The globe needs leadership urgently

In my book Global Leadership; How to lead the globe intelligently I have analyzed the challenges of global leadership and found out that the biggest challenge is that there is no such a thing as global leadership. We have learned to lead and manage individuals, teams, organizations, networks, big international companies, nations, even regions, but we don’t know how to lead the globe?

The need for this kind of global perspective is new. We should quickly find ways to do that: to define what is global leadership, what is our global vision,  global values, global processes, global targets, who is taking the leading role in making this happen, do we need a global parliament to make the rules and follow the implementation, etc. I have tried to reflect if global leadership is possible at all and could it be intelligent global leadership. But, unfortunately, at the moment, it is more like a foolish global leadership. International cooperation is done with international politics and diplomacy. It is a political power play where every nation is mainly focused on their interests, and a genuinely global perspective is missing.

I have studied leadership at different levels and found out some basic principles of good and functioning leadership. These principles are pretty simple:

1. we should have a clear vision, where we are going
2. we should have shared values, which are steering our cooperation
3. we should have clear targets which are commonly accepted
4. we should have good decision making and be able to make decisions
5. we should have active implementation and follow-up

When we consider global leadership, these five basic principles should also be in place to say that it is intelligent global leadership.  But we all understand that none of these principles are applied in global leadership at the moment, and we don’t have any systematic way to lead the globe.

Global leadership is not very complicated in theory, but in practice, it is. The reason for that is that we don’t understand the global leadership process, and nations have different visions, values, and targets. Therefore, we should try to reveal the true simplicity of leadership and to develop leadership science. From this leadership science, we should also get some guidelines on global leadership and how to develop global governance models.

Global governance could be seen as a process of international cooperation among transnational actors, aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region. International Institutions like United Nations and others tend to have limited power to decide and implement what could be the global governance model. Global governance involves multiple states and international organizations, with one state having more a lead role than the rest. Who will take the leading role here politically, economically, and culturally: the USA, China, or EU.

One possibility could be that we try to set up A Globe Ltd organization step by step, first so that Europe will integrate itself and the same way Americas, Asia, and Africa. And then finally we could set up some kind of World Parliament. But who could have the power to orchestrate this kind of integration process? It doesn’t happen by itself.

What could be then the global governance model: democrazy, meritocracy, or dictatorship. Probably none of them. If we consider present governance models around the world, they are not the solution either. Maybe we have to develop totally new and innovative global governance models. We should start active research in global leadership to understand what models could be possible to implement theoretically and practically. Leadership science could have some vital input to this research.

Tämä blogi on julkaistu myös Turun Yliopiston Global Goodness sivulla.