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  • Global Problem Solving Without the Globaloney

    November 2, 2014 Editor 0

    By Pankaj Ghemawat

    There is widespread belief not just that
    globalization is on the rise, but that it is already (close to) complete. Fed by books such as
    Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, and by heightened awareness of truly global problems
    such as climate change, large numbers of people believe that many, if not most, of
    today’s social and environmental problems are the result of global trends and that their
    solutions must also be global in nature. I refer to such overstatements about the extent
    of globalization as “globaloney.”

    Consider a few examples of globaloney. The French guess that immigrants make up
    24 percent of France’s population—three times the actual level. British air travelers guess
    that international air transport accounts for more than 20 percent of energy-related
    greenhouse gas emissions—10 times the actual level. And Americans guess that foreign
    aid accounts for more than 30 percent of the US federal budget—30 times the actual level!

    Globaloney doesn’t plague just the general populace—it also infects
    leaders of nonprofit, business, government, and multilateral
    organizations. When I polled an assembly of the national envoys to
    the World Trade Organization, an overwhelming majority agreed
    with Friedman’s characterization of the world as flat—even though
    it raised existential questions about what they were doing in Geneva.

    Globaloney has many negative consequences. It obscures the
    potential gains from additional globalization, swells fears about its
    adverse consequences, and causes companies to adopt strategies
    of “bigger and blander.”1 It also induces organizations and groups
    of organizations of all kinds to put undue emphasis on global solutions
    to social and environmental problems that should instead be
    tackled at a regional, national, or even local level. This misplaced
    emphasis matters because it overstretches our limited capacity for
    true “global problem solving” when it matters.

    Consider, for instance, the Rio process orchestrated by the United
    Nations. It began amid much optimism with the 1992 Earth Summit,
    but has proven to be a colossal disappointment. Why has it largely
    failed? In addition to three treaties—on climate change, biodiversity,
    and desertification (which a review 20 years later in Nature graded with
    an “F”2)—the Earth Summit resulted in Agenda 21, an “action plan”
    that covered an astounding 27 program areas and 116 individual issues
    such as promoting sustainable development through trade, providing
    adequate financial resources to developing countries, meeting primary
    health care needs, and providing adequate shelter for all. Were they
    all appropriate subjects for a global conclave? By my reckoning, action
    primarily at the global level was invoked for only two of the 116
    issues. Of the remaining, one-third resulted in calls for action primarily
    at the local level, another one-third for action at the local and
    global levels, and the remainder for action at the regional level as well.
    This classification, although subjective, is suggestive. It reminds us
    that not everything needs international coordination—and that even
    when international coordination is required, sub-global approaches
    (between only two nations, for example) may make more sense.

    The other obvious problem with the Rio process was that the deliberations
    at the Earth Summit involved 172 governments and 2,400
    representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—not to
    mention the 17,000 attendees at the parallel NGO Global Forum,
    which was accorded consultative status. And Rio+20 (the follow-on
    to the Earth Summit that took place in 2012) saw a further explosion
    in the number of NGOs participating. More than three times
    as many NGOs were officially involved, along with many more representatives
    from the business and investor communities.

    There were some definite attractions to bringing civil society into
    the picture to supplement traditional government-to-government
    interactions, but the dismal results remind us that broad participation
    doesn’t guarantee that problems will actually be solved.

    Global Designs

    To better understand how to differentiate between global and sub-global
    issues, and to pursue programs that are sized appropriately
    to the problem and the solution, I’ve devised five design principles,
    which I call the Five Ds: devolution, distance-sensitivity, distance-directedness,
    distinctive-competence, and de-biasing.

