In his best selling book The World is Flat, Friedman (2005) argues that many more countries and companies now compete in global markets than ever before. The effects of globalization are pervasive and are leading to the emergence of new social, political and business models. This flattening of the world represents a fundamental change and requires that managers of organizations throughout the world develop and use a global mindset.
A global mindset is "a set of individual attributes that enable an individual to influence individuals, groups, and organizations from diverse socio/cultural/institutional systems." The importance of this ???global mindset??? suggests that we need to better understand both its theoretical base and its practical relevance. The purpose of this book is to explore the content of a global mindset, how it is developed, when and how it should be applied, and what its consequences are.
Therefore, a new source of competitive advantage is emerging: the ability to integrate players from many parts of the world faster and more effectively than others. The challenge to global corporations is increasingly to create seamless globally integrated systems to satisfy diverse customer needs in diverse global markets. Corporations??? ability to create globally integrated systems depends to a large extent on their success in getting their employees, managers, and executives to understand and adapt to a flat world. Thus, the new competitive advantage of global corporations lies in their ability to shape the minds and actions of their employees to ensure successful performance.
The contributions in this volume suggest that the concept of global mindset represents animportant competitive tool for today??'s managers. Corporate leaders are advised to develop, exhibit and act with a global mindset in order for their firms to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in international markets. Without such a mindset, such firms are likely to encounter better prepared and more knowledgeable global competitors, thereby threatening their very survival.
Advances in International Management is now available online at ScienceDirect ??? full-text online of volumes 15 onwards.
*Gives a detailed account of the global mindset as an important competitive tool
*International in scope
*Edited by field leaders

Strategic Leadership Across Cultures: The GLOBE Study of CEO Leadership Behavior and Effectiveness in 24 Countries received the 2015 University of San Diego and International Leadership Association (ILA) leadership book award for "Scholarly Rigor and Critical Thought." Unique in its focus, methodology, and impact, Strategic Leadership Across Cultures: The GLOBE Study of CEO Leadership Behavior and Effectiveness in 24 Countries is a must-have for those studying or practicing in the fields of global leadership, cross-cultural leadership, and organization studies. Reporting on research obtained during the third phase of the ten-year GLOBE project, the book examines strategic leadership effectiveness for executive and top-level management based on data from more than 1,000 CEOs and over 6,000 top management team members in 24 countries. The authors offer a series of propositions about executive leadership based on the unified theory -developed after the publication of the first GLOBE book-and empirically test these propositions. They provide evidence that leadership matters, executive leadership matters greatly, and that societal cultures influence the kind of leadership that is expected and effective.

Culture, Leadership, and Organizations reports the results of a ten-year research program, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research program. GLOBE is a long-term program designed to conceptualize, operationalize, test, and validate a cross-level integrated theory of the relationship between culture and societal, organizational, and leadership effectiveness. A team of 160 scholars worked together since 1994 to study societal culture, organizational culture, and attributes of effective leadership in 62 cultures. Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies reports the findings of the first two phases of GLOBE. The book is primarily based on the results of the survey of over 17,000 middle managers in three industries: banking, food processing, and telecommunications, as well as archival measures of country economic prosperity and the physical and psychological well-being of the cultures studied. GLOBE has several distinguishing features. First, it is truly a cross-cultural research program. The constructs were defined, conceptualized, and operationalized by the multicultural team of researchers. Second, the industries were selected through a polling of the country investigators, and the instruments were designed with the full participation of the researchers representing the different cultures. Finally, the data in each country were collected by investigators who were either natives of the cultures studied or had extensive knowledge and experience in that culture. A unique feature of this book is that while it is an edited book and many experts have written the different chapters, unlike other edited books, it is a fully integrated, seamless, and cohesive book covering the many aspects of the theory underpinning the GLOBE.