About five years ago, some executives with Booz Allen Hamilton were trying to come up with an official firmwide stance on globalization. They discovered that much had been written to define globalization, but there was nothing that took the next step to ask: What now? Those discussions turned into the book Megacommunities: How Leaders of Government, Business and Non-Profits Can Tackle Today's Global Challenges Together by Booz Allen's Mark Gerencser, senior vice president, Fernando Napolitano, vice president and managing director, Reginald Van Lee, senior vice president and Christopher Kelly, vice president. Consulting magazine sat down with Gerencser, Napolitano and Van Lee to discuss the book. Consulting: So, what was the motivation for writing this book?
Napolitano: This book goes back to about 2003 when there was a lot of hype around globalization. So, we started to question ourselves, and we asked: What is our view of globalization as a firm? What is our position? Little by little, we started to analyze the situation, and we read all the books that were out there on globalization, and we discovered that in all the books, the authors were analyzing globalization from their own perspectives—either from a government perspective, a business perspective or a nonprofit perspective. All the books did a great job laying out the problems, but we thought they were all missing the last chapter: What do we do next?
Gerencser: What we found was all the books addressed and took a position about globalization—some said it was good, other said it was bad, but what was missing was the what are we going to do about it—regardless of the value judgment you want to put on it. We didn't find any books out there that offered a practical guide to globalization—the what are we going to do about it part of the equation.
Consulting: So, how did you go about solving that problem?
Gerencser: We interviewed over one hundred leaders from very different backgrounds for the book, and it became quite clear that no one leader could actually solve a problem about globalization within their own sphere—whether it's business or government or civil society. They somehow had to leap out of their sphere and take down the boundaries and natural silos that existed between each one. That was an "a-ha" moment for us early on. Government leaders have been trained to be leaders in government, and industry people have been trained to be business first and profit only, and the same thing is true in civil society. The interesting thing is policy and profit are interconnected, but we don't get to see it all the time. This book is designed to help leaders rise above, teach them how to take down the walls between the three sectors.
Van Lee: We don't think we discovered or identified any new problems with this book, but we think through these interviews we come up with something that's very pragmatic that says from a structural standpoint, from an infrastructure, from a mindset, from a skills base, that all of those things are guides to how you can create and
maintain a megacommunity; it's very real and very tactical. People sort of get intuitively that they need to collaborate to solve problems, but how you do it is not trivial.
Consulting: What exactly is a"megacommunity"?
Napolitano: We define a megacommunity as those three different segments—business, government, and nonprofit—converging on a topic to try to solve a problem. It's key that those three
sectors have a common interest.
Gerencser: For a megacommunity to occur, two conditions must be present: First, you have to have tri-sector involvement, and secondly, you have to have overlapping vital interests. And the sectors could be at odds; one might want something to happen while another wants the exact opposite. The idea is they come together to solve a problem.
Consulting: Can you give me a real-life example?
Gerencser: Sure, right now we're trying to create a megacommunity to solve Alzheimer's. Aging is a huge problem for the whole world; it's bigger in Europe actually because of declining populations and lower fertility rates. Basically, we're not dying on time, and Alzheimer's is increasing because of that. It's an epidemic and can be cured. We worked with Newt Gingrich's organization—the Center for Health Transformation—to get all the stakeholders—business, in terms of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies; government, like the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control, and civil, groups like Gingrich's organization—to create a megacommunity to address Alzheimer's. We need to get it declared as an epidemic, then sponsor and fund research. That's one that we've started to stimulate. But there are others, certainly—big problems that the world is going to face, big-category problems that require the orchestration of all three sectors to solve the problem, and we're just not set up that way.
Consulting: In reality, how does a megacommunity get started?
Gerencser: Sometimes, they naturally occur. Some of those have worked and some of those have failed. But Booz Allen is taking the lead on starting some of these. I mentioned Alzheimer's, and there are a number of others. We think we have the right rules, tools and protocols to take down the boundaries between these three sectors. And now, we're trying to have our clients to think about megacommunities from a strategic perspective.
Van Lee: In the healthcare space, there are three that we're involved in right now. There's the Alzheimer's one that Mark just talked about. There's the Atlanta AIDS partnership that's working to solve HIV/AIDS in the Atlanta area. And there's work were just beginning around
diabetes, similar to what we're doing with Alzheimer's.
