Harvard Business Hewlett

What's the biggest emerging market of them all? I'll give you a hint: The answer isn't geographic but demographic. The answer is...women.

Women leaders are the new power behind the global economy, proclaims Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's announcement of its second annual webcast (which I moderated) celebrating International Women's Day. In developing nations, women's earned income is growing at 8.1 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for men. Globally, women control nearly $12 trillion of the $18 trillion total overall consumer spending, a figure predicted to rise to $15 trillion by 2014.

More significant, the majority of tertiary degrees are now being awarded to women. Highly qualified, well-educated and ambitious, these women are taking over the talent pool from Delhi to Dubai and bringing new urgency to the issue of managing diversity.

In a speech at the Hidden Brain Drain Summit held in New York last November, the Right Honorable Paul Boateng, the U.K.'s first black cabinet minister and most recently the British High Commissioner to South Africa, urged representatives of the 57 member organizations to overcome the obstacles placed in the path of emerging talents. "If you're serious about growth, if you're serious about innovation, if you're serious about getting a global reach, then the evidence tells you that you've got to overcome those obstacles," he said. "The imperative is to move from sentiment to strategy, to make the leap from survival to success."

Here's how two smart companies are making that leap:

• Goldman Sachs' ReturnshipSM program is a novel way of recruiting candidates who, after an extended, voluntary absence from the workforce, are seeking to re-start their careers. A returnship serves as a preparatory program, providing "returnees" with an opportunity to re-learn, sharpen and demonstrate the skills essential for success in a work environment that may have changed significantly since their most recent work experience. The eight-week U.S. 2008 pilot program comprised 11 women. The 2009 program lasted nine weeks and included 16 returnees chosen from more than 300 applicants. Acknowledging the importance of Asian markets, the program was expanded to Hong Kong in the fall of 2009, with an inaugural class of 37 returnees.

• Google's India Women in Engineering Award Program was launched in 2008 to celebrate young women in college and graduate school who are pursuing careers in engineering and computer science. That year, 16 women won the $2,000 award for academic excellence and demonstrated leadership skills; 9 won in 2009, selected from among more than 250 high-caliber applicants. Google senior management and engineers serve as judges. 2009 winner Anjali Sardana, a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, says that the award has inspired her to keep pursuing her dreams: "Not only did the award encourage me to stay in my field, it has made me confident and given me the spark to mentor other younger women engineers."

By investing in women in emerging markets, companies are betting on a brighter future — for a workforce just waiting to blossom, for economies whose development depends on this new crop of talent, and, of course, for themselves.

Volunteering has always been viewed as good for your soul. Now it turns out that it's also good for your health and your career.

Recent research conducted by Washington, D.C.-based Corporation for National & Community Service reveals that charitable work literally makes the heart grow stronger, as reported in my book Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down. Individuals with coronary artery disease who participate in volunteer activities after suffering a heart attack report a reduction in despair and depression, driving down mortality and adding years to life. It's also true that those who volunteer have fewer incidents of heart disease in the first place.

Surprisingly, you don't need to devote huge chunks of time to do-good activities to reap their health benefits. The research shows tangible positive changes by volunteering just 100 hours per year — a figure that works out to two hours a week.

In addition, volunteering can give your professional well-being a boost. Non-profits have long offered a golden opportunity to network and learn new skills in different areas, something that, in turn, will make you more valuable back in the office. The recession blew open that secret, though; according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, social enterprise organizations have been swamped with business-savvy professionals looking to burnish their resumes.

Some of the best opportunities for volunteer work that benefits your karma and your career may come from your own company. Research from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows that high-potential employees (mostly women, but also a significant percentage of men) are seriously motivated by a desire to give back to the world, and increasingly seek out employers that allow them to participate on company time. Smart employers, in turn, are linking altruism and ambition. By using community service partnerships to help valued employees fulfill their dreams and accelerate their careers, companies are betting that their A-team's enthusiasm will pay off in renewed engagement and loyalty.

