In This Article
- Sidebar: A global talent search for China
- Sidebar Exhibit A: Thirty percent of executives at Chinese companies with activities abroad say they have no senior managers from outside mainland China.
- Exhibit: The capabilities required to run a business in China are much broader and more complex than they are in most other countries.
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The growing need for talented managers in China represents by far the biggest management challenge facing multinationals and locally owned businesses alike. In a recent AmCham Shanghai1 survey of US-owned enterprises there, for example, 37 percent of the companies responding said that recruiting talent was their biggest operational problem—more than the number who cited regulatory concerns, a lack of transparency, bureaucracy, or the infringement of intellectual-property rights. Separately, 44 percent of the executives at Chinese companies surveyed by The McKinsey Quarterly reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions (see sidebar, “A global talent search for China”).