Discuss the Challenges Facing Multinational Corporation in the Management of Global Talent.

“The Jack Welch of the future cannot be like me.   I spent my entire life in the United States.   The next head of General Electric will be somebody who spent time in Bombay, In Hong Kong in Buenos Aires.   We have to send our best and brightest overseas and make sure they have the training that will allow them to be global leaders who will make GE flourish in the future.”
Jack Welch

Discuss the challenges facing Multinational Corporation in the management of global talent.

In a highly competitive global economy where the other factors of production- capital, technology, raw materials and information, are increasingly able to be duplicated “the calibre of the people in an organisation will be the only source of sustainable competitive advantage available to US companies (J.L Laabs 1996). Therefore attention must be paid to and resources must be ploughed into the management of global talent to take the business forward.   To do this attention must be paid to several areas, in particular to maximise long-term retention and use of international cadre through career management so that the company can develop a top management team with global experience and to develop effective global management teams (Deresky 2006).

International assignments are becoming increasingly important for the reasons outlined by Jack Welch above; moving forward, top level managers need to have international experience in order for their company to remain competitive. An understanding of the management of expatriates is of growing importance due to the rapid increase in global economic activity and global competition (Young and Hamill, 1992).   It is increasingly being recognised that expatriates play a vital role in success or failure of international business (Tung 1984).

However there are various challenges facing Multinational Corporations in the realisation of these goals.   These challenges are two fold involving the attitudes of two groups of people, namely the multinational... [continues]

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