Being Global. Gregory Unruh
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has the same luxury.
Aligning the needs, opportunities, and challenges of global engagement requires leaders at the helm who can craft solutions by seamlessly bringing together people and resources across national, cultural, and organizational lines. The skill set of the professionals tasked with overseas efforts cannot begin and end with their reputation at home. They need not only talk but listen; they need not only act but suspend judgment; they need not only bring existing value into a new context but identify where that context can return value and even influence the way headquarters does business. Most importantly, they need to ensure that all members of the relationship benefit. They can't just act global. They have to be global.
Being Global: Our Journeys
Both of us have worked in businesses that were drawn into the global market. We, too, have been woefully unprepared—at different times in our lives—to tackle the global challenges we faced. Fifteen years ago, it wasn't clear how an organization that was successful on a local scale could parlay its capabilities to the world marketplace.
That same lack of direction was also common in the universities we attended and where we later taught. It was not that these institutions did not know that the nature of global engagement was changing. They just didn't know how to prepare students to be global. Professors and students alike had difficulty escaping the cultural norms, limited mindsets, local practices, and conservative nature of the academic institutions where we worked. There were efforts to recruit international students, but those efforts were not enough to help those students increase their cultural understanding of the local context or help local students benefit from the increasing diversity on a campus dominated by faculty and staff with little to offer in the form of a global mindset.
In our individual ways, we have each spent the past two decades struggling to learn to be global. Neither of us had a particular advantage in this effort. We did not grow up in multilingual or multicultural environments. Our parents did not move us around the world as children. We had to start on our own. As adults, we have both spent significant time in countries that are not our native homes, acquiring language skills and developing a deeper understanding of the practices and rhythms natural to those countries. We have worked to develop deep relationships with people around the world, people whose experiences and opinions are different from ours. We have looked to identify new sources of value in our work and find ways to share it.
Easy is not a word either of us would use to describe this path, but we are traveling it because we are convinced we must. We believe it makes us better at the things we care about and allows us to better help the people who reach out to us. Greg's deep commitment to environmental issues drives him to continue to learn, cultivate relationships, and attempt to influence the way companies choose their materials, manufacture their products, source their energy, and fulfill their social responsibilities to the communities in which they operate. Ángel's dedication to improving management education, and particularly to promoting ethics and integrity in leadership, drives him to seek connections with academic and business leaders all over the world. Integrity, in his mind, does not stop at the border and in fact is only fully tested when dealing with communities that are distant and different.
Being Global at Thunderbird
Our parallel journeys brought both of us to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, our home institution. Thunderbird was founded in 1946 as an independent, nonprofit graduate school with a mission to train managers for the opportunities in international trade that were expected to grow in the postwar period. The school was located in Thunderbird Airfield No. 1, a decommissioned air base where pilots from the United States and allied countries had trained during World War II. The school's founders saw how people from different cultures had connected. Even in a time of war, people with very different backgrounds, beliefs, and languages could transcend differences. Looking forward, they believed international bridges through trade and investment could contribute to a more prosperous and secure world.
In the more than sixty-five years since its inception, more than forty thousand students have graduated from Thunderbird, and tens of thousands have attended its various executive education programs. Thunderbird alumni include successful international executives and CEOs, government officials, diplomats, development professionals, social innovators, and entrepreneurs. The school's faculty likewise includes world-regarded experts in global entrepreneurship, global management, global finance, global marketing, and international relations, among others. Its single focus on global management has earned it numerous awards, including a number-one ranking among international business school programs, by both the Financial Times and U.S. News and World Report. The Thunderbird approach to educating the next generation of global leaders is not perfect, but it is the best and most deeply focused we've seen for preparing leaders to thrive in a globalized world.
For both of us, arriving at Thunderbird felt like a kind of homecoming. We had each worked at other institutions, which all lacked the specific global focus we believe is so critical. Being global really needs to be part of an organization's DNA. We both feel that Thunderbird has a unique focus and dedication in educating and preparing students to be global.
The scholarship of our peer faculty members as well as the experiences of our diverse alumni provided us with a rich pool of evidence, examples, and cases to draw from as we were writing this book. Not every leader mentioned is affiliated with the school, but quite a few are. We are grateful for our association with them and the lessons they have taught us. In many ways, this book is not the product solely of our two minds, but of all the minds that teach, attend, and contribute to the institution's mission.
Thunderbird serves not only as a source for this book, but as an inspiration as well. Our students get the benefit of Thunderbird scholarship through the intensive curriculum. But not everyone who aspires to be global can schedule two years in Arizona. Our aim, therefore, is to share Thunderbird's knowledge and experience more broadly. In a way, we've set out to write the book that we wish had been available when we took our first steps toward being global.
Becoming a Global Leader
We have written this book for leaders and aspiring leaders who aim to think, act, and, especially, be global and want some help getting there. You may be just starting in a career and creating a long-term plan; you may be in the middle of your career and considering an overseas position or a way to take a different direction.
Our focus on the global aspects of leadership of course relies on a great deal of previous leadership thinking that continues today. We have been influenced by thinkers such as McGill University's Henry Mintzberg; the University of Southern California's Warren Bennis; Wharton's Robert House; University of Washington's Bruce Avolio; Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John Kotter, and Nitin Nohria; and INSEAD's Manfred Kets de Vries, to name a few.1 Their work offers valuable insight, each in their way, for leaders managing people and tackling crises, leaders navigating through change, leaders pursing innovation, and so on.
Where Being Global differs from other leadership tools is in its international focus. While the globalization of the world economy has been extensively documented, leadership scholars are yet to fully address the ways in which leadership changes in a global context. Most take the position—either directly or by default—that leading a global firm is not very different from leading a local or regional one: there are the same challenges of securing resources, building and motivating teams, creating and applying new business models, understanding and serving markets, raising and managing capital, and so on.
Our view, however, is that everything becomes much more complex when executed in a cross-national, cross-cultural context. It is not as simple as adopting the proper meal etiquette or learning the language (and anyone who has tried knows even those things aren't so simple). This book is all about the context, the complexity, the connections, and the integrity required when working with different people and cultures.
Other management scholars have focused on how cultural differences may determine the effectiveness of a particular leadership style. This scholarship tradition is rooted in the works of Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars,