The challenge isn’t either local or global but as Beaman and Hock have talked about “How do you build a “chaordic”
organisation an organisation that thrives on the border between “chaos” and “order, that is adaptive to changing conditions,
controlling at the center while empowering at the periphery, leveraging worldwide learning capabilities, and that transcends
geographic and divisional borders?”. This is possible when you get a number of things right:
•A shared vision and common set of guiding principles together with metrics that reinforce the mindset. The key principle is subsidiarity and an openness to new ideas from localoperating companies moving from “controlling a hierarchy” to ‘managing a network’ of interconnected parts and activities.
•A well-defined set of centralised ‘coordinating’ and ‘cooperative’ processes that govern how the organisation functions, pushing
authority to the lowest level and encouraging sharing and banning the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
•Frequent face-to- face global HR meetings, facilitating sharing of ideas and communication across business units socializing individuals into the business culture and building an outlook that appreciates the need for multiple strategic capabilities, analyses problems and opportunities from the global, regional, and local perspectives, and interacts with others across the
organization with openness, alertness and agility.
•High touch communication taking advantage of advances in social networking technologies to foster real time collaboration and sharing.
•Globally alert leaders who have the ability and desire to operate chaordically. They tend to be great networkers who are
flexible, accommodating, and adaptable to different cultures and varying ways of doing things. They have a ‘geocentric’mindset. They believe there are certain cultural universals and commonalities in the world but that noculture is superior or inferior to another. Also called ‘cosmopolitans’ these types of individuals focus on “finding commonalities spreading universal ideas and juggling the requirements of diverse places” . They focus not on differences and reasons not todo things but on similarities and how to do things in a contextually relevant way. This is probably the key. It is important to find these people, reward and develop them.