Authors: Robert J. Thomas, Joshua Bellin, Claudy Jules and Nandani Lynton
Over the past year, we have interviewed three dozen CEOs and top leaders at multinational companies to see how they handle what R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of India’s Tata Group, called the “creative tensions” of competing on a global scale. (See “About the research.”)
In this report, we focus on what global leaders are saying about the challenges they face and the practices they have adopted. While the responses of our interviewees varied greatly—as one would expect given their geographic dispersion and the range of industries they represent—we discerned three key attributes that top teams must have if they are to manage the complexity and the tensions that face global companies.