The Great Game: How Globalization Changes the Managerial Mindset

Summary

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Today, globalization impacts customers and the management mindset in profound ways. Today, the term "Great Game" connotes a new geopolitical outlook for markets, technologies, and customers. This paper addresses these issues and their impact on management education and development strategies for Canada and Canadians. As Canada enters the second decade of the 21st century, it is instructive to look ahead and consider a possible change in direction. Globalization accounts for the emergence of business schools around the world, a phenomenon that reflects -- and that many countries hope, will enable them to replicate -- the pre-eminent US experience. Canadian business schools increasingly lack a critical mass of faculty in key disciplines such as accounting or marketing, and feature too much teaching by part-timers and PhD students, and by faculty with limited or no work experience. The new, multi-polar world is forcing Canadian companies and Canadian management to move beyond the comfortable pew of North America.

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The Great Game: How Globalization Changes the Managerial Mindset

More than ever, now is the time for Canadian businesses - and Canadian business schools - to transform and re-orient themselves to a world which places a premium on capabilities, skills and knowledge that managers and companies in Canada don't have. This is a new world and one ripe with opportunity, there for the taking, given the right understanding, mindset and education.

It is now 40 years since Peter Drucker published his mind-bending analysis of the world economy. In his study, The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker foresaw in remarkable detail the emergence of the global economy, the rise of the service sector and the downfall of the Soviet Union. More profoundly, and building on the studies of Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan, Drucker recognized how globalization would change the expectations of consumers, regardless of country or region. Tellingly, he predicted that a new, particular commonality, independent of any political system, would soon govern and focus the energy and activities of nations around the world. Very soon, Drucker said, the nations of the world would be interconnected and come to do business in a "global shopping center."

The 2008 "Made in America" financial crisis illustrates Drucker's prescience. This crisis also substantiates what a Japanese leader said decades ago at the G-7 Summit in Venice - "We are all in the same gondola now." Drucker understood that any government, regardless of type (democratic or totalitarian) or stage of development (highly developed, like Europe, Japan, or the United States, or emerging markets like Turkey, Nigeria, Vietnam, or Brazil) has only two fundamental social systems - governments and bureaucracies, or markets and the price system. The issue isn't one or the other, but the judicious combination of both. Drucker also understood that, while the world was on the verge of becoming a global shopping center, "this world economy almost entirely lacks economic institutions to energize global productivity."

Today, globalization impacts customers and the management mindset in profound ways. Unfortunately, the global economy today neither reflects the existence of the political institutions defined as the "nation state" nor the makeover of those very institutions needed to correct the post-1945 imbalances between the "third world" and the first world. Today, a new "Great Game" has arisen, reconstructing the global...

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