If you hanker after the idealistic spirit of international cooperation, talk to the boss of an emerging-market multinational. Not the boss of Gazprom, perhaps, which has behaved like an arm of the Russian state. But try Chairman Yang Yuanqing of Lenovo, who moved his family to North Carolina to deepen his appreciation of American culture, so as to help him integrate his Chinese and American workers.
Or Lakshmi Mittal, the London-based Indian boss of steel producer Arcelor Mittal, who says his multinational team of executives gets on so well that he forgets there are different nationalities in the room, and who believes his firm has no nationality, instead being "truly global."
Lenovo and Arcelor Mittal are at the leading edge of a new phase in the evolution of the multinational corporation. At first, companies set up overseas sales offices to watch over the export of goods made at home. Then they built small foreign replicas of the mother ship, to cater to local demand. Today the goal is to create what Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, calls the "globally integrated enterprise" -- a single firm in which work is sourced wherever it is most efficient.
For business leaders, building a firm that is seamlessly integrated across time zones and cultures presents daunting obstacles. Rather than huddling together in a headquarters building, senior managers will increasingly be spread around the world, which will require them to learn some new tricks.
How do you get virtual teams of workers to bond, for example? The answer seems to be a lot of time spent talking -- as well as the occasional junket. MySQL, an online database firm, holds virtual Christmas parties, at which teams around the world play games and exchange virtual gifts.
And what about overcoming cultural differences? Lenovo, for example, has had to encourage normally reticent Chinese workers to speak candidly in meetings with American colleagues.
Some people assume that stateless multinationals inevitably drive down standards in a race to the bottom. It is true that multinationals tend to shop around for low-tax locales, but in other ways they are usually sticklers for good behavior. Encouragingly, firms from emerging markets are finding that a globally integrated company needs a single culture, and that the best way to foster this is to make the highest ethics anywhere in the firm the norm for everyone, wherever they are working. Anything less tends to corrode the culture.
A globally integrated firm cannot allow corrupt practices by employees in some countries and not others, so it must outlaw them everywhere. On the other hand, it cannot enforce religious practices and holidays, or different ways of life, so it must preach tolerance.