Since 2003, Cisco Systems has operated an innovative program that blends career development for high-potential, senior-level employees with the company's philanthropic and community-relations goals. Cisco's Leadership Fellows Program enables "top talent leaders" — defined as self-motivated, high-performing and high-potential vice presidents and directors who are committed to their own professional development — to work with a non-profit organization for up to one year and then return to their former position, inspired, rejuvenated and with enhanced leadership skills. The Fellows are considered full-time Cisco employees and receive their salaries and benefits during their period of service.

Candidates for the program go through a rigorous selection process, and each Fellow is matched with a non-profit assignment that requires his or her specific business expertise and that will improve their management and technical skills. To date, 31 Fellows have been chosen, coming from all areas of the company, including engineering, marketing, finance and administration.

Molly Tschang recently served as temporary executive director of NetHope, a consortium of leading nongovernmental organizations, as it conducted a search for someone to permanently fill the job. Tschang helped NetHope leverage technology to build and strengthen relationships among 17 international agencies that are important players in the developing world. For Cisco, her enhanced skills in collaboration and negotiation not only will enhance her performance when she returns to work, but may also enable her to generate future business.

Ernst & Young's Corporate Responsibility Fellows Program appeals to top performers looking for a way to give back to the world through work, while exploring a new country and culture. The Fellows program sends a highly select group of high-octane talent to low-income countries for three months at full pay. They use their skills to galvanize promising local entrepreneurs at a critical point in their business — typically providing help they couldn't otherwise afford — and help jump-start growth in these emerging markets. "Fellows come back rejuvenated, transformed," reports Maria Pena, Americas leader of entrepreneurship — corporate responsibility. "They love it."

Simply giving employees access to charitable work through their job is an effective way to amp up engagement. More than a third of the 106,000 employees of BT (formerly British Telecom) already actively volunteer during their off-hours, according to a company internal survey. Another 30 percent would like to. That's why in April 2009, BT introduced its first coordinated, companywide Volunteer Program.

BT's vision is to effectively pair work teams and individual executives with productive volunteer opportunities that match their personal interests and career development needs. For example, a division that needs team building may spend a day together erasing graffiti off inner-city walls. One CEO of a BT business unit is volunteering his time mentoring the CEO of a charitable organization.

To give this new coordinated volunteer initiative the same strategic heft as BT's other operations, the company appointed Helen Simpson, a long-time BT executive with deep operational experience in bringing products to market, to head up the program. One of her first steps was to conduct "market research" on BT's employees to identify areas where the workforce wanted to dedicate its volunteering energies. By launching an enhanced, cohesive volunteer effort during this precarious economic period, BT hopes not just to satisfy its employees' desire for community service but leverage their skills to help not-for-profits struggling in the financial slump.

In other words, a positive payback all around.

For more information on BT and Cisco's volunteer programs, download these success stories .

This post was co-authored by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Lisa Weinert

The world over, well-educated young women are choosing different pathways — in their careers and their lives — than their older peers.

This is particularly striking among young Arab women, a group thought to be more embedded in — and confined by — traditional values and cultural restrictions.

Last month, as delegates to the Second Arab Women's Leadership Forum in Dubai, we participated in a focus group of young professional women in their late twenties and early thirties. The conversation was thoughtful, candid and emotionally charged.

These young women from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates work for the likes of PepsiCo and Emirati Airlines. They're kicking over the traces in two ways. Many are moving away from the secluded, family-bound lives of their mothers. And they're also questioning — and rebelling against — the rigid structures of conventional corporate careers. This was a big surprise. It turned out that the attitudes voiced by these young professionals were remarkably similar to Gen Y conversations we've had in other parts of the world.

Five drumbeats reverberated through our focus group conversation:

1. High Achieving: Everyone in the room was well-qualified and ambitious.
2. Unmarried: Of the nine women in the room, seven were single and none had children. This is no longer unusual in the Middle East. Across the region women are delaying childbearing and birth rates are falling.
3. Questing: Most want something more than a paycheck and a standard lockstep career. They're willing to work hard but are looking for flexibility in the way they work, as well as for opportunities to be creative and find meaning.
4. Entrepreneurial: Several were extremely serious about entrepreneurial options. One of the participants had already left a promising corporate career to start her own business, and another was contemplating that step.
5. Male Role Models: Many cited the men in their lives, especially their fathers, as being key influences in encouraging them to pursue their ambition.