    The first principle, devolution, emphasizes that not everything
    needs international coordination. It is based on the fact that most social and commercial interactions are only 10 to 20 percent globalized.
    Only a few interactions cross the 30 percent mark—and
    even that threshold still embodies a huge amount of “home bias.”
    The fact that most international flows occur between countries
    that are near each other geographically suggests the distance-sensitivity
    principle: Even if international coordination is required, high
    levels of distance-sensitivity typically favor sub-global approaches
    focusing on regions or sub-regions. Remapping the world in terms of
    multiple forms of distance (economic, cultural, and administrative,
    along with geographic) reveals the power of the distance-directedness
    principle in guiding choices about the locus of activity or operation
    (“where”), which activities to perform (“what”), and ways to organize
    to get them done effectively (“how”).

    Realism about the general difficulties of cross-border operations
    and the management challenges confronting nonprofits, in particular,
    underlines the usefulness of the distinctive-competence principle:
    ask not only whether something is worth doing, but also if you, your
    organization, or your network are or can become capable of doing
    it well. And finally, remembering that most individuals are still
    quite distrustful of foreigners leads to the de-biasing principle: the
    importance of deliberately building cross-border trust by reducing
    home bias due to ignorance or prejudice.

    Adhering to the Five Ds might not only have improved the outcomes
    of the Rio process, they also hold the potential to (re)direct
    and improve social initiatives. Consider a social innovation that has
    stirred up considerable interest recently: global solutions networks
    (GSNs), defined by author Don Tapscott as consisting of “diverse
    stakeholders, organized to address a global problem, making use of
    transnational networking, and with membership and governance that
    are self-organized.”3 The emergence of GSNs, which now number
    well into the hundreds if not thousands, is often extolled in glowing
    terms. (Examples of GSNs include knowledge and policy networks
    like the International Competition Network, advocacy and watchdog
    networks like Human Rights Watch, governance networks like the
    Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and operational
    and delivery networks like the Red Cross.) And the potential
    for GSNs is indeed enhanced by the growing connectivity afforded by
    the Internet—the enabler emphasized by Tapscott—and the explosive
    growth of what Ashoka founder Bill Drayton calls the citizen sector.4

    Before we get carried away with the prospects for GSNs, it is worth
    remembering that global conditions are in many respects more challenging
    today than they were when the Rio process was launched in
    1992. Then, the world economy was growing rapidly, globalization
    was increasing, and the easing of Cold War tensions raised hopes of
    a real shift away from war and conflict and toward development and
    sustainability. Today, economic conditions are generally bleaker in
    advanced economies, and even faster-growing emerging economies (such as China, India, and Brazil) have experienced slumps in their
    growth rates. Globalization itself, after surging through 2007, faltered
    in the wake of the financial crisis.5 And ongoing threats to global stability
    and cooperation include regional economic crises such as those
    in the Eurozone; increases in income inequality in many countries and
    of xenophobia in some; continued trade imbalances; talk of currency
    wars and uncertainty about the dollar’s future as the world’s reserve
    currency; the growing obsolescence of multilateral institutions, many
    of which were set up in the aftermath of World War II; and geopolitical
    tensions in regions such as the South China Sea and Ukraine.

    Against this backdrop, the notion of self-organizing GSNs spontaneously
    generating solutions to global problems of the sort wrestled with
    at Rio appears to be a triumph of hope over experience. At least some
    other scholars who have looked at GSNs have come to similar conclusions.6 Nevertheless, GSNs do exist, and organizations are tackling
    social and environmental problems at a global scale. The Five Ds are
    meant to provide guidance for these organizations that is grounded in
    what research has revealed about globalization and the responses to it.

    The Devolution Principle

    Not all the issues raised at Rio required the powers of global problem
    solving (as opposed to global exhortation). Many of them could
    be better handled at the regional, national, or local level. But there
    seems to be a tendency to attach the handle “global” to issues for no
    other reason than to give them extra emphasis. Given the limits on
    our capacity for global governance, cutting back on such globaloney
    is one way to concentrate that capacity where it really matters.

