The majority of businesses say they want to become more global. And business leaders say that the lack of people with global intelligence is the key constraint holding them back. This course will address both gaps — at the business and the personal level, it will focus on practical strategies for dealing with the real consequences of globalization.
2. Globalization at Personal level
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From the course by IESE Business School
Globalization of Business Enterprise
18 ratings
From the lesson
Week 8 - Globalization and You
This session, which is titled “Globalization and You”, looks at how globalization affects organizations and people, and in particular, you. We take a dual perspective, looking first at the globalization of personnel within and particularly at the top of organizations and second, at the individual or personal level.
Meet the Instructors
Pankaj GhemawatProfessor of Strategic Management Anselmo Rubiralta Chair of Strategy and Globalization
Department of Strategic Management
[MUSIC]
The picture we just finished painting of a somewhat limited levels of globalization
of personnel at multi-national companies also have
some significant implications at the personal level.
So let's talk both about how those organizational
realities affect individuals, the purple part of this
chart and second, let's talk a little bit
more broadly about globalization at the personal level.
That goes beyond career implications.
But to start with career implications.
The picture that we've presented, that we've painted in the
material that I just presented and throughout this course, in
fact, does suggest a couple of different things that have
potentially quite practical implications for a large number of you.
First of all, it's worth remembering that all companies are not created equal
when it comes to openness to nonnatives progressing
up the managerial hierarchy, openness to global career paths, etc.
So if those are things that are important
to you, it's worth selecting deliberately and wisely.
Second practical, practical point, and this is in some sense better
news, is this notion that once you start to recognize that
the world isn't completely globalized, it starts to suggest all kinds of
opportunities to focus that may be both feasible and desirable.
So I was heartened for instance, I was having
this discussion with my MBA class at ESA, when
one of the students pointed out that he'd been
wondering about whether to pursue a career in Latin finance.
He wondered if that was sustainable, and based on his improved understanding of the
actual level of globalization of financial markets,
he started to see, once again, that that
was, in fact, a viable career opportunity that he didn't just have to go
work on a globalized segment of financial
services, like investment banking, for the largest clients.
Third, and this is by far the best news of everything that we've seen so far.
The basic point is that people who are effective at
spanning national boundaries are still at a premium in large corporations.
They're in really short supply.
And so, if you do succeed in
making yourself into an effective boundary spanner.
The sky in some sense is the limit, because these are people who are
still very, very scarce and very valued
in some respects at the world's largest corporations.
So, those are some direct implications of the picture
we painted of limited levels of globalization of personnel.
For career are there beyond careers, are there some personal
implications for how you might want to change your identity to globalize more?
Well, one indication is provided by the little survey that
I, had you fill out before the start of the course.
I basically scored the responses, there were fifteen questions that you were
suppose to respond to on a scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Questions such as, do you read foreign media, etc.
I basically scored responses of strongly disagree as minus
two, disagree as minus one, neutral/do not
know as zero, agree as one and strongly agree as two.
And then I added up the scores across your responses to the individual questions.
This is the population distribution for all the
students in Coursera who filled out that pre-course survey.
And a rough heuristic in terms of sort of trying to diagnose how
open and receptive to foreign influences this group as a whole is.
And where you fall relative to the group is
to work off the scale that I sometimes use,
in which I suggest that gap scores above 20
indicate that there isn't too much of a globalization gap.
Gap scores of ten to 20 do indicate a significant globalization
gap, and so that's where the bulk of you are concentrated.
And gap scores below ten indicate a gap in terms of openness to the
world in terms of learning about the world that it really is essential to fulfill.
So try and recall how you answered these questions.
If you can't recall, it's a simple matter.
It takes a few minutes to just take the questionnaire once again.
And then come back and assess yourself by asking yourself, okay
what is my score and do I fall into the no significant
gap, 20 plus range, some gap, the ten to 20 range, or
a huge gap, the less than ten score on this particular scale.
So, that's one way of thinking about how
much more more you need to globalize yourself.
But my broader point is that virtually all of us could usefully do more,
no matter how high or high low our gap scores are, to globalize ourselves.
And so, what I really want to conclude this last session of globe
with are just a few tips on how if you
did want to become more globalized presumably a bit more effective at
spanning boundaries without cultural and other
biases supervening, what should you do?
Here let me sort of suggest, this is the acronym that I'm
currently working off because this is the topic of my current work.
Let me suggest the acronym CRAFT, as a way of summarizing five basic
points, about what I think is important, to really stretch your personal horizons.
The first one is, you need to curb globaloney.
You need to remember that the world isn't completely globalized.
Because if you do think it's completely globalized, you miss all
the differences out there that you can and should react to.
You and are therefore mystified when things don't go exactly as planned.
So, that's step number one.
Step number two is to remember your own roots
because all of us no matter how globalized we
might think of ourselves, do have discernible influences in
terms of who we know, how we think, etc.
Based on where we've lived, where we've grown up.
Take my own personal case.
Sometimes when I go around the world and make speeches
suggesting the world isn't perfectly
globalized, there's pushback from the audience.
Invoking myself as an example.
People say, wait a minute, you were born in India, grew
up mostly, and lived mostly in the U.S., now live in Spain.
Explain to us once again how the world isn't very globalized?
So, I got sufficiently fed up of getting responses like
that that I actually made a map of my personal contacts.
One of these cartograms that hopefully you've gotten used to
seeing during the course of globe in which different countries are
scaled in proportion to how many people I have in my
list of professional contacts who are in based in those countries.
And as you might imagine, if you take this point about rootedness seriously,
there was a one-to-one relationship between how long I've
lived in a country, and how many people I have in
my list of personal, professional contacts from that particular country.