Consulting: How is this different from some of the public-private partnerships we've seen before?
Gerencser: Many of those have been highly targeted and highly limited. What we need to have is something that lives, evolves and adapts to things. The things that we're trying to solve— Alzheimer's, HIV/AIDS and alternative energy—are persistent problems that need a persistent answer. These are problems that the citizen somehow feels locally. It somehow impacts them, but the solution can't be found by the citizen. It has to be found by something bigger. That's when the megacommunity come in. It grows, it lives, and it adapts and adjusts to the problem. It's is not just a point solution.
Consulting: Was it difficult for four people to co-author a book?
Napolitano: It wasn't always easy, but I'll tell you what is great: We're four different people with very different backgrounds and different geographical footprints.
Gerencser: And that is absolutely required. It's a lot harder to write a book that way, but we brought all of our unique experiences together
to write this book. We're all very different in how we pick up the problem, but that's what helped us get to the solutions, the very practical solutions that are presented in the book. Basically, after we did all the interviews and started to write the book, we all realized that really this is a leadership book. It's a leader's guide on the topics of the big problems that affect the multi-sectors—public, private and civil—and requires a new style of leadership to solve them.
Consulting: Do those leaders exist right now?
Gerencser: Some of them do. We need people like Henry Paulson—he would be a great megacommunity leader. He was very involved in civil society before he became the leader of Goldman Sachs, and now he's the Treasury secretary. He has the type of leadership features we talk about in the book, but he's rare. What has to be created is a new leadership paradigm. It's about how the leaders in those three areas need to lead and how they need to work. Each sector in and of itself is a community, but when the three come together, it creates a megacommunity. That's what this book is about. It's a new concept, really, that we're proposing. But again, it requires a new kind of leadership. What we're talking about is a network and networking principles around leadership. No one is in charge; everyone has a say, and in the book we discuss the protocols to execute that. There isn't a CEO of a megacommunity. People take leadership roles at different times. It's really a different way from how most people are used to solving problems.
Napolitano: And we also don't think our educational system is doing a very good job at developing these kinds of leaders. What we need is a new educational system to prepare its leaders to understand different cultures around the world. How you form new leaders needs to reflect the new world. There's still a big gap in what we've got and what is required. Our book, we believe, is coming at the ideal time because people sense that there is that gap.
Gerencser: We don't prescribe how to fill the leadership gap. What we do talk about are what features those future leaders need to have. What we are doing is going out to speak at universities about this management gap that the schools have to fill. Some schools have done some good things on the fringes, but we really haven't found a program that addresses this yet and stresses all these skills. There's certainly not a program that has students work rotating internships that allow them to be exposed to business, government and civil society, for instance.
Van Lee: Some schools are starting to think this way. I used to chair the board of the business school at the University of Southern California, The Marshall School. They are actually starting to put some of this in their curriculum because of my connection.
Consulting: It would seem to me that getting the business piece of a megacommunity would be the most difficult. Is a business going to naturally reject a solution that may end up costing them money?
Gerencser: Maybe initially, it might. It's a matter of how you look at it. Maybe it's a business investment. If you look at this just from the business community, it's a real hard sell. But if you look at this across all three sectors, it makes more sense. It is about negotiating and compromise. Right now, there's a lot of tension between these sectors when each tries to optimize their own interests. What we're trying to do with this book is make it a constructive tension where we find a solution where everybody can benefit over the long haul. When you take the long-haul view, you can find win-win situations.
Napolitano: Companies are starting to get it. Boeing, for example, has appointed former ambassadors in all the countries where they sell airplanes. Boeing understands that it needs those skills. It's not only the building of the airplane, it's more complicated than that. It's selling those airplanes it builds around the world. Look at a few companies that failed in Europe—Microsoft and General Electric. Do you remember when Jack Welch's GE and Honeywell merger was blocked by the European Commission? Why? He didn't understand that the world had changed.
Van Lee: Most of the CEOs get it. The idea that leaders need to collaborate across all three sectors isn't a new idea to them. But this approach is a new approach. At the end of the day, it's the recognition that I have an interest and you have an interest, and we can't address our individual interests without us all working together. That's really what this book is all about.
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