It’s hard to manage any organization so that its long-term interests aren’t sacrificed to short-term expedience. But there is an added wrinkle for organizations whose operations are globally dispersed: cultural orientation toward the future varies widely the world over.

My colleagues and I discovered this in the course of our work on the GLOBE project, a study now in its 15th year, that looks at how cultures vary in relation to a set of factors important to organizational management and leadership. By surveying over 17,000 middle managers in 61 societies, we have been able to discern clear differences in nine key areas. One of these is what we call “future orientation,” or the extent to which a culture encourages and rewards such behavior as delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future.

Our straightforward questions asked participants both to express their own values and to describe the environment in which they worked. For example, we presented them with the statement, “More people should live for the present than for the future” and asked for a level of agreement on a seven-point scale. In a separate question, we removed the word “should” and asked them to rank how well the statement described actual behavior in their culture.

We found that societies vary greatly in how oriented they actually are to the long term, but in most cultures, people’s personal values and aspirations are similar and quite future-oriented. What’s more, most people feel their cultures aren’t as forward-thinking as they should be.

In our study, Singapore emerged as the most future-oriented of cultures, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands and Malaysia. The least future-oriented were Russia, Argentina, Poland and Hungary. Squarely in the middle were Germany, Taiwan, Korea and Ireland. Even more important, however, is our further finding that the greater a society’s future orientation, the higher its average GDP per capita and its levels of innovativeness, happiness, confidence and competitiveness.

What does this mean for an executive attempting to manage or work with teams in cultures that are less future-oriented than their own? First, team members will have different perceptions of the feasibility of forward-thinking. Even if the indigenous workers personally value long-term planning, they may see it as futile, given prevailing practices and conditions. But second, because of those shared values, it is possible to inspire people to become more future-oriented.

The key is to start modestly by setting team goals for, say, a three-month horizon and then ensuring they are met. By gradually increasing time horizons, a manager can endow a team with a sense of control over outcomes that formerly may have seemed hopelessly provisional and remote.

Knowing how future orientation varies from culture to culture can help leaders shift their attitude from judgmental to understanding and focus their collaborative efforts. A true global leader doesn’t blame local teams for failing to immediately live up to their aspirations but rather helps them achieve long-term goals one step at a time. 

(Mansour Javidan is the director of the Garvin Center for Cultures and Languages of International Management and president and chairman of the GLOBE Research and Education Foundation at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona.)

Leadership that focuses on the customer–really

Many executives and managers exhort their followers to make the customer the center of everything they do. Yet for all the passion and conviction of their words, genuine customer focus remains theory rather than practice in their organizations.

Forward-Thinking Cultures

It’s hard to manage any organization so that its long-term interests aren’t sacrificed to short-term expedience. But there is an added wrinkle for organizations whose operations are globally dispersed: cultural orientation toward the future varies widely the world over.

Book Keeper

The life of National Book Store founder Socorro C. Ramos should serve as an inspiration to the younger generation on how to hurdle the numerous challenges thrown our way. Her success, not just in business but in all aspects of life, stresses the importance of focus, dedication, hard work, education and other important values.

Winning: Private-equity hoopla

Q: What’s your opinion about all the hoopla surrounding private equity lately? Dev Patel, Chicago 

A: We think it looks a lot like a movie we’ve seen before, from its exciting action scenes, to its scary parts, to its larger-than-life heroes and their headline-grabbing foes.

Removing the smoke screen

THE best salesman, they say, is one who is thoroughly convinced of his product. For a nonsmoker, it is indeed a feat that he should be at the forefront of selling some of the world’s top cigarette brands in the Philippines.

It takes a village to raise a child

Aldo, 5, did not mean to trap his mother when he asked her if God made everything, to which she answered, naturally, “Yes, He did.”

“Why did He make the poor?”

Baguio Calling

BAGUIO City—Success in today’s fiercely competitive global economy depends on an organization’s ability to change and the abilities of the people around it to respond.

A ‘broken people’ in booming India

DALLIPUR—The hip young Indians working inside this country’s multinational call centers have one thing in common: Almost all hail from India’s upper and middle castes, elites in this highly stratified society.

What is your company’s ‘signature’ experience?

Your company’s signature experience exemplifies what you do especially well; it’s the odd or unique process that makes your company stand out in people’s minds. Developing a signature experience and communicating it to job candidates can help you streamline your hiring process. It also helps you build an unusually engaged, excited and committed work force.

Strategy: private equity’s long view

What can the gods of private equity (PE) teach us about managing for the long term? If you think that their lightning reflex, do-what-it-takes approach has nothing to tell us about the long haul, you’d be wrong.

Wrapped up

Having fun and making money are two things that Rommel Juan can mix quite easily.

