Posted on Periscope Post
By: Cari E. Guittard
Corporate diplomacy involves a unique combination of critical skillsets that are essential for effective leadership in global business.
Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, attends the opening session of the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group Meeting. 22 September 2010. Photo credit: United Nations, New York.
I was struck this week by a pair of featured articles in this month’s Foreign Policy magazine, Inside Power, Inc and Supercitizens & Semistates by David Rothkopf, which detailed how top companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list stack up against many countries around the globe.
The massive reach, resources, and influence of the private sector – including companies and NGOs – “dwarf all but the largest governments and even wealthy governments are struggling with overwhelmed bureaucracies, budget crises, and plummeting confidence in government,” noted Rothkopf, who used statistics to help frame the imbalance of public versus private power. Some were pretty astounding. Sales revenues of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest companyare higher than the GDPs of all but 25 countries; at 2.1 million, its employees outnumber the populations of nearly 100 nations. BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager manages $3.5 trillion in assets – greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet. In 2010, The Gates Foundation, the $33.5 billion-endowed private philanthropic organisation, distributed more money to worldwide causes than the World Health Organization had in its annual budget.
Most large, multi-national companies have their own internal foreign policies and strategies, crafted in large part to help them address geopolitical challenges, respond to crises, and navigate the web of governments, NGOs and local influencers they come into contact on a daily basis. To be successful and competitive in the long run, the private sector must manage global issues with numerous geographic and geopolitical challenges with creativity and dexterity, re-defining traditional notions of global engagement and public diplomacy along the way. A hybrid form of Smart Power on steroids.
Few companies share these internal strategies and even fewer distill out and share lessons learned publicly. Most corporate diplomats who lead much of this work do so on an ad hoc basis, under the radar, with little or no resources, training, and development. Few business schools and executive education programs offer courses in corporate diplomacy even though the nature of global business is increasingly dependent upon working effectively across sectors. Corporate diplomacy involves a unique combination of critical skillsets that are essential for effective leadership in global business. If we are ever to achieve a balance between public and private power, as Rothkopf urges, we will need private sector leadership to collectively and openly come together, recognise the critical role of corporate diplomacy and tri-sector engagement, and begin enlisting and training an army of current and future corporate diplomats. Starting Now.
