Is Globalization a Myth or a Reality?

As businesses increasingly become "global players", the strategic quandary is to what extent does the business operate integrate to generate synergies and match its global customers, or is a bias toward local or regional practices more effective.

Pankaj Ghemawat, the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School and the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration (on leave) at the Harvard Business School, argues in his recent columns on Harvard Business Online that the actual levels of globalization fall close to 10%. This reality is less of the issue than surveys indicating an average management belief that globalization is near 30%.

Such a gap would be less of a concern if trend lines indicating that the "flattened world" is nearing quickly. Ghemawat challenges all of these beliefs as "globaloney", and raise concerns these myths may be leading companies and economists to make incorrect strategic decisions.

What are your experiences with the challenges of global integration?

X-Teams Solve Key Corporate Dilemmas

Leading a team chartered with innovation? Working with a group globally? Unable to secure funding from management for your ideas?

Deborah Ancona outlines the dilemmas that she finds organizations facing today in this article X-Teams Solve Key Corporate Dilemmas. Briefly, how do you innovate when people are burdened by day-to-day customer and business demands? How do you empower people and teams to gather information from their world and use it to innovate? How do you quickly develop leadership talent within an organization.

While the article and her new book with Bresman, X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Amazon link) focus on areas of innovation, the thinking and process suggested in this book and related articles (see also an interview of Bresman for Insead Knowledge) can be more broadly applied to moving an organization from a local to a global perspective. Too often we find local organizations looking outside of their own organization only when they need help. Already constrained by the model they are using, they have trouble seeing the value when they finally look outside. Chartering an organization to be externally focused at all phases of their work will open their minds to innovation, whether at the idea, execution or growth phases.

To employ these ideas, we must encourage and support extensive networks into other functions, other countries, and other companies. We must find ways to bring "outsiders" into team processes for limited periods of time and with specific purposes. We must ask for and reward the sharing of ideas and the leveraging of experiences and people.

What ways to you see to use the concept of X-teams in global organizations?