Hbr what is a global manager

Through a flexible management process, in which business, country, and functional managers form a triad of different perspectives that balance one another, transnational companies can build three strategic capabilities: global-scale efficiency and competitiveness; national-level responsiveness and flexibility; and cross-market capacity to leverage learning on a worldwide basis. If you'd like to share this PDF, you can purchase copyright permissions by increasing the quantity.

What Is a Global Manager? Bartlett , Sumantra Ghoshal ,. Quantity price applied. Add Copyright Permission. Copyright Permission Qty:. Current Stock:. Buying for your team? See quantity pricing. As a sensor, the country manager must be good at gathering and sifting information, interpreting the implications, and predicting a range of feasible outcomes. More important, this manager has the difficult task of conveying the importance of such intelligence to people higher up, especially those whose perceptions may be dimmed by distance or even ethnocentric bias.

Today, when information gathered locally increasingly applies to other regions or even globally, communicating effectively is crucial.

In the late s, Gottlieb was assigned to build the U. His local-market background and contacts led Gottlieb to a quick diagnosis of the problem. NEC had designed the switch to meet the needs of NTT, the Japanese telephone monopoly, and it lacked many features that customers in the United States wanted.

Nor could the switch handle revenue-enhancing features like call waiting and call forwarding, which were vital high-margin items in the competitive, deregulated American market. Sometimes a country manager must carry out a strategy that directly conflicts with what he or she has lobbied for in vain. In translating the needs of his U. He had to instill a sense of urgency in several corporate management groups, varying his pitches to appeal to the interests of each.

Other companies have built up and leveraged their overseas human resources in different ways. Indeed, the burden of identifying, developing, and leveraging such national resources and capabilities falls on country managers. Equally important, the U. As a builder, Gottlieb used this mutual confidence as the foundation for creating a software-development capability that would become a big corporate asset. Skilled software engineers, very scarce in Japan, were widely available in the United States.

Though its resources were limited, the group turned out a number of innovations, including a remote software-patching capability that later became part of the 61E switch design. The credibility he won at headquarters allowed Gottlieb to expand his design engineering group from ten to more than 50 people within two years, supporting developments not only in North America but also eventually in Asia.

In many transnationals, access to strategically important information—and control over strategically important assets—has catapulted country managers into a much more central role. As links to local markets, they are no longer mere implementers of programs and policies shaped at headquarters; many have gained some influence over the way their organizations make important strategic and operational decisions.

Even at the once impenetrable annual top management meetings, national subsidiary managers may present their views and defend their interests before senior corporate and domestic executives—a scenario that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

Of course, the historic position of most national units of worldwide companies has been that of the implementer of strategy from headquarters. While global business managers and country managers have come into their own, functional specialists have yet to gain the recognition due them in many traditional multinational companies. In some cases, top management has allowed staff functions to become a warehouse for corporate misfits or a graveyard for managerial has-beens.

Yet at a time when information, knowledge, and expertise have become more specialized, an organization can gain huge benefits by linking its technical, manufacturing, marketing, human resources, and financial experts worldwide.

Building an organization that can use learning to create and spread innovations requires the skill to transfer specialized knowledge while also connecting scarce resources and capabilities across national borders. Most innovation starts, of course, when managers perceive a particular opportunity or market threat, such as an emerging consumer trend, a revolutionary technological development, a bold competitive move, or a pending government regulation.

When any of these flags pops up around the world, it may seem unimportant to corporate headquarters if viewed in isolation.

But when a functional manager serves as a scanner, with the perspective and expertise to detect trends and move knowledge across boundaries, he or she can transform piecemeal information into strategic intelligence.

In sophisticated transnationals, senior functional executives serve as linchpins, connecting their areas of specialization throughout the organization. Using informal networks, they create channels for communicating specialized information and repositories for proprietary knowledge. In his new job, he was ideally placed to become a scanner and cross-pollinator. He formed European technical teams and ran a series of conferences in which like-minded experts from various countries could exchange information and build informal communication networks.

He used his staff teams to help clarify the particular role of each national technical manager and to specialize activities that had been duplicated on a country-by-country basis with little transfer of accumulated knowledge.

