we even had trouble with the word ‘services’ in the transition to the global business services model. This service mindset was still associated with low-level outsourcing work, so we needed to hear how it was going to be positioned differently at GBS than with an outsourcing model. People felt these words were demeaning and associated with low-end, disjointed processes and tasks. The company actually had to invest a lot of time in communicating that this was a significant change – that we would be doing the same GBS work as a colleague in Europe or the United States. We needed to see how our work fit into the bigger context of the organization. They told us we would now be driving the process, taking on leadership roles to drive excellence across the global organization.”
From the pharmaceutical industry to the software, finance, and manufacturing sectors, strikingly similar transitions are described. An executive at a major management consultancy comments,
We are in the process of moving the global end-to-end solutions architect team to India. It will eventually be entirely driven by our team here. Currently, our European solutions architects handle the client interface and solution development, and then hand over instructions for the India team to implement the designed solution. But this will all change within the next 18 months. The team in Bangalore has been responding to requests from Europe, but now they will need to lead projects themselves.
In many places in India, “outsourcing” and “BPO” are becoming terms used with ridicule and disdain. Infosys, once the shining beacon of India's globalization, has become the brunt of sarcastic slurs in the Indian papers: “Why is Murthy [former Infosys CEO] talking about Infosys and global leadership excellence in the same breath? It's just a BPO.”
In Mumbai, some bankers have a visceral response to the suggestion that their work is “back end.” An outspoken Mumbaikar (resident of Mumbai) quickly corrects the mistake: “Actually, you misunderstand our organizational structure. The term you use does not relate to our situation since we are not a BPO.”
India is in the middle of an identity shift, and the original stepping stone into the world of multinational corporations is now passé – even despised. India's growth has bred an elite generation of globally savvy bright-young-things with little tolerance for any whiff of second-class corporate citizenship as well as a reticence to identify with humble BPO beginnings.
For captive BPOs, the talent is actually integrated into the organization but retains a type of second-class citizenship, completing partial tasks in a process, often without full ownership, connections, relationships, or context. Captive BPO employees, however, are exposed to the organization's values, its talent expectations and opportunities. These often hit a nerve with intelligent, ambitious BPO workers who are trying to square the organizational rhetoric with the reality. The demand for development and full engagement from talent in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere either leads to change or disengagement.
The Business Case for a New Global Talent Model
The smartest organizations understand that the key to this globalization game is talent: having the right kind of people in the right place at the right time to realize their growth goals. The right place is where the growth is happening now – and the right time is yesterday.
For many organizations, talent is the rate-limit on global growth, and the biggest challenge they face in moving toward a successful global model. Global leadership capacity, in particular, is the key binding constraint. In a recent survey, executives reported that “just 2 percent of their top 200 employees were located in Asian emerging markets that would, in the years ahead, account for more than one-third of total sales.”13 More broadly, CEOs in Western multinational corporations (MNCs) identify the ability to hire, develop, and retain talent in fast-growth markets as the main competitive differentiation in today's market.14 Companies that get their global talent strategy right will set the course of their organization toward success and avoid becoming corporate dinosaurs.
More than any other factor, global talent has become the definitive gauge by which companies are measured and a key indicator of whether they will succeed or fail in the global market. Thirty percent of U.S. companies admitted in a survey that they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities “because of insufficient internationally competent personnel.”15 In another study, one in four global CEOs reported that they were “unable to pursue a market opportunity or have had to cancel or delay a strategic initiative because of talent constraints.”16
Most business leaders recognize how critical it is to have a good global talent strategy. But many, if not most, are struggling to both define what a good global talent strategy looks like and how to implement it. In an executive survey, “76 percent believe their organizations need to develop global leadership capabilities, but only 7 percent think they are currently doing so very effectively.”17 The challenges in attracting, developing, and retaining global leadership talent are myriad and include inexperienced local talent in key growth markets, radical variance in leadership models across key locations (some models are difficult to transition to global roles), scarcity of globally experienced and locally savvy leadership talent, poaching, job-hopping, and increased competition from local companies in the war for talent.
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