Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures

Alan Mulally President, Boeing Commercial Airplane Group Global Literacies is a wonderful opportunity to learn from successful teams that are creating meaning and value in our new world economy.

Auteur

Robert Rosen is a psychologist and the founder and CEO of Healthy Companies International, a consulting firm that advises executives of the Global 1000 and entrepreneurial growth companies. The author of The Healthy Company, Leading People, and numerous articles, Rosen has worked in over twenty-five countries, speaks to thousands of executives each year, and appears regularly in the media worldwide.

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Throughout the world, languages differ, but the business questions are the same. In French and Japanese, Hebrew and English, executives are asking, "How can I survive and thrive in the borderless, global marketplace?"
For answers, the authors of Global Literacies went straight to the leaders themselves -- the CEOs of thousands of corporations around the globe.

Two lessons emerged. First, there are leadership universals that every executive and manager needs to practice in order to be world-class at home and abroad. The second defied conventional wisdom: in the borderless economy, culture doesn't matter less, it matters more.

Around the world, business leaders apply their own experiences -- personal, professional, and cultural -- to an ever-expanding world of Dutch colleagues, Brazilian suppliers, Taiwanese manufacturers, and Chinese competitors. These leaders are trying to become globally literate...and Global Literacies is for, and about, them.

No one knows this better than CEOs of successful global companies such as Japan's Canon, Sweden's Ericsson, Taiwan's Acer Computers, the U.K.'s British Telecommunications, and U.S.-based Coca-Cola.
In Global Literacies, a team of researchers led by Robert Rosen, Ph.D., of Healthy Companies International, and Watson Wyatt Worldwide have produced the first model of international business success based on a wide-ranging landmark study of global leaders and their world-class companies. Global Literacies documents the exclusive results of a worldwide survey of over one thousand senior executives and in-depth interviews with CEOs of seventy-eight companies -- companies representing 3.5 million employees in more than 200 countries, and with more than $725 billion in annual sales.

Global Literacies offers compelling new insights and business tools:
The Global Leadership Universals

Learn the new literacies of business:

• Personal Literacy -- understanding and valuing yourself
• Social Literacy -- engaging and challenging people
• Business Literacy -- focusing and mobilizing your business

• Cultural Literacy -- valuing and leveraging cultural difference

  The Global Success Quotient

  Learn which are the most globally active, financially successful companies -- and countries -- in the world, understand how they got there, and apply those learnings to your own organization.

  The Cultures of Twenty-first-Century Business
  Develop ways to see global challenges and opportunities, think with an international mindset, act with fresh global-centric leadership behaviors, and mobilize world-class companies -- whether you're a multinational giant, a domestic manufacturer, or a local community organization.

  National Profiles

  With sophisticated profiles of thirty countries, and survey data from eighteen national cultures -- from the Tolerant Traders of the Netherlands to China's Ancient Modernizers and the Optimistic Entrepreneurs of the United States, Global Literacies is a groundbreaking and fascinating work on the most important issues in the world of business today.

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Chapter One: The New Business Reality

I still remember my first trip to Japan. Surrounded by the signs and sounds of Japanese, I felt utterly lost. Unable to decipher even the most basic information in restaurants and on city streets, I retreated into myself. It was hard to stretch into unfamiliar territory. When I asked questions, people reacted in ways I couldn't quite understand. I simply couldn't read their psychology.

In an instant, I understood what it means to be illiterate. Only when I got home, relieved to be back in the United States, did I fully recognize the personal cost of global illiteracy. Like adults who can't read, I had hidden the fact that I couldn't understand the verbal and nonverbal cues around me. Although intrigued by the differences, I spent a lot of energy protecting myself for fear of appearing foolish. I felt defensive, making it difficult to fully experience the world of Japan.

Being illiterate, even for that short period of time, taught me a lot about the power of literacy in our lives. Many of us take literacy for granted. We can't imagine -- or remember -- a world in which we were not able to read. But all of us were there at one time.

Watching a child learn to read is like witnessing a miraculous process unfold. A whole world suddenly opens up to him or her, enriching life beyond measure, adding depth and feeling to every experience.

We urge children to read at such an early age, and we worry when they don't proceed at the right pace. We do everything we can -- buy them books, take them to libraries, show them flash cards -- to ensure they master this new language, these strange, black hieroglyphics.

Once children have mastered basic words, we urge them toward greater complexity of ideas. One-syllable words give way to three-syllable ones, complex descriptions paint a picture richer than simple picture books, and dialogues become multilayered and more subtle.

But literacy doesn't matter just to children. In the new global world of business, we're all beginning readers. Like children, we must learn to read the world's new language by deciphering the handwriting, engaging in dialogues, and sharing ourselves in the process.

Literacy matters. And the worst thing for adults in the twenty-first century is being unable to read the world. Being able to read this emerging world allows us to witness an unfolding, an opening up of new possibilities. To fully participate in the global society, we need a common vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, and a rich base of knowledge. We need to move beyond comprehension of letters and language to a deeper understanding of ourselves, our customers, our markets, and the cultures of the world.

Global literacy is our new language for the twenty-first century.

The Twenty-first-Century Marketplace

We stand on a precipice, stepping into a new era, a time of enormous change and uncertainty characterized by the emergence of the first truly borderless, interconnected global economy. It's the world's youngest economy, fueled by the spread of free markets and democracy around the world.

Walls are crumbling among markets, organizations, and nations. People, information, labor, and capital move freely as never before. Global media, international travel, and communications have eroded distance and borders, linking us instantly to one another from Prague to Shanghai, from Lima to London. A tightly woven fabric of distant encounters and instant connections knits our diverse world together.

Ours is a unique place in history. Not since the Industrial Revolution have we faced such forces in two fundamental areas of world society: the electronic information revolution and global economic interdependence. This isn't just a change in degree, but a fundamental change in kind. Globalization is a new international system that is shaping domestic and international politics and changing the rules of trade. A dynamic and ongoing process, globalization involves the integration of markets and nation-states, enabling individuals, corporations, and countries to reach the world farther, faster, deeper, …