Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

What Is Global Mindset?

This argument is not new. It was proposed more than 30 years ago when researchers began to examine how corporations make decisions about foreign investments, and it parallels other research on managerial cognition.^[4] Perlmutter developed the first formal outline of the orientations or mindsets of managers in multinational firms.^[5] His now-classic typology of ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric orientations formed a framework for subsequent theoretical and empirical work. The future need was clearly for more “geocentric” managers, “the best men, regardless of nationality, to solve the company's problem anywhere in the world.”^[6] Since then many authors have argued that the cognitive orientation of managers has become ...