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BSG From the Boardroom

A curated selection of executive opportunities, industry highlights, and unique insights in executive search.

    Global Shift in Executive Leadership Pool Forecasted for 2020

    Having just finished an executive search for a General Manager of Asia Pacific and EMEA region where the candidate was located in Singapore, who was born and had early childhood in India, and educated and now a citizen of the U.S., the question of global talent trends comes to mind. Is this typical of the future executive leadership puzzle, where pieces will come from around the globe? Reflecting at year's end on the coming year, and the fact that we're almost at 2010, we got to thinking about leadership succession and the next generation of leaders we're grooming. With all the news of layoffs at all levels in the media, and despite the forecasts of some of the toughest economic times America has seen since the Great Depression, there are some really interesting global macro trends that are worth noting when it comes to executive recruiting, and executive talent management in the next few years. And now is probably a really good time to start the planning around the impacts these demographic prognostications may have.

    The quick headline is this-- Baby Boomers as we all have heard (approximate age range of 42 to 60), are aging. And Boomers make up the vast majority of executive leadership roles in corporate America. This includes Wall Street AND Main Street businesses, large and small. In fact, there is some evidence that more entrepreneurs starting businesses are boomers than any other age group. Boomers are fully one-third of the US population now (US Census) and X generation (54 million, ~17% of U.S. population), Y generation (aged between 18 and 30, about 75 million, clocking in at ~25% of U.S. population), and Z, AA, etc (who knows) generations are smaller due to lower birthrates post-Word War II. As the nextgen executive pool is a much smaller one, we have to ask the obvious question-- where is leadership going to come from in the next 5 to 25 years? Who will drive the U.S. knowledge economy, and can the U.S. continue to sell itself as the global melting pot, successfully continuing to woo other countries' best and brightest with our promise of streets paved with gold? Or, given the two busts in the last 8 years, one Internet and the other financial markets, is the next generation of leaders going to reverse the brain drain from rest of world to the U.S. to its opposite? We've certainly seen recently emerging global powers like China actively push to woo and re-patriate Chinese who had migrated to the U.S. for higher education and opportunity.

    What is counter-intuitive to perhaps many however is the demographic shifts and a snapshot of what the global talent marketplace looks like in 2020, a mere 11 years away. We were recently at the IACPR Annual Conference (International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment), and had the opportunity to hear one of Boston Consulting Group's Talent Practice leaders, Rosalinde Torres, address this issue.

    For a summary of the Boston Consulting Group report pdf click here. For the visual, look at the world map graphic above. Red circles are countries with a net loss of eligible leadership population by 2020. Green circles are those countries with a net gain. One might think that China would be a big player in future leadership, but with their one-child policy, they're down 10 million. The U.S. is down 17 million. The possible winner for building the biggest pool of future leaders is India, up 47 million people. This is almost more than all the rest of those countries with net positive growth combined.

    Food for thought as we go about building executive teams for 2009, 10 and deep into the next decade.

    Links To Leadership July 2017 Issue

    -by Clark Waterfall on Dec 9, 2008 3:50:32 PM

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