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Leaders with a cross-cultural mind-set are in high demand. Gaining that perspective takes great effort, but it also allows you to create value for your company. So argue Unruh and Cabrera, who chart a clear path for business leaders who aspire to join the global elite. The process starts with learning to think and act globally. It requires extensive study, foreign travel, cultural exploration, and interpersonal experiences that must be undertaken with an open mind and heart. Once you enter the global elite, there's no coasting. You'll have to suss out cross-cultural divergences and convergences--and build diverse networks--to give your company a leg up. But you should be inspired less by figures on an income statement than by a sense of global citizenship. That's what makes members of the global elite a rare, influential breed that achieves both measurable and ineffable results.

Sustainability, defined by natural scientists as the capacity of healthy ecosystems to function indefinitely, has become a clarion call for business. Leading companies have taken high-profile steps toward achieving it: Wal-Mart, for example, with its efforts to reduce packaging waste, and Nike, which has removed toxic chemicals from its shoes. But, says Unruh, the director of Thunderbird's Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management, sustainability is more than an endless journey of incremental steps. It is a destination, for which the biosphere of planet Earth - refined through billions of years of trial and error - is a perfect model. Unruh distills some lessons from the biosphere into three rules: Use a parsimonious palette. Managers can rethink their sourcing strategies and dramatically simplify the number and types of materials their companies use in production, making recycling cost-effective. After the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller discovered that its leading desk chair had 200 components made from more than 800 chemical compounds, it designed an award-winning successor whose far more limited materials palette is 96% recyclable. Cycle up, virtuously. Manufacturers should design recovery value into their products at the outset. Shaw Industries, for example, recycles the nylon fiber from its worn-out carpet into brand-new carpet tile. Exploit the power of platforms. Platform design in industry tends to occur at the component level - but the materials in those components constitute a more fundamental platform. Patagonia, by recycling Capilene brand performance underwear, has achieved energy costs 76% below those for virgin sourcing. Biosphere rules can teach companies how to build ecologically friendly products that both reduce manufacturing costs and prove highly attractive to consumers. And managers need not wait for a green technological revolution to implement them.

Deck is a U.S.-based multinational supplier to the automotive industry. It is a part of a joint venture in Romania, which, in October 2006, needs to be expanded to fulfill the growing needs of Renault-Dacia and its highly successful new world car, the Logan. But the question of the joint venture's expansion has revealed that the JV does not meet many of Deck's global manufacturing and business practice criteria. It is now being aggressively pushed by the customer to expand its investment in a small, local market, which may not yield sufficient financial results to justify the investment.