Could you replicate these themes back in New York? In London? In Shanghai?

Sure.

The drumbeats echo the findings of a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy, which found that young people the world over are diverging from traditional career paths and striking out in new directions. According to "Bookend Generations" (published last year by the Harvard Business Review in the article "How Gen Y and Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda"), the newest generation of college grads to enter the workforce are seeking meaning and purpose as well as money. Rather than plush paychecks alone, this generation — both men and women — are driven by a remix of rewards. Five motivators rank equal to or higher than compensation: new experiences; flexible work arrangements; opportunities to "give back" to the world; recognition; and cool, collaborative teams.

As demonstrated by the young women in Dubai, this rewards remix is percolating around the globe and permeating even traditional cultures. The women in Dubai were looking for their careers to open doors to personal fulfillment — and had no qualms about jumping ship if their company isn't prepared to help.

What does this mean for the Middle East's economic dynamo? With birth rates plummeting faster than almost anywhere else in the world, a war for talent is heating up in this region. Employers may well need to step up to the plate and take smart women's demands much more seriously.

"I think of my life as pieces of a puzzle waiting to be completed," as one of the woman we met in Dubai muses in her blog. "There's so much out there."

As I looked around the conference room at Pfizer's regional headquarters in Dubai, I was stunned by the view. No, not the view of the Palm Jumeirah artificial island or the sail-shaped Burj al Arab skyscraper, but something much closer.

Sitting around me were eight Pfizer senior executives, including the finance director and the head of HR for Africa and the Middle East. As the vanguard of Pfizer's strategy to establish a new regional hub, all are at the top of their game.

As recently as five years ago, this kind of group would have been pale and male. Today, they were all women — five Arab women (from Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia), one from Turkey, one from Brazil and one from Canada.

I'm not pretending that the Pfizer leadership in Dubai is exclusively female. But it says a lot that it is now possible to pull together a critical mass of female executives in what used to be — and is often still thought of as — an exclusively male bastion.

These eight hotshot women aren't so much outliers as representatives of what's happening in this region. I was there as a panelist at the second annual Arab Women's Leadership Forum, a vibrant two-day gathering of over 400 Arab women from academic, economic, social and cultural circles to discuss "Women's Leadership in Organizations: Towards new conceptions of work-life balance."

The topic couldn't be more timely. As multinational corporations turn to emerging markets as the primary engines of future growth, women will be one of their chief dynamos. The Center for Work-Life Policy is in the midst of a major new study (full disclosure: the research is sponsored by Pfizer, Siemens, Intel, Bloomberg and Booz & Co.) on Women in Emerging Markets, including BRIC economies and the United Arab Emirates. Our research finds that women constitute a pool of highly qualified talent just waiting to be tapped:

• More than half of all global tertiary degrees in education are granted to women.
• 92 percent of UAE women aspire to hold a top job. Their level of ambition is nearly two-and-a-half times that of their American counterparts and on par with their male peers.
• UAE women love their jobs and display enviable levels of dedication to their work, with 90 percent willing to go the extra mile for their companies.

Yet at the same time, female executives in the Middle East are hampered from performing at their peak because of a three-way squeeze:

• An extreme job work environment exacerbated by different time zones and cultural mores. For example, few in the U.S. realize that the weekend in Dubai falls on Friday and Saturday. Factor in the nine-hour time difference — 2 p.m. in New York is 11 p.m. in Dubai — and end-of-week conference calls slice a huge chunk of out a much-needed break.
• Heavy-duty cultural pressures against working mothers, wives and daughters.
• Local regulations and work rules that are stacked against women.

What can Pfizer &#8212 or any multinational corporation &#8212 do to better support and leverage its talented women?

