Читать книгу Being Global - Gregory Unruh - Страница 15

Global leaders are not born but made. The enterprises, organizations, and governments making strides to capitalize on opportunities and solve problems on a global scale are not leading themselves; they are led by individuals who have invested in developing the skills they need to function—even thrive—in a globalized world. Being global is a personal journey. It is about how you choose to focus your attention, spend your time, and engage your mind.

The payoff for this investment is great, but it is not necessarily measured in the traditional benefits that businesses have come to promise, and business leaders have come to expect, for their performance. Being global is not about earning the corner office, getting the next raise, or watching the stock price tick higher, though those things may happen. Being global and becoming a global leader are instead about the kind of person you want to be and the kind of world you want to live in. The payoff will come through the connections you make, the gaps you bridge, the opportunities you capture, and the solutions you create and that our world so desperately needs. The payoff will come from actively participating in the building of the world you want, not just wishing for it.

Most people on the global leadership path ask themselves what they want to be at many points in their careers: at the outset, at times of transition, even at the point where they begin to slow down. Eventually, that question narrows down to issues of vocation. Do you want to be a leader in business, innovating new products, employing people, and earning profits for yourself and your firm? Do you want to be a leader in government, representing the people and promoting the policies that will make your country a more prosperous and equitable place to live? Or do you want to be a social leader, directly serving your society and its most vulnerable people?

Answering that question is not as straightforward as it used to be. In today's world of unprecedented global opportunity and unprecedented global challenge, the boundaries of influence among business, government, and nongovernmental organizations are increasingly fluid. The classic separation between business and government, most vehemently articulated by Milton Friedman's famous adage that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, appears awfully out of sync with a new reality in which businesses are increasingly under pressure to proactively engage in social and environmental issues at best indirectly influencing their bottom line. Even Harvard management professor Michael Porter, best known for his classic models of competitive strategy, has recently argued that business leaders ought to seek “shared value” that would benefit not only their shareholders but society at large.¹⁰ The costs of business are absorbed, after all, not just by shareholders but by the broader society. Consumers increasingly expect that the businesses they support act responsibly toward their employees, the environment, and so on. Businesses likewise find that access to capital and talent depends on the success and health of the societies and economies in which they operate. Companies do not operate in silos. They are embedded in human and environmental systems in interdependent ways.

Governments and nongovernmental organizations are under similar pressures to reach beyond their traditional boundaries. Budgetary constraints and increasing citizen demands have forced governments to seek out partnerships with businesses to deliver public goods more effectively, from education to health care to security. Nongovernmental organizations have learned to rely on profit-making business models and market-making interventions to address complex economic development problems in financially sustainable ways (from providing microloans to self-employed individuals in poverty to commercially distributing clean cookstoves, mosquito nets, or solar-powered lamps).

Fortunately, cross-sector collaboration among business, government, and the social sector is giving rise to the same wealth of opportunities as cross-border collaboration among businesses located at different points of the globe. In this sense, being global is not just about engagement across national boundaries but engagement across the cultural boundaries that typically separate government, private, and social sectors. Within this ecosystem, businesses often hold the key resources and technologies that they can put to use to address social challenges—and earn in the process. Being global is crucial for leaders in business, government, and the social sector both because each is facing similar globalizing forces and because the very abilities required to deal with a diverse, multicultural world can also be helpful in effectively working with one another.

One place where we see these connections today is in pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight development priorities set by the United Nations.¹¹ Progress on the second MDG, whose goal is to educate the world's most vulnerable children, for example, would not be possible without global leaders cooperating across national cultures and across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. One notable project, the Global Education Initiative, has brought together UNESCO (a multilateral organization), the World Economic Forum (a Swiss private foundation), technology providers such as Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft (U.S.-based multinational corporations), and investment company Abraaj Capital (a private equity group based in Dubai) in the pursuit of technology-based education solutions in Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa.¹²

Another innovative and indicative effort, which we discuss in chapter 3, required collaboration between Ghana's teachers union and education ministry, an Indian nonprofit that pioneered and tested a successful literacy program, a U.S.-based research organization, and a collection of funders. Annie Duflo, a leader involved in this effort, saw the opportunity, convinced the necessary government agencies, and sought out the financial resources so that the program, known as the Teacher Community Assistant Initiative (TCAI), could launch.

Though there are some notable successes, building bridges that allow effective cooperation across sectors, cultures, and institutions is a difficult and demanding task. The boundaries between these sectors may be blurring in terms of the problems that affect them, but the toolsets available to each are different, and each imposes different demands on the practice of leadership. Nonprofits, for instance, increasingly must become adept at selling innovative products and services that drive their social missions, a phenomenon known as social entrepreneurship. Governments have likewise needed to learn to leverage market dynamics in the service of policy objectives and take advantage of those same market dynamics to outsource the delivery of public services to private actors. Businesses, in turn, are under increased pressure to engage in social and environmental issues related to their core activities.

Across these blurred lines, global leaders bring together disparate parties with uncommon views and skills in pursuit of common goals. These linkages are particularly important, given the ways in which people working in one sector tend to ignore the effects their actions have on the others. Greenhouse gas emissions offer a case in point. When, in 2007, the European Union set the laudable goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it estimated that some reductions would come through increased use of biofuels in cars. In response, the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia permitted developers to clear virgin rainforest to make way for palm plantations that would produce palm oil to sell to the EU as a biofuel. The conversion of rainforests to agricultural land, however, is a major source of greenhouse gases in its own right, nullifying the impact of the EU policy. A local solution exacerbated a global problem.

Global leaders are able to avoid unintended zero-sum courses of action because they are able to see the world's problems in their complexity. Their solutions may address only one aspect of a problem, but they function in a system of parallel, disaggregated efforts that collectively drive toward a more sustainable and inclusive world. For business, many of those solutions will represent significant commercial innovations that employ thousands and earn millions. Others will belong to society or government. Most, however, will require collaborative efforts by all three sectors.