Growing Global Executives: The New Competencies
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Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the founding president of the Center for Talent Innovation, a Manhattan-based think tank where she chairs a task force of eighty-two multinational companies focused on fully realizing the new streams of labor in the global marketplace. Her book Forget a Mentor: Find a Sponsor was named one of the ten best business books of 2013 and won the Axiom Book Award.
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Growing Global Executives - Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Advance Praise
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid deftly solve for the challenges of developing local talent to lead emerging market growth for multinationals. With survey data from eleven markets, their research sheds new light on what rising leaders need to know about projecting credibility at headquarters—and winning the sponsorship they’ll need to break into the executive suite. I particularly appreciate the ‘gender lens,’ as growing female executives is an imperative for healthcare and insurance multinationals intent on harnessing the power of the purse globally.
—Mark T. Bertolini, Chairman and CEO,
Aetna Inc.
"Growing Global Executives: The New Competencies includes useful research and insight to guide current and aspiring business leaders in today’s global economy. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid deconstruct the leadership challenges presented by cultural, generational, and gender differences, particularly for executives operating across borders, time zones, and distance. The authors provide sound advice on how to project credibility, build trust, communicate virtually, and develop talent across those differences in ways that will enable business success."
—Horacio D. Rozanski, President and CEO,
Booz Allen Hamilton
Grooming leaders who can engender confidence in the boardroom while effectively motivating coworkers across cultures and time zones is a major challenge for every multinational corporation. Here, armed with telling data drawn from major developed—as well as developing—markets, the authors ably dissect the nuances of culture, gender, and communication, which together, comprise a delicate balance of superior corporate leadership in the twenty-first century.
—Gregory J. Fleming, President, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and Morgan Stanley Investment Management
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid have written an insightful and thought-provoking guide on how to build effective, trusting, and mutually beneficial relationships within multinational corporations. Leaders who are committed to bridging the cultural divide will take away an actionable list of concrete steps they can take to increase their international reach. Enlivening robust data with stories from executives all over the world, Hewlett and Rashid make a clear and compelling case that inclusive leadership is good for business, both in terms of the bottom line and in encouraging worldwide employees to be more connected and innovative.
—John D. Finnegan, Chairman, President, and CEO,
The Chubb Corporation
Yet again, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and the Center for Talent Innovation have shone light on a little-researched and even less understood area of global leadership: the effective characteristics of leadership in different countries and cultures. The variety revealed in ‘what works’ is both striking and invaluable as we adapt our businesses and leadership practices to succeed in a global marketplace. The study goes beyond the intuitive, offering impactful anecdotes and quantitative research that combine to powerful effect.
—Helena Morrissey, CBE,
CEO, Newton Investments, and Founder, 30% Club
"Grooming the next generation of talent worldwide to be inclusive leaders is no easy task, but Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid know just how to go about it. An energetic and engaging read, Growing Global Executives offers a whole new approach to multinationals’ most critical talent challenge."
—Geri Thomas, President of Georgia Market and Global Diversity & Inclusion Executive, Bank of America Corporation
This is a Center for Talent Innovation Publication
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2015 by Center for Talent Innovation
FIRST TRADE PAPERBACK ORIGINAL EDITION
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Minion
Printed in the United States
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, 1946-
Growing global executives : the new competencies / by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid ; Foreword by Tiger
Tyagarajan.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-942600-48-0
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Executives—Training of. 2. Executive ability. 3. Globalization. 4. Industrial management. 5. Corporate governance. 6. International business enterprises—Management. I. Rashid, Ripa. II. Tyagarajan, N.V. III. Title.