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but our study suggests some useful initiatives, ranging from simple "this isn't rocket science" amendments to more complex cultural attitude adjustments. They include:

• Check the world clock. Rotate conference calls so that they are equally "inconvenient" for executives in all time zones and be sensitive to local customs regarding weekends and holidays.
• Mitigate isolation. Breaking the mold takes its toll. Senior women across the region could greatly benefit from a network where they could share advice and receive support from their peers.
• Run interference with local authorities. Many women professionals in the Middle East are unfairly disadvantaged when dealing with day-to-day demands. Create a concierge service to handle everything from electricians to emergency childcare.
• Strengthen family support. In addition to childcare, eldercare is an enormous concern in a region where dutiful daughters traditionally look after aging parents.

Multinational companies are on a journey of discovery as they mine a vast new talent source and move into emerging markets. Learning to leverage the first will be the secret to success in the second.

The world is your talent pool. We've been hearing that message ever since corporations started chattering about globalization. The real issue is, how well do you fish in that pool?

The difference between strategically fishing and merely flailing the waters of an increasingly diverse talent pool was the top issue at the recent Hidden Brain Drain Summit. Held in New York, the fourth annual colloquium brought together representatives from more than 50 organizations employing more than four million people in 152 countries around the world. Members range from American Express, Ernst & Young, General Electric, Google, Intel, and Pfizer to the International Monetary Fund, the Cleveland Clinic, and the CIA. Working as a community of peers, the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force spearheads private-sector initiatives that nurture female and multicultural talent. Its research and collaborative action have developed more than 70 models of best practices.

Diversity was on everyone's mind for a very simple reason: A major demographic shift is metamorphosing every marketplace into a global microcosm. In the United States, Hispanic, African-American and Asian communities now comprise one-third of the population and account for 85 percent of the population growth. In the United Kingdom, ethnic minorities comprise 10 percent of the population and account for 50 percent of the overall population growth. And developing countries represent more than half of the global GDP and are projected to grow at nearly twice the rate of the United States and the European Union. As jobs continue to hemorrhage in developed nations, they're being picked up in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries and frontier economies. Not only that, more and more often they're being picked up by women.

These findings have profound implications for attracting, developing, and retaining high-performers. Task Force members universally agree that "one size fits all" talent management not only is outmoded but risks putting employers permanently behind the curve. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) agendas, customized for different groups of employees, are no longer a "nice to have" act of altruism but a business-driven prerequisite for market success.

What will it take to lure the right fish into your net? Here's what three smart companies are doing:

• Focus on women. Faced with an exodus of mid-level female technologists, Intel responded with a series of career development workshops aimed at helping women better identify, request and secure more fulfilling work assignments. Why the female focus? "As a global company selling product around the world, simply put, we can't remain successful if we don't leverage the full talent pool that is available," says Rosalind L. Hudnell, corporate director of diversity. "We're doing these workshops for all our employees but we're making especially sure they meet the needs of our women."

• Nurture global networks. Mentoring and coaching only go so far in exposing senior leaders to the diverse talent pipeline within a global enterprise and vice versa. Cisco's Inclusive Advocacy Program paired 30 of the company's highest-potential talent from six different functions scattered among 16 locations around the world with an executive advocate in different geographies and functions and, often, of a different ethnicity and gender. The result: Meaningful global connections that never existed before.

• Spread the flex. Flexible work options are no longer an issue limited to working mothers. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of both Baby Boomers and Gen Y workers put a premium on flexible work arrangements, even choosing employees based on their flex offerings. Citi's Alternative Workplace Strategy allows employees to rotate the days in which they come to the office. It's a plus for time-stressed workers and enables Citi to save money by paring its office space. Launched in New York, London and Miami, AWS will roll out globally this year.

By sharing these and other proven examples, participants at the Hidden Brain Drain Summit ensure that when their organization tests the waters of the global talent pool, their fish story will celebrate landing the big one, rather than regretting the one that got away.

Share your own company's experiments and experiences. We'd love to hear about them!