Archive for the ‘Global Entrepreneurship’ Category

Today’s Thunderbird Global Council meeting in Salzburg has helped push Vision 2020 a step further focusing on two critical issues:

1. How to measure impact.  Vision 2020 calls for a focus on “global impact” and a laser focus in educating individuals who can contribute to a thriving, sustainable and inclusive global economy. This requires that we begin to report publicly on the real impact we have.  The TGC is helping identify a set of indicators of impact to be included on our first “Impact Report”.

2. How to build a global community of learning and practice that will support global leaders throughout their careers and will empower them to create value in various ways through various cycles.  Such community should deliver at least three types of value: inspiration, insight, involvement; it should be both virtual and physical; it should be global in composition and focus; it should be flexible and self-organizing.

Great energy, great ideas.  I feel energized to take next steps.  And ready for the alumni reunion tomorrow in Bad Ischl.

Through Imagining the Future of Leadership, a symposium at the Harvard Business School and accompanying blog series organized by Profs. Snook, Nohria and Khurana, an eclectic group of  thinkers gathered to investigate what is necessary today to develop the leaders we need for tomorrow.

This video (a The Crucial Skill for Tomorrow’s Leaders – Video – Harvard Business Review) provides a nice sample of the discussions that took place, featuring (in order of appearance):

Myself, Bill George (Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic), Daisy Wademan Dowling (Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley), Andy Zelleke (Harvard Kennedy School), Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld (NYU), Evan Wittenberg (Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc.), Ellen Langer (Harvard), Scott Snook (HBS and retired Colonel, US Army Corps of Engineers).

My own contribution dealt with “The Soul of Leadership“, the notion that leadership builds on trust, and trust builds on values.

Research by my colleagues Mary Sully de Luque and Nathan Washburn shows that CEOs who frame decisions in pure economic terms tend to be perceived as more autocratic and less visionary than leaders who express concern for a broader set of stakeholders through, for example, a commitment to public good. And the more visionary a leader is perceived to be, the more willing employees are to go the extra mile and consequently deliver higher performance. [...]

Corporations may have “no body to kick and no soul to damn” as the old adage goes. But their leaders do. In fact, it is followers’ perceptions of a leader’s “soul” that can make or break the deal. One of the greatest challenges of any corporate leader is to convince everyone else that they will not compromise the interest of the corporation, if not society, for their own benefit.

My colleague Mansour Javidan, also in attendance, discussed how crucial Global Mindset will be in the future of leadership.

Leaders with a strong stock of Global Mindset know about cultures and political and economic systems in other countries and understand how their global industry works. They are passionate about diversity and are willing to push themselves. They are comfortable with being uncomfortable in uncomfortable environments. They are also better able to build trusting relationships with people who are different from them by showing respect and empathy and by being good listeners.

By Thunderbird Knowledge Network Editor

LIMA — About 300 Peruvian women with big dreams for their microenterprises crowded into a makeshift auditorium June 21, 2010, for the launch of Proyecto Salta, a three-hour business course developed at Thunderbird School of Global Management in partnership with local training company Aprenda.

“The audience was absolutely captivated,” said Thunderbird Professor Christine Pearson, Ph.D., a curriculum contributor who attended the launch. “The material seems to be just the right level.”

Aprenda instructors repeated the free course twice in different locations on June 22. Overall, the program will reach 100,000 micro-entrepreneurs all over Peru within four years.

Many program participants have microloans from Mibanco and other Peruvian banks, and the goal of Proyecto Salta is to link access to capital with access to education.

Funding partners for the program include the Australian Agency for International Development and the Multilateral Investment Fund of Inter-American Development Bank.

Read more »

Thunderbird alum, Hon. Doctorate recipient and Fellow, Luis Alberto Moreno, President of the Inter American Development Bank, is featured today in the Washington Post “On Leadership” section, for his efforts to apply business solutions to fight poverty.

Moreno’s perspective is worth taking seriously, since he is the most influential development banker in the Western Hemisphere. Trained in media and management sciences, Moreno has held positions in the Colombian cabinet and as Ambassador to the United States. These were grueling apprenticeships that prepared him to be president of the IDB in Washington.[...]