HD30.4 .H49 2015
658.4/07124—dc23
To the amazing thought leaders who have been
at the heart of this research:
Rohini Anand
Erika Irish Brown
Caroline Carr
Gail Fierstein
Cassandra Frangos
Valerie Grillo
Rosalind Hudnell
Frances G. Laserson
Piyush Mehta
Shari Slate
David Tamburelli
Karyn Twaronite
Tiger
Tyagarajan
Elana Weinstein
Anré Williams
Melinda Wolfe
Project Team
Research
Laura Sherbin, Director
Pooja Jain-Link
Charlene Thrope
Publications
Melinda Marshall, Director
Isis Fabian
Julia Taylor Kennedy
Anna Weerasinghe
Project Management
Jennifer Zephirin
Communications
Tai Wingfield, Director
Silvia Marte
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
cHAPTER 1: Projecting Credibility: Mastering the Double Pivot
cHAPTER 2: Driving Value: Unlocking Ideation, Winning Endorsement
cHAPTER 3: Mastering Virtual Communication
cHAPTER 4: Winning Sponsorship, Developing Talent
cHAPTER 5: Global Initiatives
Endnotes
Methodology
Acknowledgments
Index
Foreword
When I became Genpact’s chief executive officer in 2011, one of the first things I did was relocate our leadership to the countries where our clients were headquartered. We’d been operating from Gurgaon, India since our inception as a business unit of GE in 1998. But after we spun off in 2005, during the years that I was heading up sales and marketing, I realized that running a global services business was, for all practical purposes, serving our clients’ strategic needs. I didn’t need to be at the factory;
I needed to be sitting in the markets. And if that was true for me, then it was true for my leaders.
Today, with more than sixty-five thousand employees serving clients in twenty-five countries, we are a truly global corporation. Half of our leadership sits in key markets around the world, up from 23 percent merely four years ago. Seven of us live and work in the US, as 60 percent of our revenue derives from multinationals headquartered here. That’s a tremendous change given that four years ago we were considered an Indian
company.
In fact, our evolution is one of our calling cards: because we’re on this transformational journey, our clients look to us to guide their own. As international as they are, they look to us for new ideas on how to work globally. They’re contending with constraints on growth that prompt them to reconsider their own operating models. To become more nimble, more responsive to shifting market dynamics, they wonder: Should they, too, shift their centers of gravity? What might be the optimal global business model? And what competencies might that model demand of both its teams and its leaders?
If we’re able to show them the way, then it’s because of our multicultural DNA. The company I joined in 1998 had a predominantly Indian workforce with leadership that grew up in India but whose culture was American. It bore the imprint of Jack Welch, whose books—particularly Control Your Destiny—had a profound impact on me (and, clearly, on my destiny). While known as a command-and-control leader, Jack was way ahead of the curve in terms of the culture he built, both at GE and its global subsidiaries. GE was one of the first American companies to enter growth markets with the intent of sourcing, developing, and empowering local talent; GE Capital recruited me, after all. And Jack was among the first to perceive the power of crowd-sourcing. He would get people into a room from ten different businesses who literally had no business talking to each other—an aircraft engine developer who had a PhD in materials science talking to an analyst who built risk models for credit cards—and by the end of the day, every one of those people would walk away having learned something. He called it boundary-lessness,
but it’s what we recognize today as diversity of thought and perspective.
Whether our differences are functional or cultural, Jack intuited that harnessing them was the key to sustaining innovation and solving thorny problems.
Furthermore, Jack understood that building an innovative culture depended on people not just coming up with great ideas, but sharing them and copying them. He had no patience for leaders who suffered what he called NIH (not invented here
) syndrome, people who stonewalled innovation because the idea behind it didn’t come from them or their team. So at GE Capital, if a leader hit upon an idea that wound up delivering value to the business, she’d be recognized, but if she took that idea and evangelized it across businesses so that every other leader copied it, she’d be rewarded. As a result, we had teams from different businesses who functioned as one team sharing a lot of best practices and learning from each other, boosting revenues for the firm overall. We drove that value hard; as CEO of our business, I drive it even harder, because being able to collaborate across business units serves us well as we seek to unlock value across cultures and time zones for our clients.
One of the more valuable lessons I took from my early career was the notion that a great leader is a great learner, and that what makes someone a great learner is curiosity. We have always moved young leaders across businesses, across functions, and across experiences, confident that if they were hungry enough to learn, they’d acquire what they needed to know in order to succeed. This is what allowed me, in fact, to go from sales to risk management. I came in to interview for the marketing job and halfway through the interview was offered a risk job. During the interview, I was asked, How can you accept a job that’s the opposite of what you came in for?
I said, I am not here to interview for a job, I am here to interview for a career. I thought the entry point was marketing, but you’ve made clear the entry point is risk.
That was the first of many job changes I