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Professional service firms are very different from other commercial enterprises. They typically lack the hard-nosed bottom line focus and hierarchical management structure of most companies.

Digital innovators from the Silicon Valley are noisily shaking up the automotive world. This has led some to wonder: Could outside players seize control of the automotive industry? Not likely. Traditional automotive companies have plenty of what it takes – digital abilities as well as deep engineering expertise. But make no mistake, we’re dealing with a two-speed marketplace.

The last two decades have seen a dramatic evolution in Global In-house Centers (GICs), as their value proposition has shifted increasingly from cost arbitrage to talent and skill arbitrage. As a result, GICs—until recently known as “captive centers”— are now driving process and productivity improvements for the corporation, creating new capabilities such as analytics, and leading crossfunctional synergies.

Automotive OEMs must work in fundamentally new and different ways to deliver the Connected Car that consumers so clearly desire. The shift begins with objectively assessing and developing leaders’ potential to drive deep strategic change and build more open cultures that effectively integrate diverse expertise.

Over the past year Egon Zehnder has conducted an extensive research project involving direct interviews with more than 25 CEOs of major airlines around the world, and with leading industry thinkers. Our findings speak to a new competitive landscape.

The airline industry is facing a number of global challenges. Kokkong Chan, Egon Zehnder, Sydney, and Christoph Wahl, Egon Zehnder, Berlin, summarize these challenges and their implications for talent management.

Forward-thinking product companies that successfully transition to a truly global multi-site engineering organization understand a powerful principle: moving product ownership to new offshore centers is not a single event in time, but an evolutionary process that must be approached comprehensively.

While many industrial companies in a business-to-business sales environment have identified superior strategic marketing capabilities as a critical long-term success factor, most are unable to achieve the results they’d like from this increasingly important function.