Remapping your strategic mind-set

Pankaj Ghemawat

McKinsey Quarterly, 2011 Number 3

This is an extremely interesting perspective on creating global strategies.

Executives can shake up their thinking, identify hidden opportunities, and spot lurking threats by looking at a novel type of map that depicts the world from the perspective of a particular country, industry, or company.Senior executives need better mental maps to navigate our unevenly globalized world. Although a wide variety of metrics show that just 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is truly global, executives disproportionately embrace visions of unbounded opportunities in a borderless world, where distances and differences no longer matter....
...I want to focus on the potential for a special kind of map—one I call a “rooted map”—to help leaders enhance their intuition about the opportunities and threats inherent in our semiglobalized world.Rooted maps correct a misperception reinforced by conventional ones: that the world looks the same regardless of the viewer’s vantage point or purpose. In the real world, though, geographic distance and differences in culture and policy matter. To better reflect this reality, rooted maps depict the world from a specific perspective and with a particular purpose in mind....
....depiction of the world as seen from New York City¹ is a humorous example, but more data-driven versions—particularly those drawn at the industry or company levels—have serious business applications.