By that time, Zaki had on hand a technical team that had built up relationships among its members so that it formed a close-knit network of intelligence and product expertise. The team drew the product profile necessary for healthy sales in multiple markets with diverse needs. In several European markets, powdered detergents contained enzymes to break down protein-based stains, and the new liquid detergent would have to accomplish the same thing.

In some markets, a bleach substitute was important; in others, hard water presented the toughest challenge; while in several countries, environmental concerns limited the use of phosphates. Moreover, the new detergent had to be effective in large-capacity, top-loading machines, as well as in the small front-loading machines common in Europe.

Things are obviously different now, with the Internet, satellite phone connections, and video conference calls on Skype. Those communications channels are of critical importance, Bartlett adds, when it comes to resolving the inherent tensions between headquarters—where the focus might be on standardizing products to drive down cost—and subsidiaries lobbying to adapt products to meet the specific needs of a local market.

What are the requisite characteristics of a "global manager," if there is such a thing anymore? And in the s and '70s, a foreign assignment could be far from a promotion: "It was sometimes the failed domestic managers who were sent abroad. In today's world, however, a shortage of human capital, not financial capital, is the bigger constraint. Managers operating in a global environment obviously need a broad perspective and the ability to relate to other people and cultures in an open, engaged way.

Beyond that, Bartlett points to the need for the mental flexibility that enables a manager to negotiate, adapt, and modify the layers of competitive advantage and various strategic imperatives that are part of any multinational company.

Bartlett describes Transnational Management as being in a constant state of evolution. The most recently added chapter, "The Future of the Transnational," includes a case study on the pharmaceutical company Genzyme and its efforts to establish Humanitarian Assistance for Neglected Diseases HAND , a corporate social responsibility program focused on treatments for diseases that typically affect too small a population to warrant the attention of drug development companies.

Specialization is about where you create centers of excellence—and that may or may not be at the corporate center. Now, creating this integrated network of specialized operations does increase the coordination needs.

So when we wrote about centralization versus coordination, we emphasized the challenges of coordinating operations that were no longer independent of the center nor dependent on the center. The new relationship is one of coordinated interdependence. Q: What challenges do you foresee global managers encountering during the next five to ten years?

Will they need to develop new skills? A: Multinational corporations are incredibly powerful. Because they operate across national boundaries, they are in essence beyond the control of any single governmental entity.

Country by country, host governments define national laws that the multinational must obey. But if one country's laws are too constraining, it can move to another one. So while there are few effective transnational governmental bodies, there are very effective transnational corporations.

With that power comes a huge responsibility to act as global citizens who contribute, who don't just exploit. As the wave of anti-globalization suggests, the great challenge for multinational companies 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.

I've just written a case about Genzyme in Massachusetts. Their Cerezyme plant runs twenty-four hours a day, days a year, and produces six kilos of product in all that time.

You could fit it in a little six-pack bag. But it is sufficient to treat the 6, people around the world—and that's all there are—who suffer from a rare affliction called Gaucher disease. In the United States, the treatment costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. But Genzyme will treat anyone in the world who has this disease, and there are two prices for the product they produce.

One is the price that exists here or in Europe where countries can afford it. The other is free. Through Project Hope , they seek out people who are suffering from this disease, in Africa or China, for example, and provide the therapy. This approach is in stark contrast to some of the big pharmaceutical companies that were producing AIDS drugs, sitting on their patents, and refusing to deal with this horrific disease as it spread through Africa.

Multinational companies have to be more like Genzyme and find ways to balance their huge global power with their assumption of global responsibility.

I think that responsibility is going to be one of the big things that managers in the next decade or so will have to deal with. It examined the massive transformation process of companies that began in the s.

So The Individualized Corporation looked at the implications of this transformation. We concluded that the downsizing, de-layering, restructuring, reengineering, empowerment, and outsourcing were symptoms of companies undergoing the biggest and most fundamental change in the corporate model, the organizational form, and the role of management in seventy-five years.

Globalization is one force driving it, but so too is the coming of the information age, deregulation, privatization, the service-based economy, the convergence of industry boundaries, and the knowledge revolution. Out of that has come another project. The big change that is going on now—and what's behind the massive corporate transformations—is that the scarce, constraining, and therefore strategic resource is no longer capital.

The world is awash in funding. Most companies have got more financial capital than they've got great ideas to invest in.