    Let’s look at some relevant evidence—at data measuring the
    levels of internationalization of activities that can take place either
    domestically or across borders. (See “Internationalization
    Levels” at right.) It turns out that the international component
    of these activities represents a small
    fraction—typically less than 20 percent
    and often less than 10 percent—of the total. Only for a few—mostly
    financial7—variables do internationalization
    levels exceed 30 percent—and
    even that threshold still embodies a
    huge amount of home bias.

    Actual levels of globalization are
    much lower than the levels one would
    expect to see if the world were flat
    (which would typically be 85 percent
    or more). They are also significantly
    lower than most people’s intuitions. In
    an online survey that Harvard Business
    Review conducted for me, respondents
    pegged international phone calls at 29
    percent of the total, immigrants at 22
    percent of the world’s population, and
    foreign direct investment at 32 percent
    of total capital formation—an average
    estimate of 27 percent, more than five
    times the actual average.9 (CEOs, interestingly
    enough, overestimated by
    a factor of nearly seven!)

    A common counterargument to my point is that even if the extent
    of globalization is small today, a borderless world may be just
    around the corner. Looking back in history, however, reveals that
    the changes that have occurred are rather mixed. The percentage
    of the world’s population composed of immigrants is the same now
    as it was in 1910. And some of the pre-financial crisis measures of
    cross-border financial flows are comparable to earlier peaks more
    than 100 years ago. Because financial flows actually dropped significantly
    in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it is probably more
    accurate to describe the current trend as increasing fragmentation,
    not increasing integration.

    Proponents of a flat world often point to the Internet and, more
    broadly, to the fact that in the last few decades the cost of communication
    has plummeted and the richness of what can be transmitted
    has exploded “in a way that changes everything.” But the portion of
    Internet traffic that crosses international borders is actually about 17
    percent—five times as high as telephone calls, but far below the level
    one would expect in a flat world. Similarly, an estimated 16 percent
    of people’s friends on Facebook are foreign,10 as are 25 percent of
    the people that individuals follow on Twitter.11 Just because we are
    able to befriend anyone living anywhere on Facebook doesn’t mean
    that we will—there is an important distinction between potential
    connectivity and actual connectedness.

    All of these data suggest that the agenda for global problem solving
    can be simplified by deemphasizing areas where the critical phenomena
    unfold mainly at a local or national level. The environmental
    externalities caused by pollution provide an interesting example.
    For distance-sensitive pollutants that stay more or less within national
    borders—most ground and water pollution—local solutions
    are generally appropriate. Pollutants that cross national borders to a
    significant extent—usually airborne ones—are the ones that require
    cross-border cooperation.

    The growth and sustainability of cities
    provides another, somewhat different
    example. It may make sense to build a
    knowledge network to share information
    on, say, sustainable cities around
    the world, and even to build an advocacy
    network to engage in cross-border lobbying
    for more enlightened urbanism, but
    those are limited functions that don’t require
    much coordination across borders.

    The broader point is that a problem
    needs to be more than globally widespread
    to be a candidate for global solutions
    that go beyond simple information-sharing.
    Requiring some coordination of
    responses across borders, rather than
    simply sharing information about different
    types of possible responses, is
    the acid test for global problem solving.
    Hence the devolution principle: Not every
    global problem needs coordination
    across national borders, and many issues
    are, in fact, tackled most effectively at the
    national or local level.

    The Distance-Sensitivity Principle

    If the devolution principle was about determining which issues should
    be coordinated internationally and which should be addressed at the
    local or national level, the distance-sensitivity principle is about how
    best to structure what does make it onto the international agenda.
    This principle is predicated on the law of distance—the observation
    that the lion’s share of international interactions takes place
    between countries that are close to each other rather than far apart.
    What this implies is that many “international” issues are actually
    regional ones and not truly global.

