Leadership Caffeine: Six Low-Cost Ideas to Stimulate Global Awareness
I spend some a fair amount of my post 6:00 p.m. leading programs and classes on various management and leadership topics, including international business. I love the I-Biz classes in part, because for many participants, the classes are like opening the window shades to a big, fascinating, complex, sometimes frightening and always exciting global picture.
I continue my own I-Biz studies outside of the classroom as I pursue my avocation as a Management and Leadership Anthropologist. In this case, my focus is on understanding how well prepared firms and managers are to enter and compete successfully on a global stage. My quick-take: for a good number, it’s important to focus on the basics. (Translation: there’s a lot of learning required to reach a reasonable level of knowledge.)
While most of us have mastered the art and science of consuming products from around the globe, many firms and managers are well served to work on some fundamentals.
Is it Time for You to Cozy Up with Hofstede, the WTO and Your Elected Representatives?
Here’s a quick quiz (self-graded) for you to conduct a quick-check on your current global business knowledge.
- What determines the value of a currency? Why does one currency fluctuate in value versus another? What risks do we face from currency fluctuations? How do I protect myself from currency risks?
- What are the emerging Regional Trade Pacts and how might they impact your firm?
- What is the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and how might it impact the U.S.?
- What is the Doha Round (WTO), why is it important and why has it been underway for a decade
- In exploring new markets, how well do you understand key dimensions (versus your home market) of: short/long term orientation, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, aggression versus nurturing and group versus individual orientation? (these are Hofstede’s cultural dimensions).
- How might you apply your understanding of Hofstede’s dimensions in your target markets?
- How can a simple but thorough P.E.S.T.E.L analysis help you and your team members better understand your target market?
- What options do you have for going global and what are the pros and cons for each?
- What potential ethical dilemmas will we be exposed to as we seek to diversify our manufacturing around the globe?
- How do we choose the right partners?
As citizens:
- Why are protectionist policies potentially lethal to firms and industries in the long-term?
- How do my elected officials support/inhibit global trade expansion through their voting and sponsorship activities?
- Should the government invest in infant industries or support emerging strategic industries with subsidies or other protectionist policies?
- Why is the government pushing China to allow the Yuan to float freely and reduce in value versus the dollar?
If you can confidently answer the above questions, great! Please remember to share the knowledge and help educate those less globally proficient than you.
If you can use a refresher or some good foundational knowledge, consider the ideas below.
Six Low-Cost Ideas to Jump-Start Better Global Awareness on Your Team:
1. Read more! If you and your team members don’t have good insight into and a current view on the above topics, it’s time to hit the books…or the magazines…or the websites. It’s remarkable what even regular, casual reading of the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and the Economist (and others) can do to boost your understanding of current events and help you better understand the complexities, risks and opportunities in today’s emerging world.
2. Talk about what you are reading. Create a reading club on global issues and meet regularly to discuss interesting articles “In the News.” This promotes not only reading, but the exchange of information and ideas. Ensure a diversity of topics are covered, from current W.T.O. events to specific examples of companies expanding and succeeding or failing outside of the U.S.
3. Apply the tools and then analyze the outcomes. Pick a market that is of interest to your firm and conduct a P.E.S.T.E.L. (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal) analysis of the target country. After gathering and sharing insights on this country, focus on analyzing what the information means to your potential business endeavor.
4. Leverage in-house expertise. If your firm has some cultural diversity, invite individuals from various cultures to talk to groups about life, customs and business in their home countries.
5. Invite others to share. Engage knowledgeable guest speakers and other business professionals to share their own experiences in global business. Encourage the speakers to share more than stories of dramatic growth. You want to hear about missteps, and lessons-learned to help accelerate your own learning curve.
6. Explore government’s role in your industry. Explore, summarize and share information on the political issues underlying global trade with your firm’s offerings. Are there protectionist policies here or abroad that directly impact your class of products? How tuned in are your elected officials to your industry and what are they doing to help? Are their regional trade pacts that might impact your firm’s competitiveness?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As consumers, citizens and as business professionals, living in this modern world requires cultivating and maintaining an understanding of global business and cultural issues. What happens in Bangalore, Beijing , Rio, the Middle East or Zurich now impacts what happens here on Main Street.
