Global leadership principles and practices

Global Leadership

The role of ethics is important in business even though there are significant factors that oppose their consideration. Business has also taken a more global and international role ensuring that new relationships and understandings about political and regional events must occur. The difficult landscape that presents power and profits as paramount values makes leadership an integral part of any system or organization that wishes to both succeed at business while maintaining a proper ethical attitude.

The purpose of this essay is to examine and investigate the factors that must be considered before expanding a business. In this example the business in question is constructing a new manufacturing outlet and potential environments must be analyzed and scanned in order to fully understand the best location for this expansion. The essay will address the issues that are involved in such a scan and provide examples of this has been successfully accomplished in the past.

Establishing Trust

This endeavor of expansion requires the trust of many key players. Establishing trust is the single most important aspect of leadership in all practical matters. Those employed to follow leadership will do so in most cases because of their dependence on income, but those who follow orders because they trust and believe in the message inspires the employee to give more than their own self to the greater good and dedicates efforts to the main cause while sacrificing their own personal ambitions and dreams.

Trust is the baseline for ethical codes and procedures. McDonald (2008) expressed this notion as well. Besides trust he also included six universal moral values for a corporate code of ethics. These included: "trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship" (p. 350). A code is just words however and they will ring empty unless practical and material behavior results from these words. This is the challenge of leadership.

Leadership's challenge is not in design or execution of a specific task. Rather, leaders looking to expand their business must be generalists in thought and have their hands in all of the tasks. This is impossible to accomplish unless one is willing to lead by example.

Corporations and the capitalistic way of business has been very competitive and cut throat in its nature. Many governments are weary of business corrupting their natural resources and populations with corporate values and profit schemes. A more naive populace in the past could be wooed with bribes and jobs, but today's world requires a greater sense of purpose for corporate outlets, especially global organizations.

Global Corporations =Global Problems

In seeking new ground to break, organizations must consider local customs and culture. At times, these social underpinnings are squarely at odds with profit motivated business plans that wish to take advantage of that land's resources, be it labor or otherwise. Jones & Millar (2010) suggested that these considerations are often ignored and result in poor transitions. They wrote " the point here is that transnational agro-industrial firms such as Cargill or ADM, working in conjunction with local elites, have benefited from these new enclosures without accepting moral responsibility for the millions of peasants they have displaced " (p. 4).

Short-term gains have allowed these practices to continue over the decades but soon this may come to an end. Knowledge and experience is spreading throughout the globe in a furious manner that is touching people in very remote areas. Political awareness is becoming common place and corporate domination will soon meet its end. This further establishes the need for business leaders to shift their own awareness to seeking a more balanced and symbiotic position throughout the world.

Sustainability, often used as a catch word in a meaningless argument, is becoming a real threat to action and profit on this planet. Only when those who recognize that a sacrifice is needed and certain demands need to be curtailed for later consumption will real change and progress occur.

Global Factors To Consider

Today's world is ripe with sustainability issues that specifically effect different aspects of the environment. For our purposes, some of these factors are more relevant than others. Resource allocation is very important in this expansion. For this change we must consider the following questions: How will this expansion effect the local eco-system? What is the effect on pollution? Are we saving energy? What is our recycling plan? How much fossil fuels are we consuming in this expansion? Are there materials that are more sustainable than others that we can use in our construction?

Environmental Scanning Plan

The environmental scan must include actions that anticipate possible routes of possibility that relate to sustainability and ethical issues. In this plan a solid understanding of the demographics of the target expansion area must be completed in order to fully understand the human make up of the territory. Simulations must be run to predict different outcomes for different approaches to this expansion. Unexpected forces must be incorporated into this scan as much as possible in an attempt to foresee the more difficult opportunities for danger to present itself. Being flexible and open to ideas is essential during this process as imaginative skills are necessary to identify problems that are not so obvious.