Global Managers

A global manager can be defined as a manager whose portfolio may include securities of firms that are located throughout the world, including the United States. With this, global managers have a lot of responsibilities to handle and take care of on a daily basis. To make their job a little less stressful and laid back, they must use certain strategies to keep their companies alive and successful. A well-made global strategy can help a firm become highly competitive and have a great competitive advantage amongst others. There are six main parts to a global manager's strategy. They are flexibility, efficiency, strategic advantage, risk, learning and innovation, and lastly reputation. Flexibility can be also looked upon as operational flexibility which briefly means to shift product costs and other aspects and make sure that they change over a certain amount of time.

The efficiency part to a global manager's strategy simply means to follow the product life cycle. The product life cycle means that older products can be distributed and sold to other countries that are less urbanized. This can still help to ensure that the products are all being sold and help the company or firm to create less waste and lost profit. Strategic advantage means to use the first mover advantage and also try to cross subsidize between countries. Taking risk means to diversify operational and macroeconomic risks these include labor troubles, wars and earthquakes for a few examples. The learning mechanism means to help with training new employees and taking every occasion to extend knowledge to the managers and employees working throughout the companies or firms. And lastly, reputation is to market the company name across a broad group of customers and to branch out the product with different identities and brands. If a global manager can keep up with all of these characteristics and be very organized, then leading a company or many companies can be a successful and great experience for all involved.

The global manager has to play multidimensional role by combining his technical skill, people skill and soft skill. They manager must have combination of hard as well as soft skills. He must be able to organize, analyze and motivate people at international level. The reasons behind wanting to become a global manager are obvious. If a person has great people skills and can handle a lot of work with a great salary pay, then this is the job for them. With global managers, there are a lot of responsibilities however; they hold an immense amount of power. They must make decisions and be stern with all of the employees to make sure that everything gets completed quickly and efficiently.

When becoming a global manager, the potential candidate must know that they may have to travel and live an on- the- road lifestyle in order to keep the company's operations afloat. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Christopher Bartlett stated, "Today,