Senior executives need better mental maps to navigate our unevenly globalized world. Although a wide variety of metrics show that just 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is truly global, executives disproportionately embrace visions of unbounded opportunities in a borderless world, where distances and differences no longer matter.

In several articles and books, I’ve tried to describe the true nature of globalization and suggest ways for executives to structure their thinking about distance and difference effects (see sidebar, “Understanding the world and measuring distance”). Here, I want to focus on the potential for a special kind of map—one I call a “rooted map”—to help leaders enhance their intuition about the opportunities and threats inherent in our semiglobalized world.