Rebuilding brand America: corporate America's role.

The world, we are told, is flat. It is also tipping, and not in America's favor. Pollsters tell us that US foreign policy--especially in the Middle East--accounts for 35 percent of anti-American feelings around the world. But that's small comfort for American businesses, which not only share plenty of blame for the balance but may be unwittingly contributing to the tilt [1].

When communism collapsed, it seemed that free-market capitalism had become the world's reigning economic ideology; US corporations, its principle delivery vehicle. The Wall Street Journal was even moved to editorialize that "We are all capitalists now" [2]. Well, we are not all happy about it.

Consider how closely American-style capitalism is identified with the current activist bugaboo, globalization. US firms account for less than a third of the sales of the top 200 companies in the world. In fact, of the top 200, Japanese firms account for almost 39 percent of total sales compared to US firms' 28 percent. But when was the last time you heard of someone marching on the local Sony office to protest globalization?

The reason may be that much of the world has a sharply different conception of "capitalism," and subsequently of a corporation's role in society, than the American model. Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars asked 15,000 executives from around the world to choose one of the following as the proper goal of a corporation:

* the only real goal of a corporation is making a profit; or

* a company, besides making profit, has the goal of attaining the well-being of various stakeholders, such as employees, customers, etc.

Out of the 12 nationalities surveyed, 40 percent of American managers said the sole goal of the corporation was to make a profit, compared to less than 30 percent of their non-Anglo-Saxon counterparts [3].