There is a commodity that sits beneath almost every international business trip, expatriate relocation, and cross-border supply chain, yet we rarely name it. Oil. At first glance, this may seem like an old-world concern. After all, we live in an age of digital collaboration, virtual teams, AI-enabled work, and increasingly sophisticated alternatives to physical travel. […]
How Do You Get Global Mobility to Demonstrate Its Strategic Value?
Why do I spend much of my time at the bottom looking up? This is a question I pose at the beginning of a white paper that Santa Fe Relocation Services commissioned me to write. I find the question to be quite relevant and illustrative of the shift that HR and global mobility professionals are […]
The SCARF in Global Mobility
In my last blog post I wrote about social neuroscience and the SCARF theory, which explains social behavior based on our brain principle known as ‘threat and reward response’. The theory posits that within social interactions our experience is influenced either by perceived threat or reward in one or several of five domains: status, certainty, […]
Living in a Terrorized World
Two years ago I wrote about expatriation and terrorism, arguing that global mobility professionals pay increasingly more attention to terror-related issues. Unfortunately in light of the recent ‘wave of terrorism’, be it the Nice attack in France, the Ansbach bombing in Germany, or the Orlando nightclub shooting (quite honestly, you name it), the case of […]
Global Mobility Functions: Bringing Value, but Struggling to Demonstrate It
In my latest blog entry I argued that globalization is in need of global leaders, who would allow for a more integrative approach in fostering globalization further. Indeed, globalization seems to need an extra push, as contrary to general perceptions of global interconnectedness, actual data indicates that the world is still not ‘flat’. Echoing this […]
Global Mobility Functions: From Administration to Strategy
The world of global mobility is rapidly changing and is continuously challenging. First of all, there is a continuous increase in the population of international assignees. According to the latest Brookfield Global Mobility Trends survey, 45% of respondents reported an increase in the number of assignees in 2014 compared to 2013, and 43% of respondents […]