And, in particular, the five countries that I've spent varying
amounts of time living in, account for 72% of my contacts.
Somewhat more worrying about this chart was this notion that
Asia, apart from India in particular, is very, very underrepresented.
In fact, it's after I did this analysis that I realized that the five largest
countries that I haven't ever visited, at that
point, were all in south, or southeast Asia.
And so, in the 18 months after I did this
little bit of self-analysis, of where my roots were, and
how big an influence they had, on my network of
professional contacts, I did visit Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
As a way starting to work on
this significant geographic gap in my knowledge about
a part of the world that, for varying
reasons, I find very dynamic and very exciting.
So, all of us are constrained to some extent by our roots.
It's important to remember where those roots are.
Where when my proactively reach to extend beyond them.
But also some of the limits that
that imposes on one's likely zones of effectiveness.
The third point that I would make under the acronym of CRAFT is
that it's important to appreciate differences
and what you can learn from others.
There are actually two elements to this point.
One is about knowing, and the other is about feeling.
In terms of knowing, we spent the bulk of the course
working through a framework for thinking
about cross country differences precisely because
of this sense that unless one recognizes intrinsic deep-seated differences, one is
likely to have difficulty having productive
interactions with people from other cultures.
But knowing is just half the challenge.
Feelings, especially feelings of empathy, are also very, very important.
So, it's one thing to be aware of cultural differences if
you are convinced that your culture is superior to all others.
It's quite another thing to know something about culture differences, but
also have the sense that your culture isn't superior to all others.
That there might be something to be learnt from them.
And the second kind of viewpoint is the essential adjunct to actual cognitive
knowledge about differences if we're going to deal with differences adequately.
Fourth, focusing is often a good idea, and people like Bill Gates for instance,
have suggested that, for instance, students, students
looking to work in international non-profits might do
well to focus on just one country, and learning about that country really well,
and engaging with people there, because that's
led, according to Gates, you build relationships, and
it becomes hard to walk away.
As a professor of Global Strategy, it would be a
little bit narrow for me to focus on one country.
So, I'd look a little bit more broadly than that.
But I rely on my common interests no matter which
environment I find myself in in global education and global management.
To supply a connective thread or connective tissue of some sort.
And then one can think of other more
interesting examples such as Anne Morgan the writer
who spent 2012 reading 197 books one from
each of the independent countries in the world.
And that too is a particular axis of focus.
One related to what her particular interests are.
So, the broader point here is trying to learn everything about everything isn't
a viable strategy and particularly in terms of getting deep, it may
be useful to recognize that you're going to get to know some foreign
parts of the world much better than other foreign parts of the world.
And to be deliberate about what those parts of the
world are going to be that you're going to focus on.
The final point that I wanted to make is this notion of talking to strangers.
And that's a poetic way of sort of saying,
look, you can learn a great deal about a country.
You can have the right emotional attitude in terms
of avoiding cultural hubris, cultural arrogance around your own culture.
But that said, there's a lot of evidence suggesting
that building up feelings of empathy really requires interpersonal
contact, and of course, there are different forms of
interpersonal contact electronic is not as good as face-to-face.
One way is not as good as two way, etc.
But the point is, that ultimately, it's much, much more
likely that you develop the, the ability to be an effective
boundary spanner in a corporate context and to enrich yourself and
the way you think of the world in a personal context.
If you're actually willing to go to aggressively try and
stretch beyond the filter bubbles that we're all subject to.
If you really push yourself, if you really
make time in your life, and especially if you
really try and connect at an individual person-to-person people
with people who are from countries other than yourselves.
So, those in a nutshell are my five
recommendations for how to craft a more global you.
This is an area that I'm currently working on so, we will
ask you, at the end of this session, to fill out a much
longer survey, that's actually a research instrument, that's going to, ideally help
us, help allow us to systematize some of the insights on the previous slide.
And, if you take the trouble to fill out the survey, we
will be reporting back to you on what the results to the survey
actually indicated and what progress we're
making at further sorting out this complicated
matter of how people can stretch their horizons and make themselves more global.
So, that's something that will help us out in terms of additional
reading in case this is a set of topics that intrigues you.
I'm currently working on a book on this topic.
But in the meantime, I might suggest the last
chapter from my most recently published book, World 3.0.
Which really gets much deeper into at least
some of the issues that we've talked about today.
And with that, I'm coming to the end of my slide presentation, and I thought it might
be interesting to just reflect very briefly on
this journey that we've been in, we've been through.
it's, obviously a little bit foolhardy to try and cram everything
that you need to know about globalization into eight sessions on a book.
And so that wasn't what I tried to do.
Rather the education metaphor that I borrowed from William Butler Yates, the,
Anglo-Irish poet was, education isn't about
filling buckets, it's about lighting a fire.
I don't know if Globe has literally lit a fire
under you, but I do hope that as you think back
to the discussions that we've had, you start to, that, those
discussions may have changed some of your perspectives on globalization.
Reminded you that a lot of things
that people assert about globalization aren't necessarily so.
And suggested to you, more productive ways of
making sense of interactions that happen across national borders.
So hopefully if that fire has been lit
there are additional readings that you can turn to.
Additional material that you can look at.
But even if you temporarily at least
experience satiation with discussions about globalization let
me end with something similar, simpler, than
simply asking you to read some more material.
Let me end with a single one slide summary of this course.
The basic point, that this course was trying to make, is that a lot of the
discussion of globalization is done with eyes wide shut, to differences.
And the point, that the course has been trying to
make, is that if you keep even one eye open
to differences, chances are, that you're going to do a
lot better at making sense of the world around you.
Equipping yourself to be an effective boundary spanner
and broadening your own personal mental and cultural horizons.
Thanks very much.
[MUSIC]
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