    The distance-sensitivity principle can be illustrated by extending
    the earlier discussion of pollution. Airborne pollutants can range across
    borders, but in very different ways. Acid rain, for example, tends to
    have a regional footprint, accounting for the success of intra-regional
    initiatives such as cooperation between the United States and Canada
    (most notably, their 1991 Air Quality Agreement), which has helped reduce
    North American acid rain by 65 percent since 1976. In contrast,
    carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming have an unusually
    low distance-sensitivity and, therefore, warrant a fully global focus.

    It is not just pollutants that obey the law of distance. Distance-sensitivity
    also applies to the voluntary international interactions
    that are more commonly studied in the context of globalization:
    trade in products and services, flows of capital, migrations of people,
    and flows of information. Instead of being randomly distributed,
    these flows often have a regional structure.

    Germany, for example, is known for its manufacturing prowess
    and its ability to export its products around the world, but the bulk of
    its trade occurs within Europe, particularly with its immediate neighbors.
    About 60 percent of Germany’s exports go to other EU countries.
    Within Europe, there are also significant variations: Germany
    represents a particularly high share of Austria, Switzerland, the Czech
    Republic, and Hungary’s overall imports. (See “German Exports”
    below.) Those countries are close to Germany not only geographically and linguistically, but also historically:
    Apart from Switzerland,
    these countries, along with Germany,
    constituted the Holy Roman
    Empire circa 1500.

    Similar patterns are evident
    for other kinds of international
    interactions. Sixty percent of
    German banks’ foreign lending
    is to the rest of Europe—which
    also accounts for 70 to 85 percent
    of Germany’s foreign direct investment,
    portfolio equity holdings,
    international phone calls,
    and international tourist arrivals.
    There are good reasons why
    the Eurozone crisis is, despite its
    potential global ramifications,
    mostly being handled in Europe.

    Europe is more integrated
    than most continents, but similar
    patterns exist in other parts of
    the world. If we look at the world
    as a whole, 53 percent of merchandise trade, 52 percent of foreign direct
    investment, 51 percent of international telephone calls, and 49
    percent of international migration all take place within rather than
    between roughly continent-sized regions12 The high average level of
    regionalization suggests that many issues that require international
    coordination might be best addressed at the regional rather than the
    global level. And geography isn’t the only possible basis for distinguishing
    between the near abroad and the far abroad. Others include cultural
    ties, political alignment, and degree of economic development.

    The Distance-Directedness Principle

    The distance-directedness principle also relies on the law of distance,
    but shifts the focus from devising the global problem-solving agenda
    to shedding light on what the actors involved in it should do. The
    most interesting research in this area are the studies that use “gravity”
    models to investigate the factors underlying the law of distance,
    particularly concerning trade. Gravity models in international economics
    link interactions between countries to the product of their
    economic masses, divided by some composite measure of distance.
    Gravity models not only help us understand why, for instance, the
    US-Canadian trading relationship is the largest in the world; they also
    explain, in a statistical sense, two-thirds or more of all the variation
    in bilateral trade intensities between all possible pairs of countries.

    Distance, however, is not simply measured in miles. For example,
    the geographical distance between the United States and England may
    be substantial, but the two countries’ shared linguistic, cultural, and
    historical heritage supplies important bridges that narrow the gap. The
    CAGE Distance Framework posits that “distance” includes multiple
    dimensions—cultural, administrative (or political), geographic, and
    economic (CAGE). And whereas there are many differences between
    countries, the seven variables highlighted in red in the table explain
    70 to 90 percent of the variation in country-to-country flows of trade,
    capital, people, and information.13 (See “CAGE Distance Framework” below.) To illustrate the usefulness of the CAGE Distance Framework,
    consider some of the questions that businesses have found it helpful
    in answering—many of which can be adapted to the social sector.

