Succession planning for the 21st century: How well are we grooming our future business leaders?

pe lence for heir top I n 1986, when offered the chance to be~es s a y t h e y come vice president rna t iona l o×of human resources of AMDEC's European sector, Gil Parkinson was elated. Three years later, his tr]tr iumphant return to ' the home office that he envisioned during his stay in Brussels lay shattered on his desk. As he stared past the letter that informed him there was no position for someone with his qualifications at the home office, he wondered what he would do, where would he wind up. It would be a strange feeling to walk away from his 12 years with AMDEC, and he wondered if his promotion to Brussels had been a brightly packaged time bomb. Gil Parkinson's di lemma reflects the plight of a significant number of executives today. A rational model of human resource management would assume that firms are hoarding their personnel with international experience and grooming them for upper management positions where the most important strategic decisions are made. After all, executives who have been exposed to overseas operations in different cultural environments are more able to make decisions that consider the important differences in political, culrural, and economic systems of an MNC's geographically separate operations. Indeed, there is a growing minority of CEOs who are beginning to push the importance of international experience. "If you go back 20 years, you could be pretty insular and still survive. Today, that's not possible," says Duane R. Kullberg, head of Arthur Andersen & Company. "Intensifying international competit ion will make the home-grown chief executive obsolete," says the Wall Street Journal in an article on the chief executive officer of the future (Bennet 1989). "Travel overseas" says Mr. Danforth, former chairman of Westinghouse, in giving advice to future CEOs. Despite such testimonials, some simple facts and tenacious stereotypes reveal a persistent truth: These are voices in the wilderness. Consider, for example, the following facts: • One in five expatriates leaves the firm upon reent ry--most ly because there is no relevant position open upon return. That's a fairly extraordinary 20 percent turnover of a valuable, limited resource (Adler 1981). • MBAs from seven of the world's most internationally oriented and prestigious programs perceive expatriation as a potentially risky career move. They fear the "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" phenomenon most of all (Adler 1987). • A recent Korn/Ferry survey (1986) found that a striking 0.4 percent of the executives polled said that expatriation was part of the fastest route to the top---down from 2 percent in 1977. Few studies have at tempted to really understand how an overseas assignment affects the careers of expatriates after they return home. To