to motivate his sales network to achieve better financial results, Carl was very aggressive in his communi- cation, repeatedly taking a bullying line of attack. This tone had been successful for him in the past in get- ting his U.S. colleagues' attention and impressing on them the urgency of the situation. As Carl delivered this diatribe, he didn't realize that some members of his sales network in Argentina were becoming extremely offended; they felt their value and contributions were being degraded and disrespected. In their culture, professionals simply did not speak this way to one another. As a result, one of the distribution partners ended its relationship with Carl's company and went over to the competition. Other distributors in on the confer- ence call voiced similar concerns about partnering with an organiza- tion whose leaders used such an approach. Eventually the CEO of Carl's company got involved and sent a Latin American executive to patch resolved, and the remaining distribu- tors kept their relationships with the company. Carl soon realized he had made incorrect and damaging assumptions about what motivated members of his sales network. His actions had been instinctive, automatic, and habitual. After the fact he saw that the stress of the situation had caused him to forget all his book learning about working across cultures. Under the gun he had relied on a strategy that had pre- viously worked in his own culture and context. Leading globally is extremely complex. The differences between the requirements of leadership at a local level and of leadership at the global level are exponential. In Success for the New Global Manager: How to Work Across Distances, Countries, and Cultures (Jossey-Bass, 2002), Maxine Dalton, Chris Ernst, Jennifer Deal, and Jean Leslie refer to research that found that all managers whose responsibilities are limited to a gers and to who all your stakeholders are. Because of the volatility of global business, leaders can't make decisions ahead of time, but they can research the choices and possibilities, familiarize themselves with the issues, and plan for different scenar- ios. If they do these things success- fully, when the pressure is on they won't have to struggle with each question for the first time--they will be better informed and can focus on adding new data from the immediate context to their decision-making process. SIX THEMES What are the specific challenges faced by global leaders? To shed some light on this question, CCL conducted interviews with forty senior global leaders from thirteen countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Although this study had a small sample, it is just one part of CCL's research aimed at understanding the issues and prob-