Leading Across New Borders

How to Succeed as the Center Shifts

Ernest Gundling, Christie Caldwell, Karen Cvitkovich

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119064022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119064237
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

An insightful, real-world look at the skills today's global leadership demands

Leading Across Borders is the leadership guide for the new business environment. The world's economic center of gravity is shifting at a rapid pace – huge emerging economies have already emerged. As businesses operate in an increasingly global context, the most successful leaders are able to see through the eyes of others and to hear the voices of customers and colleagues from around the world. They build their own personal networks, navigate differences, and work effectively across new borders – both the physical borders between countries and the limits of old leadership paradigms.

This book features direct input from people in critical roles around the world, advice based on deep practical experience, and new data that identifies the distinctive challenges of leading in an environment becoming more thoroughly interdependent every day. There is valuable advice for anyone taking on a global leadership role. You'll find strategies and tools for working across cultures, leading inclusively, running a matrix team, innovating, integrating an acquisition, and making tough ethical choices. Each chapter challenges established leadership models and shares hard-won expertise in dealing effectively with a changing reality that includes both fast-growth and slow-growth markets. You will learn how to serve more numerous stakeholders and to achieve your goals in a complex organizational structure without having direct lines of authority. This insightful guide helps you work more effectively at the self, team, and organizational levels, so you can get things done and grow your business.

The increasing importance of China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and other developing economies has opened the world of business leadership far beyond our own borders. This book gives you a framework for coordinating it all, and being the leader your organization needs.

• Operate insightfully at the personal level in order to better lead others
• Shape, motivate, and drive your global team to exceptional performance
• Navigate differences in culture, language, economics, and more
• Exercise your vision, influence, and expertise to lead your organization forward

The trend toward global leadership has emerged full-blown amidst the rising global economy. Today's leadership must understand how to work effectively and efficiently across a variety of contexts. Leading Across Borders provides a roadmap to the new leadership paradigm, helping you expand your own skillset and create forward momentum.

Chapter 1
The Shifting Center: Emerging Markets Have Emerged
What Is Changing and Why This Matters

The Future Arrives

The world's economic center is shifting with breathtaking rapidity. The trends are clear, both in the numbers and in the new realities on the ground; the general direction is from west to east and from north to south. This shift in power and influence is not only economic but also demographic, political, and cultural.

China and India

China recently passed the United States to become the world's largest economy defined in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) purchasing power parity. Although this news created only a small blip in the Western business press, it represented a historic milestone that is likely to be followed soon by other landmark events. Calculations based on market exchange rates—a more common yardstick of GDP—indicate that China will surpass the United States to become the world's undisputed economic leader by 2030.

India is also expanding rapidly; current estimates indicate that by 2050, China, the United States, and India will be the top three economies in the world.¹ While China and India still have many rural and comparatively unaltered areas within their borders, their growing industrial and technological prowess as well as their higher ranking among the world's economies signify that they have officially graduated from “emerging” to “emerged.”

Europe's relative economic position is changing simultaneously. Membership in the Group of Seven (G7), an economic forum originally founded in the 1970s by the world's most industrialized countries, provides a symbolic example. Original G7 members from Europe included France, West Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. If the same organization were to be recreated in 2050, it would probably include no European member nations. According to current projections, there will not be a single European country whose economy is among the world's top seven by that time.² In order to offer Europe G7 entry, it would be necessary to combine two or three countries, or perhaps all of Europe.

Humanity has witnessed these kinds of changes before. China and India previously dominated the global economy for centuries. China, for example, created revolutionary innovations such as gunpowder and printing that were later exported to Europe while supplying the Silk Road and far-reaching maritime trade routes with precious goods. Each country has approximately four times the population of the United States and more than double the number of people in Europe as a whole. Nonetheless, the ongoing recasting of global positions represents a tectonic shift in the modern economic order and is in part a transition back to the future (see Sidebar 1.1).

