What Scares CEOs.(global problem solving)(Brief Article)

Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean of the Yale School of Management, is author of a new book, "The Mind of the C.E.O." In our era of hypercompetitive globalization, he argues, few chief executives genuinely think globally. They had better start. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Michael Meyer:

MEYER: You've interviewed dozens of the world's top business leaders. What worries them most? What keeps them awake at night?

GARTEN: Tension. The inherent contradiction between having to deliver superb financial performance, every single day, while grappling with the broader and longer-term challenges that affect future profits. Imagine the complexity. How do you run a company operating in dozens of legal jurisdictions, with dozens of different regulatory structures, with shareholders in many different countries who all have very different ideas of what the company should be doing. It becomes an almost existential question: What is the job? How much control do I really have? How big is too big?

I remember speaking with the new CEO of a major U.S. defense firm. He described his first year on the job as sheer terror.

These people are very aware of the almost intractable challenges facing them. The mere act of communicating can be overwhelming. I spoke with Rolf Breuer, chairman of Deutsche Bank, after he acquired Bankers Trust in New York in late 1999. He was afraid that organizational hierarchy would stymie teamwork, so he created an e-mail system that would allow each of the company's 90,000 employees to send him a private note identifying problems or suggesting improvements. The bigger you get, he said, the more personal you have to be. Otherwise the bureaucracy becomes paralyzing.

You write about the pace of change. Not only must CEOs make their quarterly numbers, but they must also beat their competition into markets that, often, do not yet exist.

The Internet is an example. Even Bill Gates almost missed it.