Archive for October, 2008

I had a very good conversation with my friend Paul Meyer in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago around the notion of “global citizenship”.  Paul is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Voxiva, a company dedicated to providing information systems that exploit the power of cellular phones to collect and analyze direct data from the field.  In a prior incarnation he created IPKO, Kosovo’s leading Internet and telecommunications service provider.

What’s interesting about Paul is that he never really intended to become an information technology entrepreneur.  He first used information technology to reunite families displaced in refugee camps in Africa.  He then landed in Kosovo, weeks after the end of the 1999 war, and began providing rudimentary Internet service connecting Kosovo to the outside world with a humanitarian agenda.  The service ended up growing into a full-fledged telecommunications operator.

Read more »

The fourteen 2008 Artemis Fellows completed their program yesterday and proudly received the certificates they have earned.  Today they will be packing up and heading back to Afghanistan… committed to growing their businesses, beating the odds and creating opportunities for hundreds more. Getting to know these women has been a humbling learning experience for many of us and an inspiration to keep working at educating global leaders where they are most needed.

Read more »

I was invited to speak today at the annual meeting of the National Association of Investment Companies, an industry association for “for private equity firms that invest in an ethnically diverse marketplace”.  A key focus of the conference (in fact of the association) are the so-called Emerging Domestic Markets, markets in low-income communities, inner cities, and minority-owned businesses.

According to a 2007 research report by the Milken Institute:

The dramatically changing composition of the U.S. population holds significant economic and political consequences. Ethnic groups now constitute majorities in four states (California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas) and the District of Columbia, and within twenty years will do so in nine more (including electoral powerhouses New York, New Jersey, and Florida). If the purchasing power of the country’s ethnic groups represented a single nation, it would constitute the world’s seventh-largest economy.

Not surprisingly, the makeup of the nation’s business ownership is changing as well. Ethnic-owned firms grew at twice the rate of all firms over the past ten years, and the number of women-owned firms grew faster. Businesses in traditionally overlooked areas, such as low-income communities and inner cities, show market potential that defies stereotypical expectations. Yet these business owners continue to face challenges accessingcapital, thus hindering their opportunities for growth.

These emerging domestic markets (EDMs) have been overlooked and undervalued. Given their increasing share of the U.S. market, brakes on their growth will lead to brakes on overall national economic growth.

Interestingly, dealing with these emerging domestic markets may require some of the same skills needed to deal with emerging international markets.  Even if one chooses to stay at home and not embark in international business, cultural diversity will reach you no matter what!  Regardless of how domestic a business may be, it is nevertheless important to develop a good dose of global leadership.

The Thunderbird Global Council paid homage to Professor David Bowen last week for his career contributions to the management field.  A great opportunity to roast him, I thought… but somehow it was our provost and I who ended up being roasted by him!  It was all worth it in any event. One rarely comes across someone with David’s intellect and ability to comprehend and articulate complex ideas.  On top of that, he is an amazing teacher, colleague and friend.

Earlier this summer, David received an award by the Academy of Management for his work on organizational justice.  Then a few weeks ago he received an award by the American Marketing Association for his career contributions to the services discipline.

David is one of the leading scholars of the last two decades who has most eloquently argued for management’s responsibility to create value for employees as a necessary condition to create value for customers and, ultimately, shareholders.  Issues such as employee empowerment or justice in organizations are not just important because the affect people’s lives, but because they can drive (or hamper) results.

In 2005, I had the pleasure to write an article with David about the need to treat management (actually global management) as true profession dedicated to creating prosperity… (an idea recently “re-discovered” by Khurana and Nohria… see my earlier posting on this).  If you don’t have much time to spare, here’s the summary:
Read more »

The best business schools in the world are also the most expensive.  Including living expenses (and even leaving out opportunity costs), an MBA has become a six-figure dollar investment… a safe investment indeed (an MBA from a good school is a pretty sure ticket to a high paying career), but a costly one that is out of reach for the vast majority of people around the world.

In 2004 we decided to reach out to a region of the world in dire need of new leadership and invested in training 15 women entrepreneurs from Afghanistan.  As it turned out, we ended up learning more about global leadership and entrepreneurship from them than they did from us! And we were deeply inspired by how these women beat the odds, creating wealth and jobs in the toughest conditions, and spreading the entrepreneurial bug to dozens of other women in their country.  So we decided to bring two more cohorts to our Arizona campus (the last of them is currently on campus, and their experiences are being reported in the following daily blog).
Read more »

In the October 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Profs. R. Khurana and N. Nohria argue that “It’s time to make management a true profession“.  According to them:

To regain society’s trust, business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians.  In other words, it’s time that management finally became a profession.

