Leadership for a Global Economy

Editors: Robert J. Manley John F. Manley Deepa Sharma Carlos Trejo-Pech Richard Bernato As the title implies, this book is about leadership and globalization. Ed Lyons, in the chapter "Leadership in Business," states that leadership is a complex topic by itself: "Leadership may not be easily defined, but you know it when either you see or do not see it." That complexity and richness of multicultural leadership becomes more profound when leadership is addressed from a global perspective, as in this book. Furthermore, it could be said that the very conception of this book is global. The plan for the book was devised by scholars from different nationalities and cultures for students equally diverse. Researchers and business leaders from the USA, Mexico, and India devised the plan for this book during an international research conference in Udaipur, India. They visualized the implementation of a university level course taught by volunteer scholars that would enable students from these three countries to learn from their readings and discussions with one another using the Internet. The book is the product of the efforts of twenty professors that embraced the idea of an international learning community. The chapters in the book are similar to the main reading material of the course that students attended on line. Fifty students from different majors at Iona College (New York, EU), Dowling College (New York, EU), Universidad Panamericana (Guadalajara, Mexico), and Shri M. D. Shah Mahila College of Arts and Commerce (Mumbai, India) participated in the course during spring 2010. The last chapter, by Thomas Franza, technology leader of this course, describes the technology requirements to implement such a course. As this group of students benefited from the exchange of multiple cultural and professional perspectives by reading these articles, the publication of this book would allow this benefit to be extended to others in different contexts. Even though the book is comprised of chapters that were conceived independently of each other, the reader will note a natural interconnection of themes and multiple viewpoints. It seems that a collective inaudible conversation exists within the minds of people that have leadership responsibilities in different disciplines. This internal conversation is captured in unique and surprising ways within this book. The first chapter, by Robert Manley, establishes the basis or background on leadership, which is then extended in other chapters to different contexts, sectors, or functional areas of the firm. Manley introduces the topic to the reader by discussing from the perspectives of traditional (e.g. Sun-tzu and Machiavelli) and modern thinkers (e.g. Drucker), the values that make leaders succeed or fail.