Staffing global marketing positions: What we don’t know can make a difference

Abstract

As the global environment for business becomes more volatile and the need to institute frame-breaking changes in the conventional wisdom of management increases, global organizational ignorance about the usability of its existing knowledge becomes a critical issue. Ignorance in its most simple form is the lack of factual knowledge but unawareness of ignorance is “not knowing what one does not know” (i.e., being ignorant of what information would be useful in solving global organizational problems). The focus of the paper is on the underlying factors that contribute to escalating organizational ignorance as more firms attempt to globalize their operations. In the paper we examine two types of organizational ignorance: pluralistic and probabilistic which both can be experienced in a global context. In addition, a means to reduce the risk of global organizational ignorance through an innovative global staffing process of combining expatriate and inpatriate managers is explored.