BROWN: There are plenty of Americans in London, or Britons in India, but what are these expats on big packages really doing for their firms? Has anyone really looked at how it affects a company when its top three people in a particular market are Americans? How often does a Western company send an executive to China who can actually greet the locals in their own language? I’d like to do a program where students might work at a company in China and do a language course, developing fluency in Mandarin. At INSEAD, to be accepted you need to speak two languages, and to graduate, you need a third.
I think that given their druthers, they wouldn’t have chosen an American. There’s the perception that Americans are insular, and not as sensitive to local cultures as others might be. But although I was in business in New York for 25 years, I spent much of that time working all over the world.
For starters, a lot of times you don’t even have that sort of dialogue–so INSEAD will be a place where we talk about those issues. The bottom line will be that organizations will have to be increasingly transparent. They’ll also have to take a longer-term view. You are starting to see a number of companies in the U.S. asking for an end to quarterly earnings guidance, for example. It’s tough to take the long view when you have to be so concerned about what the Street thinks every quarter. Instead, perhaps analysts should be coming up with new metrics.
European companies that go beyond their own borders can be very competitive. But those that are thought of as “French companies” or “German companies” are in trouble. That goes to what’s wrong with Europe as a whole–you might have a common currency, but you also have France and Spain still fighting about cross-border mergers, for example. Still, when the EU constitution was voted down, the majority of young people in Europe were upset about it. That is a hopeful sign.
