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The New Global Business Manager
Topics: Globalization-Global StrategyPsychology-Personal CharacteristicsManagement-Growth and Development StrategyThere is no such thing as a universal global manager, concluded HBS professor Christopher A. Bartlett in a 1992 article for Harvard Business Review. Rather, multinational corporations require three kinds of specialists: country managers, business managers, and functional managers, plus a group of senior executives to coordinate their activities. These categories still hold true over ten years later, says Bartlett, but other things have changed. Baker Librarys Cynthia Churchwell interviewed Bartlett on his current thinking. An excerpt follows.
What new lesson have global firms learned?
Companies are finally recognizing that being global is about accessing scarce resources and that the scarcest of all is the human resource, particularly management. The assumption that all the smart, capable people were born within a ten-mile radius of our head office is being eroded.
What is the function of todays global manager?
We used to think of the CEO as being the grand strategic architect. Now the world is so complex and fast-moving that the general managers role is less about managing content and more about managing context creating an environment in which people can negotiate the best solution for an organization.
What is the global managers most essential trait?
The two most critical attributes are open-mindedness and recognizing that global management is all about legitimizing diverse views in an organization, including those based on cultural differences. A manager who is sensitive to that will understand and respond much better in a global context.
What challenge will global managers encounter in the next five to ten years?
While there are few effective transnational governmental bodies, there are a number of very effective transnational corporations. With that power comes a huge responsibility to act as global citizens who make a contribution. The great challenge for multinational corporations in the next decade will be to establish the confidence of society at large, governments in particular, and even of individual consumers, to assure them that they are worthy of their trust.
View the full Q&A with Bartlett.
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