I first came to work for Moreno when he introduced the concept of competitiveness to Colombian firms, created a broad consultative process between the public and private sectors, and made an agenda for legislative reform, which included privatization. Moreno reasoned that Colombian firms were not succeeding beyond domestic markets, and only an in-depth understanding of their challenges would allow the government to play a meaningful role in building competitiveness.[...]

Through this experience, Moreno realized that strategy for creating prosperity for all citizens of any nation had to include the private sector. “Enterprise solutions to poverty” was a paradigm shift. Until then, most other decision makers in Latin America believed that government officials should set competitive strategy. Moreno was one of the first leaders in the world to observe that it wasn’t working. Poverty rates were increasing. Traditional positive values were under assault. Social cohesion, itself, was threatened.

via On Leadership Panelists: Luis Alberto Moreno: Business solutions to poverty – Michael Fairbanks.

Global entrepreneurship is not just about new technologies: it is about connecting the dots, about matching supply and demand in ways no one has tried before, finding new ways to deliver cheaper and better goods… even in the most basic commodities, and even if it means selling crops from an advanced economy in emerging markets.  Check out this fascinating story of a Turkish-Canadian T-Bird entrepreneur Murad Al-Qatib:

About 35 to 40 per cent of the world’s lentil trade passes though Mr. Al-Katib’s hands in one way or another. In total, Canadian pulse [lentils, chick peas, etc.] production exceeds five million tonnes a year – up from 250,000 tonnes in 1985 –and most of it comes from Saskatchewan.

Mr. Al-Katib, with his global business savoir faire, exudes an exotic air, but he is just as Saskatchewanian as curling and Tommy Douglas. A son of a Turkish-Canadian family, he was born and raised in Davidson, Sask., where his father was the town doctor and his mother was the mayor for a time.

Pulses didn’t always make his heart beat faster. With a commerce degree from University of Saskatchewan and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, he thought he would end up on Wall Street. But he wrote a fateful letter in the mid-1990s to Roy Romanow urging the then-NDP premier to build a trade promotion presence in emerging markets.

Mr. Romanow invited him to join that effort and, as a 25-year-old, he was selling Saskatchewan crops to places like India, China and Bangladesh. After seven years in government, he conjured up the idea of becoming a value-added trader and processor of pulses. A Turkish family, the Arslans, invested $1.5-million in his newly formed Saskcan Pulse Trading Inc.

Nine years later, Saskcan has evolved into a global business, now called Alliance, that operates 21 factories in Canada, Turkey, Australia and the United States, but earns 60 per cent of its revenues in Canada through its Saskcan operations.

[...]

Pulse production is declining in the very countries that consume the most and where population is growing the fastest. As producers, many countries in Africa and Asia have trouble coping with seed diseases, and there is little plant research.

Contrast this to his home province, where University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre has developed shorter-maturing strains suited to the Western Canadian growing season.

He says his future lies in pushing up the value chain, which means more packaging, canning, processing and branding of pulses. He talks of turning green lentils into his own pasta, and buying chickpeas from farmers for his own hummus production.

Regina, hummus capital of the world? Don’t underestimate the vision of Mr. Al-Katib, whose finger is on the pulse of world food trade.

“I’m not an ag guy, I’m a risk manager,” he explains. “This business is all about emerging markets, market development and risk management. We’re dealing in countries that once were not familiar to Saskatchewan exporters.”

via Saskatchewan’s prince of the pulse crops – The Globe and Mail.

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, my colleagues Gregory Unruh and Richard Ettenson explain how going green can pay off:

“thanks to aggressive leadership by some of the world’s biggest companies—Wal-Mart, GE, and DuPont among them—green growth has risen to the top of the agenda for many businesses. From 2007 to 2009 eco-friendly product launches increased by more than 500%. A recent IBM survey found that two-thirds of executives see sustainability as a revenue driver, and half of them expect green initiatives to confer competitive advantage. This dramatic shift in corporate mind-set and practices over the past decade reflects a growing awareness that environmental responsibility can be a platform for both growth and differentiation”.

via Growing Green – Harvard Business Review.

Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting, six week, multi-author blog on “imagining the future of leadership“, that tries to identify major trends in leadership around the world.  The blog is open for public commentary and discussion.

