Accenture CEO Survey: Key is to Maintain Common Corporate Culture

Going global may sound poetic; going global may sound like inspiring dreams, but success as a global enterprise is impossible if organizations are poorly equipped. The statement came from nearly one-quarter of executives working for some of the largest companies in the world. These results from a recent Accenture survey of global CEOs. This telephonic study and fieldwork were conducted in September to December in 2006. As their chief concern, these executives mentioned their urge to maintain a common corporate culture globally; the need arose with the organizations reaching far and wide and geopolitical issues are simply overridden. The annual survey was spread over a thousand C-suite executives; from the United States, Italy, France, UK, Japan and China. Accenture designed the survey to identify business priorities and major concerns of these executives. According to 49% of CEOs, the ability to maintain a common corporate culture and understand local customs and ways of doing business are the two factors on which global business depends. According to 41%, greatest challenges towards building global enterprises are servicing remote clients/customers effectivey. 36 percent opted for the impact of the global economy as the real tough challenge. However, according to 25 percent, the impact of different geopolitical issues received the prominence. Mark Foster, an Accenture Business Consulting & Integrated Markets executive, said, "The critical challenge for management is to ensure that companies maintain their core values and corporate identity across many countries, especially as industry becomes more knowledge-based and increasingly, work is handled by virtual teams. They also must build organizations that abandon the traditional geography-based operating models, which often fail to recognize dramatic differences in market needs and the resulting management challenges." -Article provided by Big4.com