Morning Advantage: How to Build Worldly Leaders
HBR.org 2012-07-04
As companies struggle to develop a new generation of internationally competent leaders, many are turning to localization instead. Hiring and grooming local talent in key markets makes plenty of sense, but as IESE Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat explains in McKinsey Quarterly, firms that rely so heavily on localization that they no longer groom expatriates are being shortsighted. "Giving up on expatriation implies giving up on building the diverse bench of global leaders that CEOs say they require," he writes. "Global leaders need experience working for extended periods in foreign locations because living abroad creates permanent knowledge and ties that bind." Ghemawat encourages firms to rotate executives through overseas assignments — not just travel. "And don’t make the mistake of viewing expatriation as being solely about sending people from headquarters to emerging markets. The same requirement for immersion outside of one’s home market also applies to the cultivation of global leaders recruited in emerging markets."
Super-Green Companies Make Tempting Targets (HBS Working Knowledge)
When your company stumbles, don’t expect its past CSR initiatives to earn it warm and fuzzy treatment from the media. Every one-point increase in analysts’ "green" scores for petroleum companies results in a 25% to 35% greater chance that the companies’ oil spills will be covered in the news, according to research by Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Jiao Luo and Stephan Meier, both of Columbia Business School. Companies trying to position themselves as super-green risk becoming lightning rods when blunders happen, while companies "that make less extreme claims either are disregarded by the press or have a far less likelihood of seeing their failings exposed," Oberholzer-Gee says.
The Wireless Industry's Growing Pains (Knowledge@Wharton)
You'd think these would be a mobile company's salad days. Demand for both devices and bandwidth is sharply on the rise; the field is awash in innovation and forecasts call for expansion touching all corners of the globe for years to come. But the forces of growth are painful as well. Former Vodafone Americas president Terry Kramer describes life in a mobile boardroom "as one in which executives perpetually worry about two macro trends: first, relentless demand and the accompanying need for expensive infrastructure build-outs, even while revenue growth slows; and second, becoming "commoditized" by the same devices and apps that are causing so much of the sector's current success."
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Why CEO Loneliness Is Bad for Business (Fortune) A Reason to Split the Role of CEO and Chairman (Washington Post On Leadership) Ten Myths of "Say on Pay" (Stanford GSB)