Trying to “Stay one step ahead of the game”. How to manage a global workforce and play early on Environmental uncertainty

Nowadays, multinational corporations (MNCs) are exposed to increasingly tangled and equivocal external environments (Burton, Obel 2004) characterized by hyper competition and rapid change. When the ‘unexpected is an increasing part of the everyday experience’ (Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfled 2005), MNCs may have ‘limited capacity to anticipate every challenge that arises’ (Sutcliffe and Vogus 2003, p. 104). Being resilience the capacity ‘to cope with unanticipated dangers’ (Wildavsky 1988, p. 147), with this paper we posit that international mobility can help MNCs to understand better the specificities of each level of environment they deal with (general, specific, local). Playing early on environmental uncertainty they put themselves in the condition of building the pre-requisites for resilience. Flexible enough to react quickly to external market shifts, being able to detect and correct emerging and manifest anomalies promptly - thus minimizing adverse outcomes - these organizations remain steadfastly “one step ahead of the game”.