Leaders In London

Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising and marketing group giant WPP, has been in the news recently , pouring resources into China. His reasoning is that if you are leading for growth, then you have to look to be where the growth will be. And it won’t be America. Sorrell spoke at Leaders in London for us last year and a clip is below, in which he talks about this strategy.

Of our 2008 speakers, Andy Cosslett, CEO of IHG, the hotels giant whose brands include Holiday Inn, is also expanding the company’s presence in China - spectacularly so. IHG already employs 32,000 people in China. It needed to recruit 20,000 more before the end of this year to keep up with its expansion plans.

Like all of us, IHG faces a war for talent in moving into new regions. So, they grow their own. They are building 22 IHG Academy sites in China to train local people and then recruit them. Twelve of the sites have been built already and thousands of local Chinese are trained to IHG standards in how to run a hotel and then employed each year. IHG’s future leaders within China will emerge from these new cohorts they are developing themselves.

So, to lead for growth in tough trading conditions, it seems you need to look East, not West. Are you facing the right way? And are you putting the resources in to get the results you will need? More from Martin Sorrell in the clip, below.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Andy Cosslett, IHG, Globalisation, WPP, Martin Sorrell, future leaders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.