures have grown more porous and flexible. Meanwhile, new kinds of borders – socioeconomic, religious, ethnic, linguistic – have arisen in places we thought we knew. As China's economy has grown and previous restrictions on individual movement have been relaxed, Tier 1 such as Beijing and Shanghai each have attracted millions of poor migrant workers from other parts of the country; these internal immigrants speak different dialects and have set up their own community networks for mutual support. Europe's Islamic population is already 6 percent and increasing quickly relative to other groups; there are 9 million immigrants or children of immigrants from Turkey alone. Demographers also predict that white citizens of the United States will no longer be the majority by 2050, while the country's Hispanic population will comprise almost 30 percent of the total.10
This massive flow of people across former boundaries within and between countries has numerous practical consequences. For example, immigration has markedly impacted the domestic health care industry in the United States, which some might think would be slow to transform:
■ Some 27 percent of U.S. physicians are foreign-born.
■ Up to 15 percent of U.S. nurses are foreign-born.
■ Between one-fifth and one-quarter of U.S. direct care workers (nursing aides and home health aides) are foreign-born.11
● Challenging mental models. Experienced leaders may still be relying on mental models that no longer reflect reality, and which create artificial boundaries among past, present, and future. If one's mental map of the world still highlighted the biggest cities of 100 years ago, it would be seriously flawed today. Countries and their markets change, which alters our map of the world's economy. For instance, Japan's star has fallen rapidly as its once-booming economy has stalled and other countries have grown. South Korea followed Japan's ascent, becoming one of the next wave of Asian tigers; however, the achievements of this relatively small country now seem to pale next to those of its Chinese neighbors. And while the Chinese economy is still growing at breakneck speed by current Western standards, it is starting to cool off as its population ages, with some industries experiencing more severe slowdowns or boom and bust cycles. Regional disparities in the level of development and economic growth between China's east coast and interior make the real picture quite complex.
We must also reexamine models for how to lead and to best cultivate new leaders as global markets shift. In addition to boundaries between or even within nations, there are new borders to be crossed at the edge of every outmoded concept, and these may be as important as lines on a map that are enforced with guard posts and customs officials. Global talent may object to outsourcing; global mindset means more than culture there are global teams that cannot be rescued by facilitation; there is more to diversity than race and gender acquisitions can fail in spite of proper diligence; successful innovations require more than great products; and global ethics means going beyond the immediate interests of shareholders to create a broader definition of integrity.
Global leaders need to approach familiar tasks in novel ways and lead across geographical, cultural, and mental borders. Current leadership development methods might not be adequate to address the fast-growth/slow-growth dichotomy or to meet the urgent need for a vastly larger talent pool of people who can take an agile approach to global business opportunities.
The Failed Assignment
Huang Shiguang leans back and takes a drag of his cigarette, shifting his gaze to look out through the sliding glass doors of the office building café. He uses this moment to gauge how he should respond to the question about his assignment to Germany, from which he has just returned. By all accounts, the assignment was not a success. His former boss and close ally, an American with over 20 years of experience in China, described in detail how painful it was. “They basically threw him into Germany in the midst of an integration process between two companies and he foundered. You need someone who is very aggressive, vocal, and strong in that environment. Huang is not afraid to say what he feels, but he's not German. So there he was in Germany trying to deal with a group of senior leaders who don't have any experience working internationally, and he really struggled to make the connections he needed to make. They just thought that he was this Chinese kid sent to Germany to get some training, and they ignored him.
“Some of the Germans told me that he couldn't be effective; that he is a finance guy who is good with data and numbers but, in this case, he needed to actually work with people. The German plant manager told me, ‘This guy needs to go out and push people and fight his way through. He didn't do that, so we couldn't respect him.’”
Huang leans forward finally and comments that he learned a lot. He says he learned how critical it is to understand how other countries work, and what is important to them. “I thought that I had a lot of global experience because I ran projects out of China and dealt with colleagues in Europe and the United States. But I didn't really know how other people think. You need to know that.” Huang's sentences get shorter and begin to seem disjointed as he goes on. He is unsure how much to divulge, wary of painting the situation with a negative brush. The years working for an American firm show up in his reticence to complain, his determination to show professionalism. But the experience in Germany clearly shook his confidence, and he has not yet found a way to articulate what went wrong.
Huang is relatively young, just entering his late 30s, and has grown up professionally in this American organization. The manufacturing firm was his first job out of university and he has stuck with it for 15 years, taking on challenges and developing quickly. This assignment to Germany was supposed to be a reward, a stretch role allowing him access into leadership at the organizational level, not just responsibility within China.
Huang leans forward, stubs out his cigarette and picks up his cappuccino, shifting his attention back to the conversation. “To be honest, my opportunities lie in China. There is a limit to how far I can go with this organization. At some point, I need to look at using my skills to build something here, maybe with a local company. This is where the opportunities are for people like me if we really want to lead. Or I could just stay with the company and run things out of China. I need to do what I am good at. I know China. I know how to do business here.”
Huang's knowledge of China is mission-critical to his current company. The organization has invested close to 1 billion U.S. dollars there and has promised shareholders to hit a growth trajectory almost entirely dependent on performance in China. To meet that business plan, the company needs at least a hundred local nationals at the director level (Huang is one level below and was a prime candidate for promotion before his assignment to Germany). They have nothing like these numbers, and the slots are currently filled almost exclusively by expatriates on two- to three-year rotations.
In many industries, the rate of growth in China is still so high that the volume of work outgrows the number of qualified people available to perform it. In three years, the company has gone from a 100-million-dollar business to a 1-billion-dollar
Jeffrey Passel and D'Vera Cohn, “U.S. Population Projections: 2005– 2050,” Pew Research Center, February 11, 2008, www.pewhispanic.org/2008/02/11/us-population-projections-2005-2050/.
Rand Corporation, “Foreign-Educated Health Workers Play Vital Role in the U.S. Health System,”