As citizens, we have to elect officials with global vision. As business professionals, we have to understand both the risks and opportunities of this hyper-frenetic, interconnected and volatile environment. As managers and leaders in firms, we have to choose strategies, build relationships with global partners and accelerate our learning as a means to continue minimizing risk and seizing opportunities.
It’s truly a best of times/worst of times situation in the world economy. There are unparalleled new market opportunities and heretofore unimaginable sources of risk and competition. You need every edge you can get to succeed. Start with educating yourself and your team members on the rules and flow of this fast-changing game.
Growing Up Globally Aware in America-A Key to Your Children’s Future Success
Note from Art: I don’t often write about parenting, but it is most definitely leadership…and you/we are most definitely responsible for raising tomorrow’s leaders. It’s time we stepped up our game a bit on diversity and global education.
As if parenting isn’t challenging enough for most of us, there’s another task to add to a list that doesn’t seem to lack for things to do. This one may require foregoing a few soccer games, conducting some more of those “talks” and putting the effort forth to create new educational opportunities and family experiences
I’m talking about ensuring that our future generations of leaders grow up globally aware and highly familiar with the rich and complicated level of diversity, customs, practices and subtle and significant variations across cultures, countries and religions.
Six Reasons Why this is Really Important?
- The last time I looked, everything that we understood as children of the 70’s and as parents of the 90’s children has changed. Our context is steeped in the world of our parents and of our youth. Tomorrow on this pale blue dot called earth does not look like yesterday.
- The global economy is more interconnected and infinitely more complex to navigate and compete in than ever before.
- The stakes for jobs, careers and even the prosperity of countries and regions are now very, very real.
- The world of work involves collaborating and cooperating and building bridges with people across cultures, religions and geographies. You must be a boundary and culture spanner to survive and succeed.
- The people your children will be both collaborating with and competing against are well-steeped in languages, cultural issues and understanding and they are most definitely aware of the opportunities. They are also aware of the relative ignorance of their American counterparts on these issues.
- The world of work involves identifying and successfully competing in far away places that don’t look like Most Towns, U.S.A. This requires insight, knowledge, context and skills that our parents would not understand.
The Problem: We Don’t Think Globally
Most of us…and especially our children have no context for where things come from…how they got there and what the implications are for the entire value chain backwards from the retailers to somewhere in the world where the materials and labor came together. We buy and consume mindless and heedless of our connection to a complex global economic value chain and ecosystem.
My observation is that there is a naïve idealism born of parental sheltering in some of our youth that life unfolds easily and predictably. You go to school, a good job waits for you on the other end and you exceed the life achievements of your parents. For a reality check, see also the note that everything changed.
An initial instinct is to point at our education system and wonder what they can do to solve this issue. School is an important part of the opportunity to improve, but the primary responsibilities for adding a global dimension to our children’s life experiences is ours as parents. Easy words, I know.
Seven Ideas for Helping Improve Your Child’s Global and Cultural I.Q.
1. Make a conscious effort to teach your children about the broader world at an early age. This transcends looking at maps and involves actually spending time studying different cultures and creating related experiences including trips to libraries, restaurants, museums and different types of cultural events. And yes, this means you might be challenged to learn yourself. Remember, you just need to stay one lesson ahead of your child.
2. Teach your children about economics and politics and help them stay abreast of current global events. Discuss these at the dinner table.
3. Encourage reading activities or create reading lists that draw on global authors and sources. Your librarian will be happy to help you with this.
4. Increase the emphasis on learning foreign languages (plural) at a young age. Don’t wait for 7th grade Spanish. There are resources available on the web or via other service providers and tutors. Yeah, this takes money and time. So do soccer, hockey, football, dance, music lessons etc.
5. If your financial conditions allow, skip the third trip to Disney and go somewhere that requires travelling over an ocean. Spend time reading and preparing for the visit and try to build an itinerary that includes something other than the usual tourist stops.
6. Host an exchange student. Better yet, do this several times.
7. At the right age, encourage your children to become exchange students or to take advantage of study abroad programs.
The Bottom-Line for Now
It’s easy to get lost in this big country and in our daily family lives in our communities and lose track of the world around us. It’s more important than ever to create a broader global consciousness in the minds of our children or they are in for a rough wake-up call. The distance from soccer field in Sometown, U.S.A. to expectant job seeker and erstwhile professional is very short, and global preparation is now a prerequisite for survival and success.
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