Global Leaders are Hard to Find

We are living in an economic environment where many emerging nations engaged in nascent free-market capitalism are recoiling from market risks that they did not anticipate. Their trust in established financial markets has diminished. The world is not just flat, it’s fragmented. Global markets are going through a decided period of uncertainty and discontinuity.

The rules of business and finance that successfully governed decision-making in global markets may no longer apply. Great leadership is especially required during such periods of global economic upheaval, when innovative strategies, confidence, and the ability to foresee and to manage risk are vital to sustainable business practice and growth.  This is not only true for global enterprise, but for countries and their governments too. Few leaders, however, have strong cross-border, global experience, and in turbulent economic times, this can be a daunting challenge. Faced with a vastly changing global financial landscape, leaders lack the decision-making tools and techniques to help them move their organization forward and upward.

The MBA programs, responsible for training business leaders, cannot move fast enough to adapt well to the requirements of this task. These programs remain centered on a 20th-century approach to middle-management development and not targeted where the need is most evident: top leadership.
 
In the current, traditional MBA curriculum, terms such management and leadership are used interchangeably. We define these terms differently. Managers are typically trained for two important implementation tasks: crisis management and change management activities. Managers are present-oriented, trained to look inward and upward for solutions. Their principal mode of practice is quantitative and decision-making occurs in teams.

Leaders, in contrast, are more likely to engage in qualitative, intuitive modes of strategizing and decision-making. Unlike managers embedded in a present, team-oriented environment, leaders must be focused on the need to define their organization’s future (a future in which they have no experience), on building the necessary interpersonal, intercultural networks, and on overseeing the growth of the organization within and across borders. The organizational perspective of a leader is upward and outward, decision-making is importantly, interdependent.

The effective global leader embodies all the qualities of the highest performing manager, but in addition, requires a skill set distinguished by the ability to understand the complexities of planning, conducting, and growing businesses within and across borders in a radically different global environment than exists in today’s 21st century.

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The Global Leadership Solution

The goal for the Leadership in Global Enterprise graduate/postgraduate certificate program at McDaniel College is to prepare organizations to meet the demands of a radically different and constantly changing global environment. Our mission is to identify, educate, and train already effective top leaders for a new kind of leadership, for a “second life,” to raise their level of acumen on a world stage that is rapidly shifting. 

Our program is organized to provide formal training to Directors, VP-level, C-level executives, and other top leaders designated by their organization, refining and elevating their skills, injecting into all aspects of study a well planned, high-level global leadership perspective. The aim of the LGE certificate program is to train and educate leaders to:

• Refine essential global people skills and partnering expertise.
• Create and maintain a transformative global business culture for their organization while minimizing the shock of rapid change.
• Prepare management for alternative market scenarios and global business identity.
• Lead innovation and entrepreneurship while building and protecting proprietary knowledge through distributed system technology secure on a global scale.
• Understand how to gauge business scalability and sustainability in ascending and descending global economies and to better assess country risk when engaging in borderless business.
• Reorganize perceptions to reduce errors of judgment focusing on the crucial differences between randomness (risk, uncertainty), complexity, and unanticipated discontinuities.
• Focus on long term strategic plans, resource allocation models, and the efficient, ethical use of human capital.