What is your outlook for the global economy in 2001?
2011 promises to be a very good year for us.
When you look at it across the world, the economy has been recovering in really two
speeds: there's been the emerging and the more
mature. Also we've seen two speeds of recovery:
it's not only the economic recovery but the social recovery.
What we're seeing is a building a middle class in the emerging markets.
That building of the middle class in the emerging markets is really going to drive
a lot of 2011.
So not only are the developing countries going to benefit from that but also the
mature countries. So we paid a heavy price for all of the
downturn and the recession that we've been in but at the end of the day, 2011 will be
the turning point for us to be more stable, still with lots of trepidation,
but more stable than what we've seen before.
The world in 2011 is exceedingly complex,
interconnected, and unpredictable.
How can organizations develop resilience in this new world of risk?
The complexity, as we look at it into the future, all of has have known is going to
be becoming more and more. When we look at technology, when we look
at globalization, when we look at the competitiveness, all of these factors have
been there for many, many years. What we're seeing is that the downturn
has accelerated those, it's created all of those forces that were on the world
and really have moved them forward. To try to make sense out of this, you have
to go back to the roots. You have to go back to what a company
stands for. For many, many years and decades
companies have done a pretty good job of developing strategy and strategy has been
talked about as the forefront.
But when you take that strategy and you align it to the workforce strategy,
you start to make sense out of this. Without that combination of the workforce
strategy and your business strategy and all of these complexities on a global
basis you're not going to, as a company, going to be able to pull it together.
So I think it is very much of a difference than what we've seen in the
past. It's not just a firm business strategy but
it's how you're going to now deal with the complexities that have been forced upon
individuals in your company.
As global growth shifts to the developing world,
what should be the role of business in developing countries?
What we've been talking about as a society, a global society in developing
countries for some time, I actually think we have to start to change our vocabulary.
There are some developing but there are developed countries:
China, India, Brazil, what's going on in Vietnam.
No doubt they have a long way to go yet in great growth but they're more developed.
As developed those countries must also take leadership, leadership about what
is the training and talent within their countries but also leadership on a global
stage. What is driving some of the economies on
a global basis? What are driving some of the morays
and social norms of getting things done? Those are things that have never really
been the role of developing countries because they didn't have the clout.
They have the clout now and we're going to start to see the power shift and that
power shift is going to create even more chaos in this world but it's absolutely
something that the developed countries need to do.
What would you consider the most important norms that an increasingly interdependent
yet diverse world needs to share?
The world has become closer together. What we would have seen before as
emerging countries and developing countries and those without food, all of
those things exist but it has pooled together more and more.
As a result, one of the norms that will have to become much more central is what
is the population and how is that population treated.
We've seen labor arbitrage. We've seen what we can do for minority
classes within developing markets. But what we're now starting to see
is that regardless of developed, developing, emerging, or emerged, OECD or any others,
what we're going to be seeing is almost a more equalizing treatment of the
individual. No longer is it going to be that wage
arbitrage that is going to define your global platform, it's going to be much
more about how the person and the norm of that is treated.
We will struggle with this as a global society because we've been conditioned to
think about it differently. As we move forward we're going to see
that the key norm will be the individual.
How can companies turn sustainability into a competitive advantage?
Sustainability has been talked about for many years and now it's becoming one of
those very serious topics. And when it becomes a very serious topic
that is tracked, if you will, by outside organizations it can become almost fake
for some organizations just to check the box.
This, of course, is a danger because sustainability has no sustainability.
What you need to do as organizations, and we at manpower have been doing for years,
is to relate that core sustainability to your core business.
There are many things that organizations can do tangentially that can check some of
the boxes and are good things to do but organizations and businesses and a company
in particular needs to find an element or two or three that is absolutely related to
the core of the business so that it is sustainable and it returns economically
because if it doesn't return economically, the sustainability is now gone.
So as our organization for us to develop workforces around the world, for us to put
training centers in, for us to take underdeveloped countries,
underdeveloped people, unemployed or underemployed people and bring them into the workforce is
a huge motivation for our organization and we know it's sustainable because it's core
to what we do.