    Where? | Where a business originates affects what countries it should
    expand to—and that answer usually isn’t “everywhere.” In 2004, of
    all US companies that had foreign operations, the largest fraction operated
    in just one foreign country, the median number in two, and 95
    percent in fewer than two dozen. As fully global action is unlikely to be
    warranted in the short run, do social-sector initiatives take adequate
    account of where they are from (for such things as administration
    and donors) and of relevant experience sets in deciding where to go
    next? Take, for example, an issue facing Worldreader.org, a nonprofit
    that aims to bring e-books to African schoolchildren: Which African
    market(s) should it focus on first? Its founders, a Briton and an American
    then based in Barcelona, chose Ghana because Anglophone Africa
    seemed the most natural target, Ghana’s public administration was
    reputed to be relatively clean and efficient, and time-zone proximity
    to Barcelona would likely simplify coordination.

    What? | Businesses also seem more inclined to recognize that their
    strategies in the countries in which they operate must respond in
    some way to international differences. That said, they often fail to
    consider the full range of strategy levers for dealing with the differences
    that matter the most in their industries: most broadly, using
    multiple levers and sub-levers of adaptation to adjust to differences;
    aggregating across countries to (partially) overcome differences;
    and arbitraging to exploit (selected) differences. Consider some
    analogues for social sector initiatives: Does a family-planning initiative
    targeting poor, strife-torn, traditional societies, which often
    have high gender inequality and fertility rates, make adequate allowance
    for effective approaches in male-dominated societies? Can the Grameen Foundation, the hugely successful pioneer of microlending
    in Bangladesh, identify important common social needs that
    cut across or aggregate segments in poor countries that it can effectively
    help meet? Some degree of confidence that it can do so
    should underpin its expansion into nearly three dozen additional
    countries. And arbitrage or targeting differences along selected
    dimensions raises important issues ranging from building low-cost
    but adequate delivery structures for very-low-income countries to
    questions about the focus of social-sector initiatives on extreme
    deprivation, as opposed to on some other area for improvement.

    How? | Some businesses also understand that their ability to address
    cross-country differences depends not only on the objective
    distances to be traversed, but also on their internal capabilities for
    dealing with them. Businesses and social enterprises should consider
    the following questions before expanding: Do the critical people in
    your organization understand how global we actually are, or have they
    fallen prey to globaloney? Do they have a framework for understanding
    the underlying differences between countries—and differences in
    differences—that underlie limited levels of cross-border integration?
    Are they housed in one location or dominated by one nationality? Are
    they involved in cross-border projects and networks, and, ideally,
    have they ever been rotated abroad? Are they prepared to engage in
    the debate about the social consequences of globalization in general
    and your organization’s particular involvement in it?

    The Distinctive-Competence Principle

    The distinctive-competence principle extends the where, what,
    and how questions, to ask whether a particular social enterprise is
    best positioned to pursue a particular global problem-solving opportunity—or would the cause be served better by joining up with
    an existing organization or network, or
    letting some other organization pursue
    it? The distinctive-competence principle
    emphasizes that individuals or organizations
    that are considering entering or
    expanding in the social sector need to ask
    themselves whether their involvement
    would lead to creating significantly more
    total value than would happen otherwise.
    The corollary is that organizations
    should ideally account for the opportunity
    costs of donors’ resources, even if
    those resources are contributed free.

    Most social enterprises do not measure
    their performance by undertaking
    this sort of cost-benefit analysis. But
    the approach does merit more attention.
    Industrial organization economics
    indicates that at least in the absence of
    product differentiation, there is a tendency
    for an excessive number of companies
    to enter a market simply to take
    business away from existing companies
    without growing the market or providing
    any other particular benefit to society.14
    These effects might be aggravated in the social sector by “messianic complexes” that could lead to even more
    entrants than in the for-profit benchmark.15 The good news is that
    in the social sector, it seems reasonable (or, at least, more reasonable
    than in the private sector) to ask players to internalize the social costs
    of their entry or expansion. Another implication of this line of reasoning
    is that initiatives that add to variety, whether in means or ends,
    are generally more deserving of grace than initiatives that simply pile
    additional resources onto established, relatively well-funded efforts.

