CEOs Vote With Their Feet

We are witnessing what Andy Grove used to call an "inflection point." Dell's decision to double its work force in India to 20,000 people and Wal-Mart's announcement that it would hire 150,000 people in China came at roughly the same time that General Motors offered retirement packages to more than 100,000 American workers. In short, massive shifts in employment patterns are beginning to hit the U.S. economy, one that economists and other soothsayers have underestimated.

To one extent or another, these trends have been underway for years. But what seems to have changed is that American CEOs are deciding to gear up in the newer, emerging markets on a massive scale, and not just to tap lower cost labor. Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins at Dell and Lee Scott at Wal-Mart see China's economy continuing to grow at 8 to 10 percent a year and India's economy growing at about 8 percent. To put it simply, that's where the sales growth is. They also see highly educated, motivated work forces hungry for new jobs. There is human capital to be tapped.

At home, the American economy will grow at slightly more than 3 percent this year. CEOs also see high health care and pension costs, a difficult regulatory environment, nasty litigation woes, and a poorly educated work force that has a sense of self-entitlement. Complete drift in Washington suggests that very few of these problems are going to be fixed any time soon.

Nearly every CEO of a major company with whom I speak is enthusiastic about emerging markets. A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble, our 2006 CEO of the Year, is particularly passionate about the opportunities in China, India, Mexico, Brazil and Russia. (see page 30.)

Of course, some good things will emerge from this rush into emerging markets-the companies that do it right will grow faster and be more profitable than the ones that don't. Employees and shareholders will benefit from that.

But CEOs who are leading the way could become more vulnerable to charges that they don't really care about the American economy. They ought to have a strategy for communicating why they're doing what they're doing.

In short, this is a megatrend. Get ready.

Copyright Chief Executive Magazine, Incorporated Apr/May 2006
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