Winning: China, India and US economic dominance

Q: You have written about the reasons to invest in India and China, but you haven’t said whether you think those countries pose a threat to American hegemony in the world economy. Do they? Sahara Chhabra, Dallas

China Rising

HONOLULU—The rapid spread of product development and research in high-technology industries toward the Asia-Pacific Region is accelerating China’s rise as an economic superpower.

Why do presidents lie?

TO understand why presidents lie, following Herbert Spencer’s advice, judgment must first be withheld, for above all men (and women, to be gender-blind), they have different desires, hopes, fears and restraints, although it is a truth from experience that all presidents, no matter how saintly (a wrong term to use on them in the first place), lie.

As Capitalist As Ever

HONG KONG—Tim Freshwater, Asia vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., gazes across the Hong Kong skyline from his 68th-floor window toward a rectangular building that houses the barracks of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

How to Zap the Zombie

A company finds great success with a product or service. Makes loads of cash. Builds a seemingly strong brand. Settles in to a satisfying position of dominance. A couple of years pass and then, out of nowhere, a new player swoops in and gobbles up most of the customers, leaving little but scraps for the once dominant firm.

GREED IS BACK

Earlier this year, someone was confident that Hydril Co.’s stock was due to take flight—and very soon. During the two days ended on Friday, February 9, investors purchased options conveying the right, through February 16, to buy more than 160,000 Hydril shares for $90 apiece.

What is the color of gold?

I lost my appetite for shark’s fin soup when I learned how the shark was skinned alive and thrown back into the sea. But not entirely, for it tastes good. Some of the good and precious things in this world—including such wonders as the Pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—have a cruel history. It seems that civilization is built on blood for the most part. But time and the hunger for precious, wondrous things blurs the history of the process.

Toward An Independent, Fair And Fast Justice System

Adrian Cristobal: The Supreme Court has been in the news lately, principally because in these perilous times, we think of the Supreme Court as “the enemy of political persecution.” We tend to think of the three branches of government—Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislative—as contradictory to each other.

Real Leaders Negotiate

Good leaders are invariably effective negotiators. After all, authority has its limits. Some of the people you lead are smarter, more talented and, in some situations, more powerful than you are. In addition, often you’re called to lead people over whom you have no authority, such as members of commissions, boards and other departments in your organization.

Set Up To Fail: Economist Paul Ormerod on strategy and extinction

In his recent book Why Most Things Fail, theoretical economist Paul Ormerod argues that failure is the defining characteristic of biological, social and economic systems. But Ormerod, a former economic forecaster and now principal of Volterra, the London-based consulting firm he cofounded, doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.

Tubbataha dreaming

My initiation to Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park started with a back-roll, one day in May, into Jessie Beazley Reef. The first sharks of the trip were close enough to make out the white on their tips. Grey reef sharks were on active patrol, too, and we spotted no less than three pregnant sharks, bulging at their sides.

The ethics of revolution

THE death of Elias achieves revolutionary significance the moment society is recognized as a creator of victims in order to execute them. Elias had been condemned even before he was born, and it only remained for society to carry out the death sentence.

Down in the Valley

SAN JOSE—Silicon Valley, says San Jose/Silicon Valley Journal editor Norman Bell, is more of a state of mind than a piece of geography.

3 habits that hold leaders back–and how to overcome them

In my 10 years as a board member of the Peter Drucker Foundation, one of the wisest things I heard him say was, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do.

Help newly hired executives adapt quickly

The main reason why newly hired outside executives have such an abysmal failure rate (40 percent, according to one study) is poor acculturation: They don’t adapt well to the new company’s ways of doing things. In fact, some three-quarters of 53 senior human-resources managers I surveyed cited poor cultural fit as the driver for onboarding failures.

Chip off the old block

Developing a good work ethic at a young age proved to be beneficial for Intel Technology Philippines managing director Michael Wentling.

Help wanted: HK banker soaks Indian call centers in black humor

Shyam Mehra, 26, is a self-professed loser in New Delhi. When he dons a telephone headset each night, though, he becomes Sam Marcy, a polite troubleshooter for Americans angered by their home appliances.

Seeking a sea change

It was—and still—is considered the country’s southern backdoor, a way out for Filipinos caught in the grip of poverty and conflict, and a way in for Filipinos wanting to free themselves of that grip, through the power of smuggled goods and smuggled ideologies.

The rise of confessional politics

THREE centuries and a decade have changed America’s image of itself, it seems. In 1797, under George Washington, John Adams signed a treaty with Tripoli with the following disclaimer:

At Your Service

ALTHOUGH the Philippines’ tourism industry is now assessed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as the best-performing in Asia, the number of local manpower shifting to work in the tourism industry abroad also continues to rise.

The Force of the Weak