Today’s entry is by my colleague Mansour Javidan, on how to lead with a “global mindset”:

In most societies, ordinary citizens are socialized to learn how to work with people who are like them. They develop a unicultural lens that helps them understand and interpret their surroundings.

This formula has worked for many centuries, but it is an obstacle now — kids grow up learning how to work with people who are like them; as adults, they start working for companies who require them to work with people who are different from them and who have different cultural lenses.

via Bringing the Global Mindset to Leadership – Imagining the Future of Leadership – Harvard Business Review.

My colleague Bob Hisrich presented today on campus his latest book “International Entrepreneurship: Starting, Developing, and Managing a Global Venture“.  Bob likes to define entrepreneurship as “creating value, assuming risks and reaping rewards”.  When moving from a domestic market to a global scale, entrepreneurs take advantage of economic discontinuities and inefficiencies across borders and find ways to create value by bridging markets and tapping resources.

Global entrepreneurship is one of the core components of Thunderbird’s model of global leadership.  We use the term to refer not only to the creation of new enterprises, but to the establishment of new commercial relationships, business partnerships, investments or business expansions.   Global entrepreneurs envision new ways to create value where others only see obstacles.

No matter how we define it, the name of Merle Hinrichs ‘65 (in the picture in a recent visit with the President of Panama) keeps coming to mind as the perfect example of a global entrepreneur.

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of presenting him with Thunderbird’s highest distinction (the honorary doctorate), in recognition for his many contributions to global trade (not to mention his service as a Thunderbird trustee, his philanthropic work using trade to combat poverty, or his multi-million dollar contributions to the School for the benefit of future global entrepreneurs).

Born and raised in Nebraska, Merle moved to Asia after graduating from Thunderbird.  In 1970 he founded what later became Global Sources (Nasdaq: GSOL), with the hope to facilitate trade between East and West and that way contribute to global prosperity and peace.  With time his company would become Asia’s leading business-to-business media company (which makes him, I suppose, a meta-global-entrepreneur: a global entrepreneur dedicated to empowering global entrepreneurs).

Today it is hard to imagine a world economy without China, but when Merle envisioned Global Sources, Nixon was yet to set foot in China.  Global markets are not inevitable, the are the result of entrepreneurial talent and hard work.  Congratulations Merle for being such great example of what we are about!

Thunderbird ‘05 alum Matt Berg recognized by Time magazine for his work using SMS technology to improve health care in Africa:

ChildCount+ has been in existence for only nine months and has already reported more than 20,000 nutrition screenings, 500 cases of malnutrition and 2,000 of malaria. Berg and his colleagues are now scaling up to monitor more than 100,000 children under 5.The use of technology in Africa has long been Berg’s passion, and he’s made it his mission to nurture homegrown talent too. He helped establish the Rural Technology Lab in Mali, so local students can take over the job of ensuring their communities’ health. Remarkable as Berg’s work is, its greatest achievement will come when he’s no longer the one doing it.

via Matt Berg – The 2010 TIME 100 – TIME.

Is it OK to make a profit for investors while serving the poor?  Is business better or worse equipped than nonprofits to lead innovation and change?  Will the increased accountability required by donors hinder innovation?

The American Express Foundation brought this week to Thunderbird an impressive group of leaders from nonprofit organizations from around the world for an intensive leadership development program directed by my colleagues Mary Teagarden and Mike Finney.  About twenty-five leaders from organizations like Acumen Fund, Ashoka, Aravind Eye Care System, Care, Doctors Without Borders, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Heifer International, Pro Mujer, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and World Wildlife Fund.

Some of these organizations have contributed to bringing down the wall between business and nonprofits and unleash a new era of innovation.  They are applying concepts of entrepreneurship to drive social change, the tools of venture capital to crack complex development challenges or microfinance to unlock the poverty trap.

Nonprofits are increasingly benefiting from management tools and frameworks coming from business.  These tools are opening up entirely new solution spaces and encouraging a new wave of entrepreneurship and innovation.  I am not sure the reverse flow of influence is occurring with the same intensity, and it should.  Nonprofits have a lot to teach business in how to build high-commitment, purpose-driven organizations, how to deal with uncertainty, balance multiple stakeholder interests and build talent.