In addition to the managerial and cross-cultural skills acquired by expatriates, the company benefits from the knowledge and experience those managers gain about how to do business overseas and what new technology, local marketing, and competitive information they acquire. The company should position itself to benefit from that enhanced management knowledge if it wants to develop a globally oriented and experienced management cadre - an essential ingredient for global competitiveness - in particular where there is a high degree of shared learning among the organization's global managers. If the company cannot retain good returning managers, then the potential shared knowledge is not only lost but also conveyed to another organization who hires that person. This can be very detrimental to the competitive stance of the company. Some companies are becoming quite savvy about how to use technology to utilize shared knowledge to develop their global management cadre, to better service their customers, and - as a side benefit - to store the knowledge and expertise of their managers around the world in case they leave the company; that knowledge, it can be argued, is an asset in which the company has invested large amounts of resources. One such savvy company is Booz-Allen & Hamilton, which instituted a Knowledge Online Intranet.
Research by Black and Gregersen of 750 U.S., European, and Japanese corn- panics concluded that those companies which reported a high degree of job satisfaction and strong performance and which experienced limited turnover used the following practices when making international assignments:
• They focus on knowledge creation and global leadership development.
They assign overseas posts to people whose technical skills are matched or
exceeded by their cross-cultural abilities.
- They end expatriate assignments with a deliberate repatriation process.
A successful repatriation program, then, starts before the assignment. The company top management must set up a culture which conveys that the organization regards international assignments as an integral part of continuing career development and advancement, and that it values the skills of the returnees. The company's objectives should be reflected in its long-range plans, commitment, and compensation on behalf of the expatriate. GE sets a model for effective expatriate career management. With its 500 expatriates worldwide, it takes care to select only the best managers for overseas jobs and then commits to placing them in specific positions upon reentry. In fact, a study of the Shrive policies of British multinationals indicates that careful planning for foreign assignments pays off. Farsighted policies, along with selection criteria based more on the adaptability of the manager and her or his family to the culture than on technical skills, apparently account for the low expatriate failure rate - estimated at less than 5 percent.
Exhibit 9-9 : Developing a Global Management Cadre article from Global Human Resource Management Catagory Exhibit 9-9
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