Today, for most firms, it is still important to be located near your customers. But in the global war for talent, it may be equally important to be located in the best place to attract the high performers and specialists your business needs. Over the last few years, specific locations around the world have arisen as preferred places to live and work. High-talent employees can live in locales that enable them to find the work they want while they create the work – life balance that meets their current needs and still be near to others like themselves. So, where are such places? As it turns out, people don ’ t look so much at countries as they do at cities, and often it is small cities that provide the lifestyles they are looking for. For example, it includes Groningen, a small town in the north of the Netherlands, and Eindhoven, another small town — but major business location — in the Netherlands. Of course, the traditional, popular cities continue to have appeal, but there are also new areas — in every region of the world — that are attracting the talent that today ’ s MNEs need. In Europe, this would include an area marked on the map by a gentle curve drawn from Barcelona, across southern France, northern Italy, Switzerland, and southern Germany, an area that already boasts the highest per capita income in the world. The big cities of interest in Europe still include Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Nice, Berlin, Milan, Dublin, and Zurich. In Asia, these cities would include Sydney and Brisbane, Auckland, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore and Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai. In the Americas these cities would include Toronto Vancouver, Canada, Boston, Denver, Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and Seattle/ Portland, US, Monterrey, Mexico, and S ã o Paulo, Brazil. If a global firm cannot find talent where its customers want them to relocate, then maybe it needs to figure out where the talent is and go there. And compounding the problems in the search for global talent is the interest by today ’ s technology-savvy millennials to just work from home — wherever home may be — in an open, collaborative way — with colleagues and customers, wherever they may be. 

Sources : Friedman, T. L. (2005), The World is Flat , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Howard, C. G. (1992), Profile of the twenty-first-century expatriate manager, HR Magazine , June, 93 – 100; Laabs, J. J. (1991), The global talent search, Personnel Journal , August, 38 – 43; Sirkin, H. L., Hemerling, J. W., and Bhattacharya, A. K. (2008), Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything , New York: Business Plus. 

Discussion Questions :

watching “The Workforce Crisis of 2030—and how to start solving it now (Links to an external site.)”, please discuss the following:

How do should the issues described in the case study and TED talk affect IHRM in MNEs? Identify at least two different impacts and describe them.