---

Sidebar 1.1 The Shifting World Center: China and India

The Shifting World Center: China

The Shifting World Center: India

China's current population of 1.4 billion exceeds the entire U.S. population of approximately 320 million by well over 1 billion, and comprises almost 20 percent of the people on earth. There are over 160 cities in China with a population over 1 million people. In the United States, there are just nine cities that exceed 1 million.^3 China's steel industry production is now more than 8 times larger than that of the United States; the production of its state-owned mills equals the combined production of the rest of the world.^4 China reportedly used more cement in a recent three-year period than the United States used during the entire twentieth century.^5 The volume of trade between China and Africa has increased by more than 20 times since the year 2000^6; more than 1 million Chinese are currently living and working in Africa.^7 China consumed 155 million cases of red wine last year, more than France's 150 million and Italy's 141 million.^8 China is by far the world's largest producer and consumer of coal, accounting for 46 percent of global coal production and 49 percent of global coal consumption—almost as much as the rest of the world combined.^9

India's population will eventually exceed China's due to its higher birth rate, reaching an estimated total of 1.6 billion within 30 years.^10 If the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh were to declare independence, it would be the fifth most populous country in the world, with over 200 million people.^11 India will soon have one-fifth of the world's working-age population and the number of people in the country who are working age will rise by more than 200 million over the next 20 years while China's working-age population declines.^12 India, which is still more rural than China, is now in the midst of what is likely to be the largest rural-urban migration of the twenty-first century, with some 10 million people moving to towns and cities each year.^13 India is already the fourth-largest consumer and net importer of crude oil and petroleum products in the world after the United States, China, and Japan.^14 India's GDP, too, is projected to overtake that of the United States and become the world's second largest economy by 2050 in terms of purchasing power parity, though not using GDP at market exchange rates.^15

---

Personal Consequences

The world's shifting economic center has vast implications for almost everyone, particularly those who have been at the top and at the bottom of the global economic order. During the past century, U.S. and European leadership and business models largely dominated multinational corporate cultures. The economic shift toward markets such as China and India means that these countries and their leaders will increasingly shape the way business is conducted.

New leaders from Asia and elsewhere will need to consider their own core values and vision for the future and how they can inspire their global colleagues. Beyond material success, what will make their careers fulfilling and worthwhile? If current or aspiring leaders from Europe and North America go on with business as usual—assuming that their privileged position will last forever—they risk looking like human ostriches, heads buried in the sand to avoid the speeding freight train of globalization. Rather, they must embrace the planet's inexorable tilt toward rising economies and learn how to succeed together with employees from around the world who want to be treated as full partners. Sometimes the consequences are very personal, and one's career can take an unexpected turn.

---

Promotion Postponed

Ingrid speaks in quick spurts over the phone from her office in London, where she has just returned after three years in India. She is Swedish, but started her career with a company in New York and then moved to London, so her accent is hard to place. Ingrid is in her mid-30s, works for one of the world's most famous banks, and saw the opportunity to move to Bangalore and gain international experience as critical for her career.

Ingrid comments, “I had just completed my first year in Bangalore and had a perfect performance rating. I was on the list to get VP, but then, three days before the promotion lists were finalized, I was pulled off the list and no one could tell me why.

“This really impacted my engagement. There were so many times when I just wanted to leave, especially during my third year in Bangalore. To be honest, I called my contacts in London and said that they needed to find me a position back in the U.K. or I was going to look at other opportunities.

“I realize now that there were a lot of things going on u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Leading Across New Borders: How to Succeed as the Center Shifts
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: The Shifting Center: Emerging Markets Have Emerged
• Chapter 2: Global Talent: Beyond Outsourcing
• Chapter 3: Global Mindset: Beyond Culture
• Chapter 4: Global Teams: Beyond Facilitation
• Chapter 5: Global Inclusion: Beyond Race and Gender
• Chapter 6: Global Mergers and Acquisitions: Beyond Diligence
• Chapter 7: Global Innovation: Beyond Products
• Chapter 8: Global Ethics: Beyond Integrity
• Chapter 9: Leading from Your Own Center
• Appendix A: Team Launch: Foundations
• Appendix B: Assessments from Aperian Global
• Appendix C: Recommended Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement