Soft Processes, Hard Results

We have found that successful global leaders have fostered the meta-values we described earlier while putting in place a global strategy. In their own search for meaning, the leaders of these companies created a vision that clarifies what the organization stands for, highlights the organization's fundamental purpose for existing, and outlines the values and beliefs that define the organization's corporate culture.

To summarize, the essence of our argument is that the core culture of top-performing global organizations is fundamentally different from those with average performance. A survey of the business press supports this observation. For Fortune's “Most Admired Global Companies,” key priorities are teamwork, customer focus, fair treatment of employees, initiative, and innovation. In the more average listed companies, top priorities are minimizing risk, respecting the chain of command, supporting the boss, and making budget.^[18] Additional criteria for a company's inclusion on Fortune's most admired list are “the level of trust, pride, and camaraderie that employees share with management and their peers, as well as what practices the company has in place to support those things.”^[19] Not surprisingly, these organizations have very healthy balance sheets as well; hard results based on soft practices. Our own extensive observations have shown that leaders of these organizations are people like Percy Barnevik, Douglas Daft, or David Simon—people with a multicultural background, years of cross-cultural work experience, and the exceptional global leadership traits we discussed earlier.

In their roles as change agent, cheerleader, coach, teacher, mentor, and integrator, these CEOs change the way their people work by helping them to reframe their attitude toward work. They instill in their employees a kind of pride that goes beyond the numbers game. They foster corporate values with a crucial emphasis: their organizations work through team effort, not autocracy. Perhaps a better metaphor for many of these global organizations is that of the jazz combo. All the employees play together, but for each player in these organizations there is ample room to improvise as a soloist. The focus is on process: constructing the kind of high-performance, learning organization that encourages innovation based on individual contribution.

Playwright–dissident Václav Havel obviously knows something about the significance of meta-values in the new global world. He made the following comments upon assuming the presidency of Czechoslovakia on New Year's Day 1990:

The recent past…has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential: the civic culture that has slumbered in our society beneath the mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust the face it chooses to show you.…[P]eople are never merely a product of the external world—they are always able to respond to something superior, however systematically the external world tries to snuff out that ability.^[20]

It is our hope that we in the business community can nurture the kind of global leaders who will foster these meta-values in global organizations. Such global leaders, as part of their quest for meaning, will encourage a sense of community in their employees and a sense of continuity in their organizations, allow their employees to “play,” give their employees the opportunity to express themselves creatively and fully, and highlight the value of organizational tasks. In addition, they will transmit to their employees a feeling of appreciation as individuals, a sense that their contributions make a difference. This congruence between inner and outer worlds will promote both individual and organizational health, laying the groundwork for a new psychological contract in global organizations.