Professions of course are built not only on a specialized body of knowledge, but also on a sense of service to the greater good and a clear code of conduct.
Read more »

My friend and former colleague at IE Business School Eric Napoli (check out his political blog at www.graveerror.net) emailed the following thoughts today:

I was just watching the Bill Moyers Journal and Moyers was interviewing George Soros on the state of the financial crisis. As I was listening, I kept thinking that your blog should be addressing the important that will face leaders due to the the financial crisis, similar to the way that you really took the lead on ethics after Enron.

In a sense, the financial crisis is an extension of Enron. Now more than ever in globalized markets where average citizens, businesses, and financial institutions are all dependent on one another (think about the credit interdependence that has caused the crash), we need better leaders. Leaders need to step up to the plate. The whole paradigm of corporations defined exclusively by their profits alone can no longer be seen as valuable to society. Transparency, sustainability, even paying taxes (the new patriotism) are now vital both to capitalism (finally) and society’s survival.
Read more »

Discussions about global development are dominated by hard econometric data. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, except that we run the risk of assuming that it is the indicators themselves that we are trying to improve, not the lives of people. I hate to disillusion my economist friends, but as hard as we may try, GDP growth cannot be eaten!

It would probably be more useful if we could analyze data on how well people are in fact doing: how well we are eating, how secure we feel, how healthy we are, how frustrated we are with government… But how can we get such data?  Here’s a good start: ask people how they are doing!

This past Monday, I was invited by the Meridian International Center to moderate a panel at the Global Engagement Forum in Washington, D.C., at an event they co-organized with Gallup. There I learned of the latest Gallup World Poll initiative: Gallup WorldView — an online tool that brings together data from worldwide polls and allows us to map how different countries compare along a set of key 20 key indexes (and much of it is available for free).

Now we just need to convince economists and other social scientists to start digging into the data and share with the rest of us what they find … I’m guessing we are in for a few surprises.

Thank you Gallup!

Thunderbird alum and TGC member John Cook shared with me a story from today’s New York Times (”In Poverty and Strife, Women Test Limits“) about the life of women in Bamian (or Bamyan) in Afghanistan.  One of the women who have tested the limits (and as a consequence, raised the bar for her and all other women) is Thunderbird Artemis Fellow Fatima Kazemi.

In her late twenties, Fatima became the first shop owner in Bazar-e-Ghul market in Bamyan… but not without a good share of bullying from her now fellow shop owners, who thought she would set a bad example for their wives and daughters. Fatima owes part of her success to the support she received from Governor Habiba Sorabi (who is quoted in the NY Times story). Fatima and Habiba are just two of the many heroic Afghani women who are helping each other in their quest to making the world of their sons and daughters more fair than the one they had to endure.

This month Thunderbird will welcome the third class of Artemis Fellows… I look forward to meeting another group of exceptional leaders.  I just hope they learn half as much as we will be learning from them!

After 17 years of exemplary service as Thunderbird’s dean of admissions, Judy Johnson decided it was time to retire and pass the torch to a new generation.  Last night, the board of trustees, several members of the faculty and the administration, students and alumni joined President Emeritus Roy Herberger and me in thanking her for having found and recruited about 10,000 T-Birds throughout her career.

Judy’s remarkable ability to recognize talent around the world, to read between the lines of biographies, letters of recommendation and personal statements and find the raw material of global leadership is not just amazing… it actually calls into question the very premise of this blog: that global leaders are made, not just born.

Thunderbird student Pellagia Muliba also argued a few days ago that global leaders are born, and that the role of places like Thunderbird is to recognize those individuals who have the right passion and ability and help them further develop both.

Research by Prof. Mansour Javidan and other colleagues at Thunderbird has discovered that some components of what we call a “global mindset” (a core dimension of global leadership) are learned, while others are not.  For instance, cognitive flexibility or openness to experience (a personality trait) are unlikely to respond to training, while global social and intellectual capital are clearly acquired through experience.

So the answer is likely to be both… global leadership potential needs to be identified before it can be developed… as the saying goes, it may be possible to teach an elephant to climb a tree, but it is a heck of a lot easier to teach a squirrel!

Thank you Judy for having found so many raw diamonds around the world and for having made our educational mission so much easier as a consequence.  You will be dearly missed by all of us.  Happy journey!

– Ángel