    To be a bit less stringent and a bit more practical, a social enterprise
    might not be the best in the world at what it does or aims to
    do, but it does have to be—or have plans to become—pretty good
    in the relevant respects. Without those plans, the adage by Kenneth
    Andrews, who wrote the classic text on business strategy, applies:
    “Opportunism without competence is a path to fairyland.”16

    To better understand these ideas, consider again the example of
    Worldreader.org. Its two founders focused their nonprofit on education
    because they had backgrounds in the field, and on e-books because one
    had connections in high-tech. This knowledge and these connections
    increased the odds of being able to do something special within the
    zone of distinctive-competence rather than outside it. But they also
    set up a clear evaluation mechanism by hiring MIT Professor Esther
    Duflo to help design and analyze their first field trials. And because
    Worldreader.org was designed to be an operational and delivery network,
    it clearly did require the development of some significant organizational
    capabilities, as well as a structure to house them in, rather
    than an attempt to “organize without an organization.”

    The De-Biasing Principle

    The final principle—de-biasing—shifts the focus from governments,
    NGOs, and businesses to individuals. It recognizes that distrust of
    foreigners is rampant, reducing cross-border interactions and imposing
    constraints on global problem solving. To counter this bias it is
    important to build cross-border trust. To figure out what might be
    done in this regard, it is best to start with some data—in this case,
    concerning the extent to which citizens of various European countries
    reported trusting their co-citizens and others.

    Close to 50 percent of respondents to the 1996 “Eurobarometer”
    survey reported trusting their fellow citizens “a lot,” but only 20
    percent reported trusting citizens of the other 16 European Union
    countries “a lot,” and just over 10 percent reported trusting citizens
    of other countries “a lot.” There is some variation by country (Italians
    report trusting the Swiss more than they trust other Italians), but on
    average, nationals of EU countries express “a lot” of trust twice as
    often in co-nationals as in nationals of other “nearby” EU countries,
    and four times as often compared to nationals of countries that are
    farther away. These data from the EU are indicative of what researchers
    have found in other parts of the world. Scholars have concluded
    that trust falls as the populations of any two countries grow more
    different in their languages, religions, genes, body types, geographic
    distance, and incomes, and if they have a more extensive history of
    wars.17 This differential distrust of foreigners is estimated to have big
    effects. Statistical studies suggest that moving from lower to higher
    levels of bilateral trust can increase trade, direct investment, portfolio
    investment, and venture capital investment by 100 percent or more,
    even after controlling for other characteristics of the two countries.18

    Fear of foreigners, particularly the ones who are most “foreign,” is compounded by the constraints that cross-cultural mistrust imposes
    on attempts to reduce other kinds of barriers to international flows.
    Consider some additional examples from Western Europe—a region
    where nationalism has recently been more or less held in check, where
    countries have pursued formal administrative integration to an extent
    unparalleled in other regions, and where education levels are generally
    high. Despite this context, cultural fears have loomed very large as
    economic pressures have mounted. Much of the surging protectionist
    and, especially, anti-immigrant sentiment has not just nationalistic
    but cultural roots. The economic case for large-scale immigration
    into Europe is clear; most of the fears around immigrants have to
    do with cultural fears more than ostensibly economic dimensions.

    In figuring out how to build trust, it is also useful to note that much
    cross-cultural mistrust seems to be rooted in cultural insecurities. A
    survey of 47 countries around the world indicates a strong positive
    correlation between perceiving one’s own culture to be superior and
    perceiving it to need protection. The list is headed by India, where 93
    percent of respondents agreed that their culture was superior and 92
    percent agreed that it needed to be protected. India is followed by Indonesia,
    Tanzania, and Bangladesh. In contrast, the bottom of the list
    is occupied by Sweden, where only 21 percent of respondents agreed
    that their culture was superior and 29 percent that it needed protection.
    Interestingly, Swedes are highly trusted as well as trusting, illustrating
    a more general pattern across the countries included in both
    surveys: Countries that feel the least superior and defensive about
    their own cultures also tend to be the most trusting—and trusted.

