On November 10, schools from Cuba, China, Albania, Nigeria, Spain, and the United States, joined the worldwide launch of The Center for Global Enterprise’s new book, Growing Global: Lessons for the New Enterprise at an event held at Columbia Business School in New York City.
“I don’t know if this is the first truly global book launch, but it’s got to be one of them. Between Cuba, Nigeria, China, and all the rest of the great universities, it’s really wonderful,” David Kappos remarked.
Member schools of CGE’s Global Scholars Program and audience members discussed with several of the book’s authors – Sam Palmisano, Shelly Lazarus, Doug Haynes, Chris Caine, Dave Kappos and Peter Evans — the ideas presented in Growing Global during a 90-minute webcast. You can watch the video above.
Sam Palmisano, CGE co-founder and former Chairman and CEO of IBM, expressed that the goal of Growing Global is to start in depth conversations around the key issues facing business leaders today—innovation, global branding and marketing, intellectual property protection, government and market access, company culture, and platform-based business models.
“We’re trying to prepare future leaders of management for the world they’re going to encounter,” he said.
Participating universities included:
- Universidad de Granma, Cuba
- Lagos Business School, Nigeria
- Epoka University, Albania
- Sanya Univerity, China
- IESE Business School, Spain
- Lafayette College, United States
- Columbia Business School, United States
Among the many topics discussed by participants was the interdependence of company culture and branding. Shelly Lazarus and Doug Haynes addressed this point with the audience and write about this extensively in their chapters of the book. Both Haynes and Lazarus spoke about the important management distinction of culture and branding being intentional versus emergent.
Palmisano encouraged current and future managers to “see the world as it is, not as you want it to be.” Today, that’s an economic environment where new business models have come on the scene faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.
“You can create a business very quickly based on software and smart people writing code that solves a particular societal or business need,” Palmisano said. “Why do you have to be wedded to the management system, and therefore the IT systems, of the past?”
Growing Global, the second book in the CGE Re-Think Series, was written by the nine board members of CGE which include Sam Palmisano, Shelly Lazarus, Jerry Yang, Michael Spence, Kevin Warsh, Chris Caine, Peter Evans, Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Dave Kappos and Doug Haynes. All are accomplished leaders in their topic areas and share a commitment to advance management practices for the globally integrated economy and the role business can play to make the world better. Growing Global is now available to purchase.
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