Mighty Is the Mongrel

Often, a team requires such specialized talents that it can be assembled only virtually, or by drawing members from locations around the world. Speed is another factor. Scattering members of a team across time zones makes around-the-clock progress possible. One set of team members can write code during the day, and while those workers sleep, colleagues on the other side of the planet can test the code. When members of the first group arrive at work the next morning, they can see a list of their mistakes -- and that hastens the process of improvement.

Such global teams are on the rise -- and not only because of time pressures and skill shortages. Corporations find that the line between "local" and "global" blurs when they are designing many products and services. No master recipe controls the balance between local and global elements. Since the balance constantly shifts, many companies hybridize their teams.

Consider Philips, the world's largest consumer-electronics company outside of Japan. In the 1990s, the Amsterdam-based company transformed its approach to design under the leadership of Stefan Marzano, an Italian who believes that creativity is stimulated by unusual combinations of people. He hybridized a Dutch-heavy team and built an operation with offices in 20 countries, including France, India, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. Among his staff of 500, he counted 33 nationalities.

Marzano didn't just look for a mix of ethnicities and nationalities. An architect by training and a professor at a design school in Milan, he also expanded the definition of "designer" and moved beyond the traditional boundaries of industrial engineering. He hired anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and architects. He loaded up on young people -- another means of achieving fresh thinking -- and drove down to 33 years the median age of the people in his division. Finally, he added another creative dimension to his staff by increasing the number of women on it to 40%.

By the late 1990s, Marzano's retooling had turned Philips into a trendsetter for consumer-product design. The company introduced splashy colors and aerodynamic styling to its line of traditionally black, boxy products. Philips didn't stop at aesthetics: Relying on original field research on how people around the world brush their teeth, take their coffee, and even chop their vegetables, company designers now influence how appliances work -- and how consumers behave.

Change: Get the Best People, Wherever They Are

The benefits of hybridization can be great, but conversion takes practice. It isn't easy for a mature corporation, with scant diversity, to go hybrid quickly. Because national identification seeps into the crevices of all corporations, many of them behave more like "national champions" than like global competitors. Headquarters retains its national character and is largely cut off from outsiders. Such corporations don't even realize that they need to hybridize. Some leaders of U.S.-based companies, because they rely on a diverse workforce or because their founders are foreign, hybridize organically. Others, like the managers at McKinsey, pragmatically pursue that end, gearing their training, tactics, and strategies toward it. But many corporate leaders believe that it's just too daunting to mongrelize their talent.

It is not. A company can consciously strive to raise the level of mixing among its employees -- and in a way that creates not more opportunities for assimilation into a dominant style but a kaleidoscope of styles and interests. Yet the ideal of hybridity has been misunderstood even by people who decry the limitations of a national approach to business culture. Kenichi Ohmae, the longtime chief of McKinsey's Japanese consulting practice, advised companies in a 1990 book to "create a system of values shared by company managers around the globe to replace the glue a nation-based orientation once provided." He added, "Country of origin does not matter."

If naively followed, such advice diminishes people. A person's origins matter. Rather than promote creativity, a complete identification of an employee with his employer's transnational network robs him of what local identities have to offer. Indeed, many executives are leery of abandoning national identity -- because the alternative seems worse: an empty globalization that produces a workforce without soul. Surely, it is better to embrace both roots and wings and to craft ways for the local and the global to drive performance together. But how?

The German pharmaceuticals company Schering AG is wrestling with this very question. Schering employs 56% of its 22,000 workers outside its home country -- chiefly in the United States and Japan, where its subsidiaries have traditionally operated quite independently of one another. A major difficulty is that few American or Japanese employees work in Schering's sprawling Berlin headquarters, and just a handful of non-Germans rank among its top 100 executives. By contrast, hundreds of Germans work in foreign units. To be sure, some Americans and Japanese visit Berlin frequently, but the company's core remains dominated by Germans who shape its priorities, from research to marketing.