What Global Companies Lose When Decision-Making Revolves Around Headquarters

A 15-month study of 150+ leaders across the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East finds that in most multinationals, strategic decisions are shaped less by market insight than by physical proximity to headquarters—a structural bias that sidelines regional expertise and distorts priorities. The research prescribes two fixes: reversing the direction of decision framing so regions define problems first, and engineering bi-directional information flows. For SEA mid-market CEOs operating in distributed markets, this directly addresses the cognitive blind spots built into centralized decision architectures.