    In keeping with the distance-directedness principle, the challenge
    of building cross-border trust is likely to be different in, say,
    the Netherlands and Nepal, not the least because the former is already
    more than one hundred times as connected with the rest of
    the world than is the latter. But both countries do present challenges.
    Think of the success in the Netherlands, traditionally a haven of
    tolerance, of Geert Wilders’s wildly misnamed Freedom Party, with
    its anti-immigrant and now Europhobic posturing.

    Research on the determinants of cultural chauvinism and related
    fears does identify some apparent commonalities across countries—
    and some broad paths forward. Higher education levels in a country
    cause levels of nationalism and suspicion of outsiders to decrease.
    The extent to which an individual participates in the network of
    global economic, social, and cultural relations and of inclusive social
    identification with the world community seems important. Traveling
    and living abroad seems to broaden individuals’ perspectives.
    And scholars have found that security of property rights and the
    rule of law are prerequisites for trust to emerge, rather than what
    they often seem: vital substitutes for trust.

    On the basis of these findings, several concrete steps for building
    trust and reducing excess cultural fear can be undertaken. These
    steps include more education; monitoring of negativism in the media
    and in political discourse; encouraging more interpersonal contacts
    across cultures and ensuring that they are as pleasant as possible;
    and building a cosmopolitan global social identity. One might also
    try to build cross-cultural understanding between countries in which
    economic potential exists, but political and cultural relationships
    are strained (such as India and Pakistan or Israel and Palestine); to
    prioritize support for the rule of law; and to encourage the private
    sector to become involved in building bridges between cultures.

    Implications for Global Problem-Solving Leaders

    Focus the agenda for global problem solving. | The devolution and distance-sensitivity principles offer systematic advice on how to set—and,
    in particular, limit—the agenda for global problem solving. Individuals
    and organizations should analyze the extent of globalization and the
    distance-sensitivity of the problems they wish to address. Calculate
    the percentage of the relevant activity that takes place domestically
    versus internationally and the percentage of the international component
    that crosses regional boundaries. Even if a similar problem
    appears in many countries, if it requires little coordination across
    borders, most of the effort expended toward solving it should be local,
    national, or regional, rather than global. Limiting truly global efforts
    to the problems that really demand them can help us make better
    use of our still very limited bandwidth for worldwide cooperation.

    Select and structure initiatives so as to add value. | The distance-directedness
    and distinctive-competence principles look at some of
    the same observations about limited globalization and considerable
    distance-sensitivity from the perspective of the organizational actors
    involved in global problem solving. Distance-directedness supplies
    guidance about the where, what, and how of an organization’s pursuit
    of its mission across borders, and distinctive-competence about the
    more basic existential question of whether it is a good instrument
    for that pursuit. A starting point for operationalizing these two
    principles is to use the CAGE Distance Framework to understand
    that where you are coming from affects where you might want to
    try to contribute and what kinds of adaptation to cross-country differences
    might be required. Having applied the framework to get a
    more realistic sense of the border-crossing and distance-bridging
    challenges your effort faces, ask whether your organization or network
    is really the right one to pursue a particular opportunity—or
    whether it is better pursued through other means.

    Work on improving people’s attitudes towards globalization. | The
    de-biasing principle goes even more micro, emphasizing that individuals’
    attitudes toward globalization and foreigners in particular
    constrain both the global agenda and what organizational actors
    can hope to accomplish within it. Somewhere within global problem
    solving we must find room to consider educational initiatives that
    aim to shape people’s attitudes—by connecting them better with the
    systematic evidence about the extent, patterns, and consequences
    of globalization, as well as with each other.

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