Seeing the Elephant:: Human Resource Management Challenges in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

I n the early 1800s, an American farmer who had never seen an elephant decided to travel to a nearby town where a circus was scheduled to visit. Thinking to kill two birds with one stone, he loaded his wagon with vegetables, with the intent to sell them at the town’s market after the performance of the circus. On the way to town he encountered the circus retinue, which was led by an elephant. The sight of the elephant terrified his team of horses, which promptly bolted—the result being an overturned wagon and spoiled vegetables littering the road. In response to this disaster, the farmer is said to have exclaimed: ‘‘I don’t give a hang, for I have seen the elephant!’’ In nineteenth century America, ‘‘seeing the elephant’’ denoted the encountering of an exotic phenomenon, an unequaled experience, an adventure of a lifetime, or a particularly dangerous situation. Gold prospectors planning to travel west in the 1850s announced they were ‘‘going to see the elephant.’’ Those who returned home without making it to California claimed they had seen the ‘‘elephant’s tracks’’ or the ‘‘elephant’s tail.’’ Gold Rush-era Californians sometimes described the phenomenon as simply, ‘‘the elephant.’’ What is the managerial ‘‘elephant’’ of the twenty-first century? Is there an unequaled, heretofore unknown, exotic sight, or some attractive, yet potentially overwhelming condition that can make or break people and organizations? There is. The elephant, globalization, has upset the cart of traditional business rules: the new rules of globalization are often vague, unstable, counterintuitive, and full of exceptions. The elephant and HR: When chief executive officers (CEOs) try to aggressively position their companies to be global players, they often find their efforts frustrated due to a lack of global competencies in their managerial corps. As the former CEO of Brunswick Corp., Jack Riechert, put it, ‘‘We have all the financial, technical, and product resources we need to be a dominant global player. What we lack are the human resources. We just don’t have the people we need who understand global markets and players.’’ When CEOs turn to their human resource specialists for help in Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 261–274, 2003 ISSN 0090-2616/$ – see frontmatter 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0090-2616(03)00031-7 www.organizational-dynamics.com