Who Will Change the World: How CEOs can effectively work with employees in globalized markets?
Mostafa Sayyadi, Author, Transformational Leadership: How To Prosper as a Leader In Today's Hypercompetitive Environment
“A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
The business environment is constantly changing as organizations are increasingly participating in global markets. Hypercompetition has become the norm. Organizations compete globally but must think locally if they expect to exceed. These new and improved globalized markets place demands on the roles of leaders in organizations operating in this modern environment. Leaders are, in fact, faced with challenging economic conditions today with global competition increasing and the need to be number one or two in an industry or fail to keep up with the market place. This new economic environment may have a negative emotionality that can seriously reduce people’s capabilities in changing and overcoming challenging situations. Thus, the emergence of global business environments drives companies to become world-class. Leaders within companies can play a crucial role in creating effective changes in order to achieve a high level of effectiveness and world class efficiency. Mills in his book, Leadership: How to Lead, How to Live, says that organizations cannot make required changes to attain their organizational goals, and acknowledges that leaders can dramatically affect the way a company performs its functions. He also gives an example of how a leader can dramatically affect the way a government performs its functions, and introduces Eisenhower, former President of the United States in World War II, who could effectively lead both American government and the Allied Forces in Europe in defeating Adolf Hitler, and concludes that Eisenhower’s leadership can provide lessons for top management executives in today’s organizational challenges.
Today‘s globalized nature of competitiveness is placing more pressure on organizations to employ effective leaders who are capable of building effective organizations. There are many academic studies that focus on the organizational and managerial factors that drive organizational competitiveness. Leadership is one such area that plays a critical role and is a strategic prerequisite for running corporations in a hypercompetitive global environment and business success in today’s globalized markets. However, new requirements are continuously required for leadership in global environments today. In today’s global business environments involve a high level of uncertainty, organizations will increasingly need more leaders to be more innovative and creative. An innovative workplace can further develop executive decision making because there is significance evidence of an influence upon various cognitive functions such as problem-solving. Organizations must effectively collaborate with other companies, and share their knowledge with them to improve community issues and global problems in a manner that solves problems and creates solutions when necessary. Leaders today are more focused on strategic management decision making due to the hypercompetitive global environment and the public and private sector evaluation and opinion. Public organizations are attempting to function as private profit-wise while public companies have the Wall Street analysts continuously evaluating their every strategic move. I suggest that a firm’s ability to compete in globalized markets can be highly affected when executives can effectively work, not only manage, with employees as the primary form of leading people and resources.
In this article, I place a new emphasis on leadership in globalized markets to build the best-performing organizations that can create and implement innovations timely as they operate and compete in global markets. In the absence of effective leadership, organizations lose their required direction to achieve a high degree of hypercompetitiveness, and cannot implement successful change in order to adapt with today’s global business environment. Organizations have succeeded and failed based upon the various leaders that make the decisions that impact society.