Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures

by Carl Phillips

Throughout the world, languages differ, but the business questions are the same. In French and Japanese, Hebrew and English, executives are asking, "How can I survive and thrive in the borderless, global marketplace?" For answers, the authors of "Global Literacies" went straight to the leaders themselves -- the CEOs of thousands of corporations around the globe.

Two lessons emerged. First, there are leadership universals that every executive and manager needs to practice in order to be world-class at home and abroad. The second defied conventional wisdom: in the borderless economy, culture doesn't matter "less, " it matters "more."

Around the world, business leaders apply their own experiences -- personal, professional, and cultural -- to an ever-expanding world of Dutch colleagues, Brazilian suppliers, Taiwanese manufacturers, and Chinese competitors. These leaders are trying to become globally literate...and "Global Literacies" is for, and about, them.

No one knows this better than CEOs of successful global companies such as Japan's Canon, Sweden's Ericsson, Taiwan's Acer Computers, the U.K.'s British Telecommunications, and U.S.-based Coca-Cola.

In "Global Literacies, " a team of researchers led by Robert Rosen, Ph.D., of Healthy Companies International, and Watson Wyatt Worldwide have produced the first model of international business success based on a wide-ranging landmark study of global leaders and their world-class companies. "Global Literacies" documents the exclusive results of a worldwide survey of over one thousand senior executives and in-depth interviews with CEOs of seventy-eight companies -- companies representing 3.5 million employees in more than 200 countries, and with more than $725 billion in annual sales.

"Global Literacies" offers compelling new insights and business tools:

The Global Leadership Universals

Learn the new literacies of business:

* Personal Literacy -- understanding and valuing yourself

* Social Literacy -- engaging and challenging people

* Business Literacy -- focusing and mobilizing your business

* Cultural Literacy -- valuing and leveraging cultural difference

The Global Success Quotient

Learn which are the most globally active, financially successful companies -- and countries -- in the world, understand how they got there, and apply those learnings to your own organization.

The Cultures of Twenty-first-Century Business

Develop ways to "see" global challenges and opportunities, "think" with an international mindset, "act" with fresh global-centric leadership behaviors, and "mobilize" world-class companies -- whether you're a multinational giant, a domestic manufacturer, or a local community organization.

National Profiles

With sophisticated profiles of thirty countries, and survey data from eighteen national cultures -- from the Tolerant Traders of the Netherlands to China's Ancient Modernizers and the Optimistic Entrepreneurs of the United States, "Global Literacies" is a groundbreaking and fascinating work on the most important issues in the world of business today.

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2000

About the author

Carl Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry.

He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.

His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.