The imperative of cultivating a global mindset is most obvious in the case of those individuals responsible for managing activities that span borders (for example, a global product manager, a Europe region marketing manager).

Benefits of a global mindset

It also is obvious for those individuals who interface routinely with customers, suppliers or peers from other countries.

The value added by a global mindset, is likely to be strongest in the case of those individuals who are directly responsible for managing cross-border activities.

However, what about those individuals who not only have purely local responsibilities (for example, a production supervisor or a machine operator) but who also have little if any routine interaction with customers, suppliers or peers in other countries? Can these employees — as well as the company — benefit from the cultivation of a global mindset? Our unambiguous answer is yes.

Consider, for example, the job of, say, paint shop supervisors in a global car company such as Toyota or Hyundai. The company is likely to have dozens of such individuals, and it is very unlikely that any of them will ever be sent on an expatriate assignment or engage in cross-border negotiations. Nonetheless, the company can build a global learning community of its own paint shop supervisors.

Forming bonds

They might, for instance, all receive and contribute to a global paint shop newsletter and might have easy connectivity to each other through electronic mail. Their children might enjoy being pen-pals. The net result would almost certainly be that, in a company with these types of practices, the need for a hierarchical push to create a learning organization deep within its operations would be dramatically reduced.

In today’s technology-networked environment, nothing — other than the lack of a global mindset — prevents even assembly-line workers from developing their own global learning communities. In the absence of a global mindset, creating a global learning organization will almost certainly be a much tougher challenge.

Adding value to business

This is not meant to imply that the global mindset imperative is equally strong across the entire spectrum of employees. Although we contend

In today’s technology networked environment, nothing prevents even assembly line workers from developing their own global learning communities.

that the returns to investment in cultivating a global mindset would always be positive, we do not expect them to be uniform.

The value added by a global mindset, and the value subtracted by its absence, is likely to be strongest in the case of those individuals who are directly responsible for managing cross-border activities (for example, the president of GE Lighting), followed by those who must interact frequently with colleagues from other countries (for example, members of a cross-border research team at Alcatel-Lucent).

Thus, if a company is in the early stages of becoming systematic about cultivating global mindsets, the highest returns would come from focusing on these more senior levels.

Cultivating a global mindset

Nonetheless, if the company’s goal is to capture and sustain global market leadership in its industry, it absolutely has to regard the development of a global mindset as a goal that encompasses each and every unit and each and every employee.

In thinking about how to cultivate a global mindset, it is critical to remember that the key word is cultivation, and that the quest for a global mindset is a ceaseless journey. Living as we do in a complex and dynamic world, there is no upper limit to the extent to which one could continue to explore the world’s diversity as well as the linkages across this diversity.

Changing knowledge structures

No matter how developed the global mindset of a Nokia, a Toyota or a Cisco Systems may appear to be today, surely 20 years from now, these companies’ current mindset

How successful a company is at exploiting emerging opportunities depends on how intelligent it is at observing and interpreting the dynamic world in which it operates.

would appear, in relative terms, quite naive.

Remember too that mindsets represent knowledge structures (that is, cognitive templates). As a result, the development of mindsets follows the same generic path as the development of all types of knowledge: child learning to walk, a team of scientists pushing the limits of microprocessor technology, or an organization like eBay learning about the world’s cultures and markets.

As we know from research in a variety of areas, including evolution of species, human development, cognitive psychology and even technological innovation, all development occurs through a sequence of evolutions and revolutions.

Cultivating curiosity about the world

Curiosity and openness about how the world works reflects an attitude — an element of the individual’s personality makeup. Like other elements of personality, this attitude is shaped heavily by early childhood experiences and becomes more resistant to change as the individual gets older.

Thus, although a company does have some maneuvering room in further cultivating curiosity among its existing employees, its greatest degree of freedom lies at the point of selection and in managing the company’s demographic makeup.

Diversity of employees

In situations where a company has the luxury of hiring a younger workforce, it may

The ongoing cultivation of a global mindset, whether at the individual or the organizational level, must be seen as taking place through a series of S-curves.

be able to develop an inherent corporate advantage in the degree to which its employees will strive to develop a global mindset.

In any case, every company has a good deal of discretion in including curiosity about diverse cultures and markets among the selection criteria at the point of hiring and again at the point of promotion.

Promotion decisions to senior executive levels that place high value on global experience and global mindsets also have a corollary effect in terms of sending strong signals regarding the increasing criticality of openness to and curiosity about diverse cultures and markets.

Changing times

The economic landscape of the world is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly global. For virtually every medium-sized to large company in developed as well as developing economies, market opportunities, critical resources, cutting-edge ideas and competitors lurk not just around the corner in the home market—but increasingly in distant and often little-understood regions of the world as well.

How successful a company is at exploiting emerging opportunities and tackling accompanying challenges depends crucially on how intelligent it is at observing and interpreting the dynamic world in which it operates. Creating a global mindset is one of the central ingredients required for building such intelligence.