Worldwide Management With Global Consciousness

WORLDWIDE MANAGEMENT WITH GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The term global is derived from the Latin word globus meaning ball which refers to the ball of the earth, the planet earth or what has become known as the blue planet by virtue of its marvelous blue appearance as seen by the astronauts from space.

Consciousness is another Latin term which, according to language specialists, entered Western languages toward the end of the 12th century. Its Latin root word is conscientia which has the meaning of knowledge.

Psychological consciousness, moral consciousness and (good or bad) conscience are also derived from this Latin root. One could further analyze the term which is composed of scare…scio...scivi...scitus which means to know, to understand, from which the word science is derived, and the prefix con from Latin com or cum which means with. So, a literal translation of global consciousness based on its Latin roots would be with knowledge of the ball of the earth or sharing the knowledge of the globe of the earth.

In our age of knowledge with its knowledge economy conscientia with the meaning of knowledge has become the most coveted commodity and fulfills the adage according to which knowledge is power, as it can materialize in diverse forms of power such as global economic power which can, culturally speaking, be achieved via the cycle diversity-creativity-innovation-wealth or political, military and other forms of material and immaterial power. Philosophers and social scientists have analyzed power. Today we have to go one step further and deal with the underlying category of knowledge or conscientia which spiritualists and some humanities specialist have been dealing with until it became a major source of power in the modern technological high-tech age, where sophisticated knowledge has become the major key to power.

To illustrate this, not from a military strategic or scientific research view point, where knowledge or its application are the key to global supremacy but from a global management perspective, I would like to quote Christopher Bartlett’s, Sumantra Ghoshal’s and Julian Birkinshaw’s definition of the metanational company in the knowledge economy:

Metanational companies do not draw their competitive advantage from their home country, nor even from assets of national subsidiaries. Metanationals view the world as a global canvas dotted with pockets of knowledge, market intelligence, and capabilities. They see untapped potential in these pockets of specialist knowledge scattered around the world. By sensing and mobilizing this scattered knowledge they are able to innovate more effectively than their rivals.

According to the quotation of these experts of global management the path toward global economic domination passes through sensing and mobilizing specialist knowledge at a global scale.

In analogy to the Latin globus the adjective geo is derived from Greek gê whose meaning is earth. Geocentrism therefore is a consciousness or mindset which is earth- centered, globally or planetarily oriented rather than locally or regionally. The economics professor Howard Perlmutter has identified forces which promote geocentrism, i.e earth -, world -, global - or planetary orientation and forces against geocentrism.

According among the forces for geocentrism are the following:

Technology and management

Skills available in more countries

International customers

Expatriate costs

Competition for scarce human resources

Low morale in ethnocentric subsidiaries

Polycentric waste and duplication

Among the forces against geocentrism are these:

Economic nationalism

Military secrecy

Desire for senior managers for control/centralization

Distrust between home execs

and foreign execs/glass ceiling

Anticipated costs and risks

Language and cultural issues

The listing shows that nationalism, ethnocentrism and parochialism still constitute formidable barriers to geocentrism, but the potentialities inherent in geocentrism force players to become world-oriented.

And senior executives at corporate headquarters as well as any function in a global organization can be diagnosed as having either ethnocentric, polycentric or geocentric attitudes towards international operations. That is known as the E (ethnocentric, P(polycentric) or G(geocentric) or EPG profile - a yard stick for global attitudes - which impacts corporate policy above all with regard to strategic global human resource management and corporate governance. For, if senior executives at HQ have an ethnocentric mindset they will only appoint managers from their own ranks to international management positions in subsidiaries, because they share the same nationality and culture and can therefore be trusted. It is a way of controlling foreign operations with their cultural liabilities. The polycentric mindset on the other hand uses locals to manage international operations, because they are in a better position to manage culturally distant and difficult foreign environments, while HQ tend to control these international operations financially. The geocentric mindset or attitude is that which characterizes the most advanced stages of corporate globalization and assumes neither one absolute center as in the ethnocentric attitude nor more than one strategic center for global corporate governance but it rather is a network. Its human resource policy is therefore characterized by a quest for the best irrespective of cultural origin of personnel. Decision making is collaborative between HQ and subsidiaries rather than centralized or decentralized as in the ethno- and polycentric stages of globalization. International subsidiaries are part of a whole, whereby each contributes its uniqueness to worldwide corporate objectives. Thus the EPG profile determines international corporate strategy.

Ohmae, the Japanese management scholar maintains that in today’s global economic landscape the opposite of an ethnocentric mindset is required and postulates that managers should rather think global first. In line with this assumption the mindset which leads to success in global competition would be that of equidistance along with the capacity of insiderization which entails the ability to become a fully fledged member of local markets.

Perlmutter and Ohmae, the two international management experts referred to, see the global corporate management challenge not in adopting one management strategy worldwide but rather in developing attitudes and visions of corporate managers. And Bartlett, Ghoshal and Birkinshaw additionally confirm in a nutshell as follows: “Transnational management is not a structure. It is a mindset”; in the sense of a matrix of the mind which they characterize as follows: “Diverse roles and dispersed operations must be held together by a management mindsets that understands the need for multiple strategic capabilities, views, problems and opportunities from both local and global perspectives, and is willing to interact with others openly and freely.” The notion of the transnational is therefore an idealized approach to global management which involves three key capabilities of previous stages of corporate globalization within a multidimensional approach: The efficiency of the global company, the flexibility of the multinational and all pervasive organizational learning: thus efficiency, flexibility and learning are enablers of effective management of global competitiveness and complexity of global markets that stretch to the horizon.

The following transcultural profiler models the totality of the complexity of the multidimensionality of today’s global management environment and distills a singular superordinate dimension of conscientia or consciousness that can integrate multidimensional complexity.

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