In order to talk
about global leadership, Rosen (let his name stand
for all) analyzes the four cultures that leaders must
understand and orchestrate in 21st century business.
The personal leadership culture seen
in the four literacies above operates in business
cultures that vary from company
to company, each with different priorities and
styles. These business cultures in turn operate
within many national cultures.
National cultures gain definition from the
psychology, economics, politics, religion, geography,
and history peculiar to each. Finally, Rosen places
leadership, business, and national cultures within
the encompassing frame of world
culture, where transnational
organizations do their business. (See Rosen's
schematic figure of these four cultures on p. 34.)
Contemporary
world culture has evolved, in Rosen's view, out of a
combination of forces--the knowledge explosion, the
connections and relationships made possible by
information technology, the chaos and ambiguity
resulting from the unrelenting pace of change, and
the new linkages that make it necessary--and
profitable--to operate globally and locally at the
same time. (pp. 35-37)
While
theoreticians such as Fredric Jameson
still are trying to define
globalization, the practitioners who are the subjects
of this book, as Rosen tells it, are
living it in their corporations.
He depicts a set of men and women whose values are a
mirror of the world they are driving and defining. As
they manage their large corporate entities across
national boundaries, they manifest in their personal
styles the behaviors that work in whatever
globalization turns out theoretically to be. Those
personal styles--"personal literacy" in
Rosen's terminology-- involve seemingly contradictory
types of behavior--"aggressive insight,"
"confident humility," authentic
flexibility," "reflective
decisiveness," and "realistic
optimism." (p. 61)
The book
consists mainly of narratives about the CEOs busy
working in their complex overlay of cultures. The
narratives illustrate the new global language of
business; they show the global literacies being
applied to the big corporate questions, such as
purpose ("Where are we going?"), networks
("How do we work together?"), results
("How do we measure success?").
Take one
example--Cheong Choong Kong, deputy chairman and CEO
of Singapore Airlines (SIA), "the world's most
admired airline," which worldwide employs 27,
516 people serving 80 cities in 41 countries. Rosen
depicts Cheong, a mathematician, as a pragmatic
native of Singapore. He draws on Singapore's national
multicultural traditions to emphasize "team
spirit" in SIA's business culture. That means,
for example, that cabin crews fly together for at
least a year. Peer pressure and family feeling
combine to build success in these crews, and this,
Cheong points out, "is grounded firmly in Asian
concepts of saving face and harmony." Cheong has
instilled a double-edged value of "high
touch" service with the best
"high-tech" airplane environment--the best
of East and West. Because of Singapore's history of
international commerce, SIA's native employees thrive
in the competitive climate that characterizes
globalization. Cheong realizes that openness to
change must counterbalance an embedded national
culture, since change seems to be the only constant
in a globalized economy. Cheong says that things are
always changing "and you cannot afford to take
inflexible positions." (p. 251)
Stories such as
Cheong's at SIA confirm that the transnational
corporate culture at the heart of globalization is no
longer a transitional phenomenon; it has arrived at a
fully developed state. It now displays standards for
corporate behavior throughout the world. Rosen's
analyses of "literacies" and
"cultures" give us a useful lexicon for
talking about those standards.
The stories also
demonstrate that older modernist values, rooted in
European national policies and old colonial outreach,
though they may survive, have had to blend with or
yield to the newer values. European and American
influences of course persist. But the business world
that emerges from these pages is not dependent on
Europe and America for its definition and vitality.
At the leadership level, a new kind of global
character is shaping up. Its prizing of qualities of
openness, flexibility, fairness, and inventiveness
does not come out of a new global
"philosophy." It comes out of the pragmatic
need to succeed in a fast-moving, competitive game of
unprecedented dimensions.
Fredric
Jameson
holds that the definition of globalization at the
philosophical level will be unstable for some time to
come. (The world-system
& the individual and Hegelian oppositions help explain
globalization)
Yet in Rosen's book we see globalization as a
practical corporate matter in full bloom. I don't
think Jameson's observation invalidates the clear
empirical report on global leaders in this book.
Rosen's subjects, despite all the emphasis he and
they place on "cultures," pay scant
attention to the deeper consequences of what their
work is doing--for good or ill--to the world and its
peoples. Rosen's CEOs are so busily immersed in the
new behaviors of world business that they lack the
perspective to see the dynamic effects they are
having on the idea of the "self" and the
idea of the "nation" as globalization moves
ahead.
Rosen lauds his
CEOs for their ability to "leverage culture as a
tool for competitive advantage" (p.50). It does
not occur to Rosen to ask what such leveraging will
do long-run to the integrity of national cultures and
the human quality of the rising world culture. These
are precisely the issues that thinkers such as
Jameson rightly address.
In parting,
Rosen exhorts his readers to become globally literate
"or be left behind." Be it noted he is not
calling us to a wholly self-serving role. He would
have us apply our new literacies as "global
citizens" and offers this very brief vision of
our role:
[We
must work] hard to close the gap between the haves
and have-nots and [dedicate] ourselves to raising
standards of health, education, safety, and wealth
for the world's citizens. We must promote sustainable
development and play a leading role in preserving the
earth's resources. And we must respect human rights,
our democratic institutions, and the integrity of
local cultures. (pp. 375-76)
It would take
another book for Rosen even to begin to examine what
all that means to corporations and how his 75 CEOs
might begin to stimulate corporate actions in pursuit
of such goals. I cannot imagine that they or their
corporations have it in them to embrace a mission
that would give priority to these goals, much less
set specific action agendas for their attainment.
In the modernist
period, when European nations and then America came
to dominate the world's markets, the rest had to
adjust as it could to the ethical fallacy of
Eurocentrism. That fallacy emerged from the West's
assertion of its cultural superiority over all the
other cultures and their economies throughout the
world. Now we have left behind the modernist period
of corporate enterprise and have entered the
postmodern domain. Jameson and other theorists are
striving, I think, to identify the fallacy in
"late capitalism" before it runs completely
rampant in yet a new and undefined way over the
peoples of the world. Rosen's book unwittingly gives
us evidence that the danger of that happening is not
only real but immediate.
Some will argue
that the long-term self-interest of global
corporations will compel them to work for the
altruistic agenda outlined by Rosen. Not to do so
will spell their own corporate failure, the argument
might go. I am skeptical. I think Rosen's findings on
"global literacies" offer us ways of
thinking about a better postmodern world. The
literacies he identifies in this book may contain the
kernel. They are offered here merely as tools for
corporate aggrandizement, however, not theoretical
constructs for the making of that better world. This
"how to" book is simply not the place to
look if you want to find the theoretical foundations
of globalization.
